I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.
These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind.
It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks.
Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity.
I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.
Coal kills far more people than nuclear yet you never read about it. I think partly because any nuclear catastrophes are visible and concentrated to a single area.
Coal smoke kills over a much wider area and this impacts that 'newsworthiness' of this fear to spread. It's a class data vs feelings issue and yet again peoples feelings trump the data and undermines what experts familiar with both the danger and the data say.
Fun fact: in the 90's, the reference gauge for aircraft safety was 1 accidental fatality per 100 million hours of passenger flight. Which is amazingly safe, far better than car and on a par with train.
Now, facing the growth of air travel, it was decided to raise this bar to 1 per billion hour. Not as an end by itself - this comes at very high cost and had a significant impact on travel prices. But because, with the growth of air travel, this would have implied one major accident per fortnight on average. And because those accident are more spectacular and relayed by media, civil aviation authorities feared this might raise angst and deter the public from air travel.
So, safety was enhanced, but mostly for marketing reasons.
which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.
Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?
My numbers come from conversations I recall with René Amalberti, a notable specialist in the area, having advised, among others, Airbus. The conversations were around 1993-96, when I was doing my PhD, and thus may be a bit blurry by now. Also, it is perfectly possible the reference values and measurement units have evolved since then.
Still your projection shows that both reference indicators and actual values are in the ballpark of the estimates I cited.
My (and Amalberti's) main point is that safety assessment is not just about minimizing the raw number of accidents, but involves tradeoffs between various concerns, including psychological perception and revenue. Otherwise, the safest airline would be the one that does not fly anyone.
And yet we could regulate even more to make flying even safer, but likely negatively impacting the cost of flying.
This is a balance/tradeoff. We agree for some deaths, for a given price. It is the same for food safety, workplace safety.
With the latest designs and regulations there has been no major issue across all the nuclear facilities, except for Fukushima which sustained a 9 earthquake + a tsunami... and yet hardly any death (in the 10 years after, one death by cancer got compensated but still not clear if it was directly linked... the evacuation itself might be responsible for up to 50 deaths though, showing how the perception of nuclear can be overhyped).
It is possible that the nuclear industry is over-regulated (done mostly after Chernobyl) and could benefit to be reviewed based on the current knowledge.
Without doing or seeing the actual math, my intuition leans on the side of it's probably much more efficient to put people together under certain constraints and fly them in one big container, than lots of unconstrained individual containers. See public transport vs cars for a similar tradeoff.
Now the only real way I can understand your original comment is that lots of little drones can't actually do the job of commercial passenger planes, and therefore it's an ironic send-off of the people who try to compare the safety of lots of little intermittent renewable generators to nuclear power plants.
Because lots of little intermittent renewable generators can no more do the job of a nuclear power plant than the drones can do the job of the big passenger jet.
People fear what the media tells them to fear. I still remember the (publicly funded so not really independent from government) TV here having someone refer to a beech near Fukushima as "possibly one of the most dangerous places on earth" while holding up a Geiger counter that showed radiation levels barely above background levels.
Nuclear accidents have been a nothing-burger compared to all the deaths and health issues caused by coal and gas - but those are more spread out over time and don't make for as exciting news so no one cares. Shutting down nuclear instead of coal was never a rational decision but an emotional one.
And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.
Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.
I'm open to Nuclear if it can be done safely and if we can show we have the cultural maturity to keep it safe...but in the case of Chernobyl at least I think that statistics and other officious BS has been used to greatly downplay the true human cost in death, sickness, displacement and on many other metrics.
Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time.
The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.
We don’t actually do that, at least not in the USA. America’s industrial policy — until Trump — has been (politicians from certain areas of the country excepted) a gradual phaseout of coal and other fossil fuels. It’s taking time because West Virginia produces a lot of coal and their politicians have been assholes about it.
Not only designed decades ago (which the PWR also was) but the designers also cut corners, ignored its faults and pushed it through politically because it was cheap and the Soviet governments could meet their 5 year targets easier. Early incidents were treated with cover-ups.
"The RBMK was considered by some in the Soviet Union to be already obsolete shortly after the commissioning of Chernobyl unit 1. Aleksandrov and Dollezhal did not investigate further or even deeply understand the problems in the RBMK, and the void coefficient was not analyzed in the manuals for the reactor. Engineers at Chernobyl unit 1 had to create solutions to many of the RBMK's flaws such as a lack of protection against no feedwater supply. Leningrad and Chernobyl units 1 both had partial meltdowns that were treated, alongside other nuclear accidents at power plants, as state secrets and so were unknown even to other workers at those same plants."
Ok plenty of responses to the Chernobyl thing, but without a definition of "safe" it's a moot argument. The injury per watt hour speaks for itself, unless you had something else in mind.
This. People have phantasm about Chernobyl that are straight out of their imagination, in a fear driven narrative that is very far from the reality.
When you look into it, you find that deaths directly linked to the meltdown are contained to people on site and first responders. Even the army of cleaners suffer more from random life risk (alcohol, smoking, cardiovascular diseases, etc...) than anything related to nuclear meltdown induced health issues.
But people are ideologically driven against it, in a quasi-religious way (worse than actual soft religion followers actually).
There is no way to properly argue with those people, just like flat earthers, so we get the current sentiment on nuclear.
At least it's changing and those people will go the way of the dinosaurs, I hope.
It's not just about deaths. That's the thing. People can get sick, the environment gets polluted. A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back. The area will remain closed for generations.
Counting deaths does not do the actual damage justice.
Most importantly if you scale fatalities by power generated Nuclear is one of the best (last I checked only bested by solar). Coal generates releases way more radiation into the environment and has way more deaths during mining.
People are irrationally scared by large incidents and under-represent the regular deaths and costs that occur during operation.
What sort of nonsense statistic is fatalities per watt hour?
People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.
Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.
You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.
> Coal
Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.
Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.
[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.
Yes, that’s my point. They are scary - memorably so - in a way that very few other forms of power generation are. The closest equivalent I can think of is a major hydroelectric dam breaking.
Also remember that at each major incident, despite the failures that led to it, people fought tirelessly, in several cases sacrificing themselves, to reduce the scope of the disaster. Each of them could have potentially been worse. We are lucky in that the worst case death figures have not been added to the statistics.
Yes that's the point. Dam failure is much worse and actually the largest event of fatalities related to power generation was a dam breaking.
Yet people are not against dams at all, even though they are not much better in terms of risks.
It's entirely irrational just like people who are scared of flying.
Irrational, perhaps, but also totally understandable and unlikely to change.
People fly but it requires a huge amount of trust to put yourself in someone’s hands like that, where if something goes wrong the results are catastrophic. People have faith in the regulations, they trust that the pilots are well-trained and the planes well-maintained, to the point where the chances of catastrophe are so small it overcomes their natural fears.
The same is true of the nuclear industry. The only thing making nuclear a remotely popular option is the extensive regulation which makes the risk to the consumer so small it outweighs their fears.
And the trouble is that it is up against solar and wind, where the cost is much smaller, and the absolute risk - if you discount people who choose to working to install them - really is very close to 0.
I think this line of thinking comes from a westernized world where all water is controlled.
Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.
In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.
The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.
Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.
We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.
Why you would be downvoted for mentioning this is beyond me. The numbers are well documented and hold up. Compared to every other major source of energy production, nuclear has the lower rate of fatalities by far, by any metric, and this despite it being far from a minor source of power globally.
Not only that, but it also produces less radioactive leakage than many other kinds of power sources that depend on resource mining on a large scale (looking at coal plants in particular here)
This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives.
Just saying that only 50 people died is pretty messed up in my opinion.
It's actually not, as it correctly states 50 direct fatalities.
What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.
The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.
One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.
And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.
I will use the "rabid" replies I got as evidence towards interests of minimizing the scare for nuclear because there's many other interests behind it and I doubt it would get a fair shake. A lot of political and economic interests are known to muddy the truth.
And this isn't the first time this happened, had a few debates before and out of nowhere quite a few people insist going as hard as possible, to no end, to dispel "misinformation", like that is what normal people do. I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose".
>Radiophobia
I do not have this issue, I am not scared of a bit higher radiation, I understand the body can deal with quite a lot (compared to normal background).
I am scared of what could happen when humans and their politics get involved. There's more dangers than proper implementation, there can also be sabotage fears, as recent events have shown. I really don't understand why you'd accuse me of such a thing unless you're trying to smear me, which again...makes your rabid responses rather suspicious.
All the replies other than yours have politely pointed out that you were incorrect.
> >Radiophobia
> I do not have this issue,
The definition says: "...leading to overestimating the health risks of radiation compared to other risks."
That looks exactly like what you are doing.
> I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose".
Nobody here has done that...with possibly one exception.
You are denying the pain and suffering of the people who suffer due to us not adopting more nuclear power. For what "higher purpose" this should be I can't fathom.
The adoption of nuclear power had saved an estimated 1.8 million lives by 2011.
Conversely, the turning off of nuclear power plants or delaying/cancelling of new builds post Chernobyl has cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives.
We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the U.S., 33 in the U.K. and 318 million globally
Not many unlike what you want to believe. And there is no mechanism to directly link them to the nuclear meltdown.
Since they are suspiciously clustered in specific places, it is more likely that there are other environmental and genetic problems that have more influence than the result of secondary radiation.
In addition to what other comments have said below, it's also important to state that the indirect impacts of the alternatives aren't widely studied, so it's practically impossible to compare. How do we figure out how many people have a significant impact on their life because of the fossil fuel we burn and put all sorts of crap into the atmosphere?
Okay, my reflection is as follows. Investing in nuclear power today is a bit akin to betting against solar/wind + battery. In my opinion it is a losing bet.
For a nuclear powerplant to be economically feasible, it first needs to be built (10+ years at this point), and then run for tens of years at consistent output rates. To make this worth it for investors, the state often guarantees the price for energy for tens of years after construction, picking up the difference if the electricity price falls.
So in essence, building a nuclear power plant today is locking in that price of electricity for something like 50 years. Solar is today already much cheaper than nuclear, and is coming down in price very quickly, as are batteries and other storage methods. If this development continues and there are further breakthroughs in storage, the taxpayer would have to keep footing the bill to buy expensive nuclear energy for years in the future.
Therefore, instead of investing in reviving nuclear, I would much rather invest the same amount in upgrading the grid, researching storage methods, and subsidizing grid-scale solar and wind. I think this will be the better choice for the taxpayer in the long run.
I am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?
This is the main reason why I am, generally speaking, against nuclear as a universal solution.
A question for pro-nuclear folks: Would you be okay with having a highly corrupt low HDI country building nuclear facilities (conversion and deconversion, enrichment, power plants) next to your borders?
This is similar to the reasoning of Austria vehemently opposing nuclear reactors to be built in neighbouring countries, even if downstream on the Danube, even if 200 km from their border.
The latest decision (although on the surface, not on an environmental issue like the article is about, but on state aid measures - but actually not the real reason for Austria's opposition):
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...
So, I believe, yes, low HDI countries with high corruption do have the right to build nuclear facilities. This is not like a combination of low HDI and high corruption index awarded by some international organization has the approval rights to such questions of sovereignity. There is a whole range of special regulation regarding who can build nuclear stations and under what conditions, with a special agency to ensure the safe use (IAEA) - that should be the only criteria for letting nations build nuclear stations, not corruption, HDI or how rich the countries are.
Slovenia has been running a reactor for a good long while without any problems and it's extremely safe. So from our POV, it's much more likely that Austria would prefer everyone around them to import Austrian energy instead of producing their own.
Also, Austria makes no sense. It opposes a new reactor in Slo being built but that means that the current one will just keep getting its life extended. Clearly it's not about safety.
So you would oppose an entire, globe-spanning branch of deeply necessary technology (clean energy) with all its vast opportunities for improvement, innovation, and management under all kinds of more responsible means, because the government functionaries in your specific part of the world can't get their moral shit together (and given what you describe, wouldn't be able to do it well no matter what kid of large-scale energy is put into their hands)?
They're concerned about the safety of corrupt management. Several posters here reassure that Chernobyl etc. were poorly managed and that we've learned a lot since then. But ongoing corruption doesn't instill confidence that learnings will be incorporated safely.
Saying that catastrophes have been uncommon over decades is also not reassuring as one would expect catastrophes to increase if we go from not building and decommissioning to rapid building and recommissioning.
Maybe the upper limit of atomic power catastrophe is still a low casualty count. In that case we shouldn't reassure people that we've learned and improved and instead show that even rampantly corrupt administration cannot do much harm, if that's the case.
I was involved in the nuclear industry in the 90's.
Why impose externalities on others when solar and wind are so cheap and less risky? It seems like proponents fall for technological aspirationalism without considering pragmatic consequences and risks of shoveling enormous sums of money for unnecessary risks and inefficient allocations of capital because it's seems just barely unobtainable or blocked by "them" when it's simply economically unviable.
And it's selective technological aspirationalism. Why is unbounded optimism appropriate for nuclear but not for renewables? The engineering principle of KISS says renewables should be much more improvable, as indeed the data indicates they are.
Intermittent renewables supplying an industrial society does not. And there is no way to get from here to there except a lot of handwaving and "magic happens here".
Real examples in the last years:
Olkiluoto 3 - 17 Years
SHIDAO BAY-1 - 9 Years
Flammanvill-3 - 17 Years
VOGTLE-4 - 11 Years
FANGCHENGGANG-4 - 8 Years
RAJASTHAN-7 - 14 Years
The reason to be against nuclear energy is quite simple - human error.
Unlike flying, we’ve not shown nuclear energy to be sufficiently idiot-proof for many people to be comfortable with it. That and the fact that radiation is invisible, which makes it somehow almost paranormal.
The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered).
But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it.
The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl.
Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven and earth to solve the problem… and if they hadn’t, then the entire continent might be dead today.
And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.
It’s important to understand the qualifier per unit of energy.
The correct parable for you would have been the number of bear deaths vs interactions with bears weighed against number of car deaths vs interactions with cars.
You generally can't really pet a wild brown bear, since they are not interested in humans and would avoid you. You can't run away from it either, since it can outrun you easily
It is expensive because of the regulatory burdens associated with making it unreasonably safe. By unreasonably safe I mean that harms predicted by radiation models are unscientific, and death rate expectations are far lower than alternative power generation technologies.
Nuclear fuel storage is relatively straightforward, and volumes have potential to be reduced 30x through recycling.
Nuclear power plants require international laws and international cooperation for insurance, because one serious incident, such as Chornobyl, can wipe a continent.
In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.
Still, though, if nuclear continued growing at the same pace it was until the 80s we'd be in a massively better spot climate change wise.
Sure, these days its too expensive in relative terms but switching back to fossil fuels due to all the Chornobyl/Three Mile panic (but mainly likely because of the cost) might end up being one of the bigger mistakes in human history.
We can make nuclear safe (enough) but after one big incident nobody wanted the political career suicide to push for this. So we are stuck with criticizing stone-age level nuclear power because we never took it further. The West never stopped doing something just because the USSR didn’t do it properly.
If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking kills 7-8 times more people than cars every year (that’s 80-100 Chernobyls worth every year) and we still allow it.
The reasons are political not technically or financially insurmountable obstacles. We didn’t shut down nuclear in Europe for “green” reasons or because we can’t improve it, or because it kills too many people, but because enough Russian money went into politicians’ pockets to do this.
No, the argument is that it didn't "wipe the continent" and in fact caused far less damage than other things we're totally fine with. I don't see GP saying that they want an incident like this to repeat, just that, if it did, the consequences would be far less severe than "wiping the continent".
Why not exaggerate to the "entire planet" if we are going this way..
Regardless, in hindsight humanity could have prevented (at least to a significant extent) climate change if we doubled down on nuclear 40-50 years ago instead of stopping most expansion. What will be the cost of that?
I doubt so: 416 industrial nuclear reactors are deployed in the world today. They produce 10% of the electricity, itself 20% of the final energy, so nuclear power produces at best 2% of the energy consumed.
Nuclear power would provide 10% of the energy, which would be far from sufficient since it is necessary to electrify uses (in order to reduce the quantity of fossil fuel burned) and therefore produce more electricity, if we could multiply the power of the fleet by 5, therefore building around 1500 new reactors and keeping the existing fleet active. Hoping for this before 2100 would be absurd.
To extend this beyond that, we must hope for a revolutionary production process (pursued in vain for decades: breeders...), the ability to exploit less promising uranium deposits, thus tolerating increased emissions and costs, or the discovery of a large deposit.
Hoping for such a discovery is risky because intensive prospecting began at the end of the Second World War (the quest for nuclear weapons), and the rapid and sharp rise in the price of uranium (a bubble) that occurred around 2007 triggered a massive investment in prospecting, the results of which (15%) are very inadequate.
Therefore, multiplying the stock by five would leave at best 40 years of uranium certainly available under current conditions, and would therefore be an inept investment (one needs to amortize the plant).
Moreover there are geostrategic considerations: many nations don't have any reserve not want to have to buy uranium (creating a dependency) or technical expertise.
Since the 70s, oil reserves only lasted for another decade.
"Current reserves" is a moving target: once scarcity raises prices, prospecting makes sense again. Uranium is incredibly cheap. Prospecting is not worth it as there are enough reserves to exploit in the foreseeable future.
Seawater extraction is starting to be competitive with mining. With that, even natural Uranium becomes essentially unlimited.
In addition, we currently throw away >95% of the energy potential of the Uranium we use. Why? Recycling is not economically viable, because raw Uranium is far too cheap (see above). So facto 20 of what we've used so far is just sitting in Castors. And fortunately not in deep geological repositories, out of reach.
And then there's Thorium, which is significantly more abundant in the crust than raw Uranium. And of the Uranium, only a small percentage is currently usable.
> Uranium is incredibly cheap. Prospecting is not worth it as there are enough reserves to exploit in the foreseeable future.
A huge uranium bubble between 2004 and 2008, which triggered massive investments for prospection... and a ridiculous result (15%). The cause is known: the quest for atomic weapons triggered during the 1950's and 1960's massive prospection, and there is no decisive way to better prospect and few not yet prospected zones.
> Seawater extraction is starting to be competitive with mining
This is periodically announced since the 1970's, and no-one could industrialize.
Bottomline: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium"
Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...
> In addition, we currently throw away >95% of the energy potential of the Uranium
> So facto 20 of what we've used so far is just sitting in Castors. And fortunately not in deep geological repositories, out of reach.
It would be sound if a ready-for-deployment model of industrial breeder reactor. There is none.
LOL. An overview article that was obsolete even in 2016 when it was published. You need to get with the times.
"... the amount of uranium in seawater is truly renewable as well as inexhaustible."
"New technological breakthroughs from DOE's Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater economically possible."
A speculative bubble is not the same as serious serious demand, and the actual demand never materialized. The vast majority of the "prospecting" was just speculators, not serious mining companies. And for serious prospecting, the 4 year time-frame was way too short, you just barely get done with the early stages of
You don't have enough to get to actual serious exploration and feasibility studies:
- Infill drilling
- Metallurgical testing
- Environmental baseline studies
- Scoping and feasibility studies
- More permitting
- Community consultation
Breeder reactors exist, they face the same problem as recycling: mined uranium is still way too cheap to make investment in those technologies economically attractive.
Should Uranium get more scarce and thus more expensive, the economic incentives change very quickly and then we can pull those technologies off the shelf.
Same for Thorium reactors: currently not necessary, as we have plenty of Uranium for the existing Uranium based designs. Doesn't stop companies like Copenhagen Atomics from investing, as they see other advantages in addition to very readily available fuel.
Having a massive head start at stopping or slowing down climate change would have been quite nice, though. Even if it weren't a permanent solution.
But yes, I agree that fossil fuels also had a lot of very significant political, economical and technological advantages over both nuclear and renewables which is why coal/gas/oil won. For renewables it might be changing now it just might be a bit too late...
No, those are your words. The dumbed down, skewed, ragebaity, Fox News level strawman. The guaranteed way to drag down the conversation when you have nothing of value to say: pretend the other guy said something just as worthless and then fight that because it’s easier and you think you have a shot.
Your arguments have been shot down all over this thread. Do you need a win so bad?
That it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it couldn't happen in the future. We have never had a worst case event but we do know pretty well what the consequences of a worst case event could be.
The worst case consequences of Chernobyl were stopped because people literally risked their lives to prevent it. The fire was put out, the steam explosion was prevented, and countless lives were saved as a result.
Even so, many countries spent billions, over several decades, to minimize the consequences. As far as 2000 miles away, animals are still to this day fed special foods and managed to avoid prolonged grazing in contaminated areas.
Think about it for a second - over 2000 miles away, almost 40 years later, this still requires active management. Despite best efforts to handle the situation when it happened.
Now consider that every reactor carries it's own copy of the risks, and they only generate around 10 TWh of electricity per year.
That's just way too little electricity for such a risk. It makes no sense.
Meanwhile solar and storage is deployed at a rate equivalent to a new reactor every month as we speak. Faster, cheaper, and comparatively risk-free.
Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody knows for sure, however after each of these click/bang the "there will be no more problem!" thesis seems less and less prominently published.
> Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking
Avoiding car accident and not smoking is way, way easier than avoiding most effects of a major nuclear accident (fine dangerous and very durable dust disseminated on a vast geographical zone, thanks to wind and rain).
No, we can't. I worked in the industry when there was strong, independent regulation and private engineering consultancies. These don't exist anymore. The NRC is stacked politically and it and EPRI lack the gray beards it once had and the engineering industry is a shadow of its former self. Dunning-Kruger ignorant proponents advocate for it without understanding the issues or the complications in this current situation that is a far different situation than 30 years ago that might've been reasonable when Duke Energy wanted a revival. Its time has passed because the economics of conventional alternatives make it moot.
I meant “we” as humanity. You gave a very US-centric perspective at a time when the US finds it challenging to deal with many long solved issues. Why conflate not wanting, not caring, not wanting to pay for it, or just not being able right now with it being humanly impossible?
We didn’t get to making the calculations of economics to improve the tech because of the corruption and lack of education I was mentioning before. What we have is calculations based on 60 years old tech and risk analysis based on a 40 year old accident.
As I said in the previous comment, if you’d do the same for commercial flight you might find steam ships are a better deal.
You would need to wait at least five years to make sure Europe will not go the way of the US due to the similar uptick of the same ideology now in power in the US, more if it's still a tiebreak in five years time.
Betting on a technology that has a catastrophic likelihood of low probability but high impact at a time when your scientific and regulatory institutions are crumbling is a high risk strategy. Unless you're arguing that modern nuclear tech is literally childproof and not susceptible to catastrophe under idiocratic regimes.
Your mind appears closed and you're not interested in having a normal conversation because you don't have any valid points. Best of luck to you.
I worked with Japanese and Germans in the field, so I guess you don't know what you're talking about and are projecting your biases. The owner of the company was a Jewish Moroccan expat who contributed greatly to the field. Please have a look inside yourself before confessing your issues.
Rude and aggressive reply to an otherwise perfectly civil comment, “trust me bro, I’m an expert”, bringing up “arguments” but never actually stating any, and chatgpt-like random statements about Jewish-Moroccans from “the company”. Hallmarks of competence. Color me humbled...
You mean, everyone watched the TV story which has little basis in fact. Chernobyl was the worst case scenario - there's no way to build a reactor that would produce worse radiation effects when destroyed than to use a pile of graphite.
Long build times are often the result of constantly changing regulations. Also it’s interesting that build times in Japan are almost 2 times smaller than in US.
Nuclear doesn't have a great record in other countries either. I might have the wrong figures but Hinkley Points C is over 2 times over budget and likely to be 5+ years late.
The exemption being France and maybe China?
France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well.
I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong
The average build time is currently 6.5 years. The median is lower at 5.8. The variations across both time and space of those average are neither large nor particularly systematic.
There have always been outliers, so if you focus on those you can "prove" anything you like.
Which for western construction creates a dataset weighted around ~1980. Not sure why that is relevant half a century later?
Instead taking the average of all modern western construction and we get close to 15 years.
With the recent insanely subsidies european projects being proposed even the initial timeline calls for a ~10 years build time. Assuming everything goes to plan.
We’ve had our share of anti-nuclear activists in France. The project got endlessly stalled, with shifting legislative grounds, and general opposition. Also, the general inefficiency and incompetence from Areva meant this was a match made in heaven (or hell, depends) to get nearly infinite delay.
Flamanville 3 failed because of screwups in the design and construction. What you're blaming the opposition for is exposing that and holding the nuclear people responsible. How dare they, right? /s
At least 5 times, indeed: it was due to cost 3.3 billion euros, its cost to date is 23.7, it it not running at full power and a major update (reactor cover) is already planned.
And even that absolutely catastrophic nuclear construction project has a better ROI than any German intermittent renewables. After almost 25 years of renewable subsidies.
Note: catastrophic nuclear is still better than best renewables.
Source please. That truly does not make sense given that renewable subsidies are being phased out around the world and renewables are the fastest growing energy source in human history.
In contrast nuclear power is backsliding, and the few projects which get green lit have insanely large subsidies attached.
> renewable subsidies are being phased out around the world
Nope. Countries are trying to phase out renewables subsidies. And failing. Recently, the UK, Denmark and Germany have had offshore-wind sales with exactly zero bids.
> fastest growing energy source in human history.
People love those delicious subsidies.
> In contrast nuclear power is backsliding
Nope.
> and the few projects which get green lit have insanely large subsidies attached.
Only in markets that have been thoroughly distorted by subsidies and other preferential treatment for intermittent renewables.
Let’s begin with concluding that you could not find a source for your claims. Instead you go on a tangent hoping to muddy the water.
I find it interesting how someone so smart can just lie through their teeth.
Now you’re trying to paint the entire renewable industry, solar, storage, onshore wind etc. with the paint brush of off-shore wind.
The German and Danish auctions were negative bid auctions.
To explain what that means: companies were asked to pay for the privilege to build off shore wind at a set very low CFD. Those delicious subsidies right?!? Might even call them negative subsidies!
Given recent interest rate hikes and increased cost for construction materials off shore wind is right on the cusp of viability.
Other projects like this one in Germany moves forward without any subsidies.
What you of course don’t mention is that the recent interest rate hikes and increases in construction costs impacts nuclear power far more than off-shore wind and other renewables.
So someone actually knowledgeable in the topic would not promote nuclear power as the alternative.
So again. Please stop lying and misrepresenting cherry picked stats. You know better.
> Let’s begin with concluding that you could not find a source for your claims.
The source is the report by the French Cour des Comptes. I am not your research assistant.
> I find it interesting how someone so smart can just lie through their teeth.
I find it interesting that you have no arguments left and have to resort to ad-hominem attacks.
And thank you for confirming my point:
>off shore wind is right on the cusp of viability.
Meaning the very best off-shore wind projects may or may not be profitable. We don't know yet.
Whereas the worst French nuclear project in recent history (FV3) is predicted by the Cour des Comptes to have "modest" profitability in the worst case scenarios.
So once again: worst nuclear >> best intermittent renewable.
The report with a discount rate lower than the inflation and a 40 year pay back time.
For anyone even having a slight economic understanding the writers of that report are shouting from the top of their lungs that investing in nuclear power is pure lunacy.
But shrouded in a language allowing lobbyists and blindingly biased people to cite it.
Any understanding of economy and shilling for nuclear power seems to be a very disjoint set given what we are seeing in this thread.
The world also very much is not investing in nuclear power given how it is backsliding as a % of the global energy mix with a huge number of closures looming in the close future with no replacements in sight.
Given this answer I don’t know if you are either trolling or have serious problems with delusions.
I dislike drawing conclusions so I will end this conversion with a question:
If you are not trolling, have you tried seeking help from the mental healthcare system?
Please. Do tell me where I am incorrect. You just keep making unsubstantiated claims about me being "incorrect" and when we go to the sources they contradict you.
Or you are explicitly going on tangents attempting to muddy the water. Nuclear power having a record year in 2025 and me claiming:
> The world also very much is not investing in nuclear power given how it is backsliding as a % of the global energy mix with a huge number of closures looming in the close future with no replacements in sight.
Are both correct statements. I even acknowledge that we have a lot of existing infrastructure while commmenting on the trend line.
That 60+ reactors number also includes several abandoned projects. In 2024 the world managed to complete 6 reactors. So far the number in 2025 is a 1 reactor.
Of course ignoring that this is a debate focused on the west with western construction costs. In which the nuclear construction rate far under the replacement rate.
But you can't deal with reality. When it came to the future you went straight into hypotheticals not backed by firm deals hoping no one noticed.
This is not a sane behaviour, nor commenting in good faith.
Nuclear projects are easy to announce. Maybe we can ask these reactors how it went getting a final investment decision:
France:
EPR2 project, do I need to say more? Stuck in financial limbo due to the insanely large subsidies needed to get it off the ground with a government that just collapsed due to being underwater in debt while having a spending problem and being unable to reign it in.
Keeps announcing reactors without starting to build them. China also recently revamped the financing side removing the previous CFD are instead forcing the reactors to compete on market terms which is slowing down investment.
China averages ~4-5 construction starts per year which cumulatively leads to nuclear power shrinking as a part of the electricity mix.
Sorry, I have no time to debunk all the disinformation you put out.
> China: Keeps announcing reactors without starting to build them.
I asked ChatGPT:
Is it true that China keeps announcing nuclear reactors without building any?
ChatGPT said:
No, it's not true that China keeps announcing nuclear reactors without building any. In fact, China is one of the most active countries in the world in building nuclear power plants.
Here's what the facts show (as of 2024–2025):
China is actively building nuclear reactors
As of 2024, over 20 reactors are under construction in China, making it the country with the largest number of reactors being built.
Many more are in various stages of planning and permitting.
China has over 50 reactors in operation already and continues to expand its fleet aggressively.
China’s typical process
China often announces long-term nuclear energy plans as part of its five-year plans or carbon neutrality goals (aiming for carbon neutrality by 2060).
Not all announcements lead to immediate construction — some projects are proposed or approved but not yet started, due to:
Regulatory approval processes
Site selection
Financing and technology partnerships
Local opposition or environmental reviews
Examples of real construction and completion
The Hualong One (HPR-1000), a Chinese-designed Gen-III reactor, has been built and connected to the grid in multiple locations, including:
Fuqing-5 and Fuqing-6
Karachi-2 and Karachi-3 in Pakistan (exported models)
China is also investing in SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) and fast breeder reactors, including:
The Shidao Bay HTGR (high-temperature gas-cooled reactor), which reached criticality.
The CFR-600 fast reactor, under construction.
Why might people think China is only announcing?
Some reasons for the misunderstanding:
Media headlines often report announcements, but follow-up coverage of construction or completion is rare unless it's a major milestone.
Some proposed projects take years to move forward, so people may assume they’re stalled.
There is general skepticism toward state announcements in some international media.
Conclusion:
China is not just announcing nuclear reactors — it is actively building and commissioning them at a faster rate than almost any other country. While not every announcement leads to immediate construction, a large percentage do eventually get built.
----
> That 60+ reactors number also includes several abandoned projects.
How many of those do you consider "abandoned"? Is it a significant number?
----
Financial Limbo. Once again, I asked ChatGPT:
"Is the EPR2 project stuck in financial limbo?
Not exactly. While the EPR2 nuclear reactor project faces significant financial uncertainties, rising costs, and regulatory hurdles, it is not truly "stuck in financial limbo." The project is currently in a prolonged but fairly typical preparatory phase for large-scale infrastructure, where securing financing, approvals, and detailed planning takes time.
These challenges are common in complex, capital-intensive projects—nuclear or otherwise—and reflect the cautious and deliberate approach needed before construction can begin. The French government and EDF remain engaged, with key decisions and financing strategies expected soon, indicating the project is still moving forward, albeit slowly and with some risks."
But that expensive guaranteed price still wasn't enough to cover the actual costs and the EdF CFO resigned in protest.
Once that became too obvious to deny, after the French government had renationalised EdF, they were begging the UK government to give them more money, possibly buried in the contract for the second plant build.
For that build they stopped using CFD, a financial instrument designed for nuclear but which has massively helped renewables, be ause it couldn't hide the nuclear cost overruns. They're now charging electricity users in advance for the nuclear they are going to build with no guarantee of eventual costs.
During the past 25 years there were projects aiming at building industrial nuclear reactors. They all ended badly (canceled, way over budget or delay...).
And that's the complete answer: we know how to build nuclear reactors quickly and cheaply.
Building only very few of different novel designs while slowly (or quickly) losing the industrial base to do so, for example by making it illegal to build more (or at all) is exactly how you don't do it.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
But nuclear is fast to build, if we ignore all modern western examples!
> South Korean company build a NPP in 7 years in Saudi Arabia.
Barakah (delivered March 2024) was late (by about 3 years?), undersold (KEPCO hadn't any other ongoing project and the Korean government at the time wanted a nuclear phase-out) and various tricks are now known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
but comparing to solar / wind there you also have to factor batteries production, battery replacement, wind turbine replacement and recycling (they are not easily recyclable), cleaning solar panels etc.
'recyclable' is such a vague term. E.g. radiation-affected typically easily recycled materials are very hard to deal with (think e.g. pipe steel from power plants) and are effectively non-recyclable, instead of close to 100% recyclable, as their non-contaminated counterparts.
Opposed to that, battery recycling is mostly hard to deal with in terms of economics, and admittedly the chemistry involved is complex, but at least from a technical point of view, plenty of solutions are available - and the tech is coming in relatively quickly now that the demand is there (remember, first generation EVs are just now getting closer to EOL).
It's slightly amusing that recycling of a wind turbine is treated as if it was a big deal - yes the laminated rotor parts can't be part of circular economies, but the total material amount of this laughably small. All the metal components are very easily recycled.
In many Western nations bury them is now forbidden. Most are burnt in cement kilns (producing useful heat).
In France, 95% of the mass of a wind turbine must be recycled (legal obligation), the concrete base is not spared and the law requires wind farm operators to lock (upfront) a financial guarantee (deposit).
According to EDF (multinational electric utility company owned by the government of France, the giant in France, owning and operating all nuke plants) 94% of a solar panel is recyclable. In France most of it is already recycled.
Yea, I know. Their volume may look impressive, the actual amount of material is quite small and 'burying' that absolutely non-toxic stuff isn't any problem.
They are easily recyclable. Nuclear isn’t, unless of course you have a 24/7 protected and monitored by 100’s of people storage place to keep all that safe for the next 10000 years. Very ‘cheap’ indeed.
From a technical point of view, nuclear waste is a solved problem. The issue is political.
Ibidem for the fuel: yes, you can depends on wild countries; You can also depends on Australia, Canada and India, which seems like not-so-bad countries (in my opinion);
> From a technical point of view, nuclear waste is a solved problem
When it comes to nuclear waste repositories real experts official publish: "Internationally, it is understood that there is no reliable scientific basis for predicting the process or likelihood of inadvertent human intrusion."
You're being obtuse on purpose and that's not nice. Could you please just respond to the argument in a good faith manner rather than pretend you don't understand the argument?
As I said earlier, I do not understand the relation between the answer and its parent
Yes, toxic waste are toxic, this is not the issue (as far as I know)
The issue is the long life of nuclear waste, which is a solved problem due to fast breeder reactor (half life ~30ky, which is nothing compared to what light water reactors produce); Also, the quantity of waste is drastically reduces;
For this we need an industrial model of breeder reactor. Please name it. There is none.
Many nations (US, France, Germany, Japan...) engulfed huge amounts of money on this quest, during decades.
TLDR: this works on lab reactors cajoled by scientists. It doesn't work industrially.
Russia has (by far) the most advanced potentially pertinent reactors ("BN"), and they work so well that this nation pauses on this architecture (sodium) and is back to the lab (300MWe) with another architecture (lead) named "BREST".
> the quantity of waste is drastically reduces
Therefore it would not solve the problem (we would have to put this waste somewhere then pray that nobody ever mingles with it).
Knives can kill: should we destroy them ? Height can kill: should we make the earth even ? Rock can kill: should we ban rocks ? Water can kill: should we destroy all waters ?
(yes, this is argumentum ad absurdum; Effort is made to prevent access to the nuclear waste, like all toxic materials)
How is it not economically viable given it is actively used since multiple decades in France? I also disagree with saying it is the cheapest, in practice it is actually pretty expensive compared to solar and wind, but economically nuclear makes a lot of sense, it fits a really good role in the grid
That’s not how economic viability works. EDF posted €11.4bn net profit in 2024[0] and France is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity precisely because nuclear is economically viable.
Government involvement doesn’t negate viability, it enables it, just like with roads, ports, or any other infrastructure requiring long-term capital deployment.
Until we solve the long-term energy storage problem that renewable sources have, we're going to need a backup of some sort. Something you can turn up late at night in the middle of winter.
So far the cleanest solution we've come up with is gas plants, but gas plants made Europe extremely dependent on Russia. The alternatives are oppressive regimes or the US, which has been starting trade wars seemingly out of boredom.
Nuclear fuel, on the other hand, is exported not only by Kazachstan, but also Canada and Australia. In terms of "countries you don't want to depend on", I'd rather have Canada than Qatar.
I'm not sure if the economics still work out if you factor in the ineffective, half-assed Russian sanctions that have Europe fund Russia's war economy. The only alternative is probably coal, but only if you don't hold coal to the same standards in terms of waste disposal and nuclear exposure of the public as nuclear plants.
Nuclear isn't cheap, in part because it's become a niche market only some countries still participate in, but the politics and large-scale economics aren't as bad as the anti-nuclear crowd make them seem. They'd probably be bad for America, because the mighty oil industry stands to lose money and they'd need to import their fuel, but for countries already importing their fuel the balance is completely different.
Infuriatingly, the crowd that wants to do something about global warming also seems to think every nuclear reactor is going full Chernobyl within the decade. All of the parties I even consider voting for are staunch anti-nuclear activists for no documented reason other than "we don't like it".
Nuclear can be turned up and down relatively easily. It's on/off that takes a long time. And you can supplement nuclear with pumped storage hydro to steepen its turn up/down curve in extremis.
The less a traditional nuclear reactor contributes to the grid the worse its economics.
If you have a nuclear reactor you want to run it 24/7 at max output for it to make any economic sense. Otherwise you have all your fixed costs which need to be offset by the few hours that the reactor is actually selling energy, making this energy even more expensive.
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).
And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks).
They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.
In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.
An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
I really want to see a heat pump being used to make a real world high temperature process more efficient and cut natural gas use by 40% or so, this might destroy the latest talking point
the problem with heat pump is require quite well isolated building to make it efficient. Also after talking with a friend he had to change all radiators in his parents home since it didn't work well with previous old one he had.
I'm also not sure if heat pump is a solution for multifamily apartments.
> the problem with heat pump is require quite well isolated building to make it efficient. Also after talking with a friend he had to change all radiators in his parents home since it didn't work well with previous old one he had.
no, it doesn't require good isolation. Good isolation is beneficial, like for type of heating.
Radiators don't have an effect on isolation. However, modern radiators usually have a way higher surface area, which allows heating rooms with lower water temperature.
Heat pumps are more efficient if the difference between source and target temperature is closer.
2. Just electric heating, if electricity is cheap enough. Very simple and cheap.
But yeah, heat pumps make that more efficient. At significant higher investment costs. Gotta do the math of whether it is more efficient overall to invest in an efficient energy producer (nuclear), efficient consumers (heat pumps) or both.
Again, building one nuclear plant is expensive. But building tens or hundreds of thousands of heat pumps is certainly also and likely even more expensive.
Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste.
I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail
Apart from cities with crazy density, you underestimate how much solar we could put in the city outskirts, and it would be fine. We have already the power lines anyway to bring electricity from power plants that are far from those apartments you mention.
You would have to either cut forrest and trees or remove farm fields. I'm looking at my home town and I really don't see any barren land around many cities in Poland. I would rather they use those city outskirts land for new real estate that is lacking to deflate the bubble.
Building roofs, parking lots, streets, rail tracks, etc.. are all spaces that could have a canopy installed overhead and solar panels providing power and shading. As solar panels continue to lower in cost the sides of buildings, fences, etc.. There are lots of opportunities to install solar panels in a crowded city.
maintaining such infrastructure would be really costly: installing extra canopy, cleaning, removing snow (not easily accessible), extra inverters. I think solar only make sense if it's installed as solar farm (easy to maintain by one company) or in residential houses (owner maintain) or commercial units (owner maintain it). Solar prices went down but cost of installation and maintaining not much - this is the reason why many people in my family didn't buy it since it's still big investment and maintenance burden currently not worth the effort unless you are building new house.
Take all the land area that we currently devote to oil extraction, refining, delivery, etc.
Just that tiny amount of land is enough to supply the entire world's energy needs, if covered with solar panels.
Power line transmission losses are negligible. We don't need to put solar directly at the site, just as we don't need to put nuclear directly at the site of energy use. The round trip efficiency of energy storage is accounted for in the cost of the storage, whether that storage is hydro, battery, or hydrogen.
Solar really is the holy grail of energy: super cheap, super scalable big, super scalable small, and highly distributable or centralized. Pair that with the incredible cheapness of current batteries, and their falling prices in future years, and we are looking at a future of incredible energy abundance. As long as we are willing to accept it.
Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option.
Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
> Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations.
Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).
Solar is the current cheapest and will be the biggest source of electricity in 2033 and continue to accelerate away from others for the rest of the century.
I was talking about the situation once fossil fuels are no longer used ("in a renewable powered world" was the relevant phrase). We are not yet in that situation, so your observation there is beside the point.
During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
Which is why you don't use batteries (at least, Li-ion batteries) much beyond diurnal storage. Systems analysis for renewables that assumes batteries are the only storage mode requires massive overbuilding of solar/wind, and this strawman engineering makes the nuclear alternative appear more competitive than it actually would be.
Hydrogen or heat. The former would be stored like natural gas currently is stored, underground. We store months of natural gas consumption.
Heat (at 600 C) is potentially even cheaper to store, with a cost of storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th) of capacity. This could yield 365/24/7 heat for $3/GJ, competitive even with cheap natural gas.
Round trip efficiency if you go back to electricity is nothing great, but this is not important for very long term storage, where capex is king, not RTE.
Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.
Even if you can't get to 100%, it would still make sense to strive for as large a % of renewables as you could achieve. So, that's going to involve batteries necessarily.
For context I work at a company in Japan working on this problem. The entire reason the company exists is Japan's energy policy in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Batteries are severely underutilized in Japan at this point in time, so we can at least vastly improve on where we are.
My question is a few math operations away from "how much batteries capacity can we deploy to support how much % of renewables in the short-medium term, while still having a stable grid". My "100%" phrasing was sloppy, no need to index too much on it.
Since you're in the industry, maybe you can answer this question and change my mind.
I forget the exact numbers but from my recollection it relies on widespread adoption of EVs and being able to leverage their batteries as part of the grid.
Batteries alone cannot handle all storage use cases, but also including an alternative long term storage mode (syngas, thermal) can get to a 100% renewable grid. Use of hydrogen vs. just batteries cuts the cost of an all renewable grid in Europe in half.
They can manufacture 80 GWh a year. To get through dunkelflaute with moderate renewable percentage we need tens of TWh. Not to belittle Tesla, but that's 3 orders of magnitude difference.
Are you changing your mind or can you give me numbers to change mine?
There are several factors, but the single biggest reason for nuclear's ever increasing cost is due to construction productivity.
All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages. (Let's just elide the disconnect between wages rising fully with productivity increases, but they do rise some!)
Despite being far more wealthy today than centuries ago, we don't build cathedrals with super intricate stonework, because labor is so much more expensive.
I fear that nuclear is like the gothic cathedral: something that was far easier to do when labor costs were low, but at wealth increases it becomes far more difficult to make economic sense.
This doesn't measure the cost of providing dispatchable electricity though. If I want 1MWh of electricity at night provided by solar, it's going to cost more than solar's LCoE because I will also need to pay for a way to store and dispatch it.
Which again does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
Solar has this problem to a much greater extent though. If you have a market where solar is >100% of demand during the day then it will be dispatching at or below $0/MWh for almost all of its life.
But of course the marginal market is not the whole story. In reality solar largely receives effectively fixed prices in most markets (via CfDs or PPAs). Nuclear does the same and can also take capacity payments and sell into flexibility markets where those exist.
Which is shifting as that is getting saturated. In those markets renewables are built with storage now to deliver the electricity when needed.
Nuclear power also used to get built with PPAs. Look at Hinkley Point C for a completely insanely expensive contract, that EDF is now looking to make to make a loss on.
For Sizewell C they don’t even dare touch a fixed price contract and instead want the ratepayers to pay the construction cost in advance hoping it works out.
That is how far nuclear power has fallen.
PPAs between commercial entities of course also adapt to the market. To guarantee the nuclear price at daytime comes with a corresponding discount, because the ones buying the PPA know they can get what they need either way.
Nuclear power also generally does not participate in ancillary markets. Too slow and inflexible with weighting too much on CAPEX. They can get capacity payments but as soon as the true need is defined in terms of how much reliable energy is needed for how long renewables with carbon neutral gas turbine based backups win.
The only market civilian nuclear power wins is the ”I want to have a workforce and industry capable of building nuclear weapons and naval reactors”.
Essentially a military jobs program. That may be worthwhile, but let stop pretending nuclear power actually gives a modern grid anything it need at the current costs.
From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad!
Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale.
I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.
Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate.
3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.
Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that:
1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima.
2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here.
3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.
1. I am with you in that nuclear plants should not explode.
2. Yeah, and nuclear plants have a lot of costs which are not accounted, like the already mentioned unaffordable insurance costs that are passed on to the taxpayer in the event of an incident.
3. Land radiation and environmental impact are a far worse story for nuclear in case of an accident.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a supporter of burning fossil fuels. I am discussing which technology should be used to generate electricity. And I consider renewables to be the more pragmatic strategy. Mostly not because they are cleaner or cheaper, but because they are more decentralized, can be built quicker and are easier to replace. I am pro nuclear power plants as long as they are built far away from where people live, including the waste disposal.
Edit: to be more clear, my long term earth vision is: everything runs using electricity. No coal, no other fossils are burned. Electricity is mostly generated using wind, water, solar.
Solar & wind are not as decentralized as you think when you consider resource extraction. I think SMNR would meet your criteria for safety and a distributed grid.
How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.
Isn't that only applicable for Uranium 235 based reactors? Thorium is converted to Uranium 233 and when split the byproducts have an half life of 10s of years, meaning that the radioactivity drops to safe levels in "only" few hundred years.
This is much more manageable.
Anyway, that is to say that nuclear is a spectrum, and the current mainstream tech I believe it is the one that won because of the military applications (and therefore funding) back in the cold-war era.
I remember the anti-nuclear fever went viral in 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I think the correct lesson to be learned from that experience is not to built nuclear power plants in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters...and not to call for all nuclear power plants around the world to be shut down.
Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.
There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima.
Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons.
> Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec.
If you're referring to the Onagawa plant, one engineer (Yanosuke Hirai) pushed for the height of the wall to be increased beyond the original spec:
> A nuclear plant in a neighboring area, meanwhile, had been built to withstand the tsunamis. A solitary civil engineer employed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company knew the story of the massive Jogan tsunami of the year 869, because it had flooded the Shinto shrine in his hometown. In the 1960s, the engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, had insisted that the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station be built farther back from the sea and at higher elevation than initially proposed—ultimately nearly fifty feet above sea level. He argued for a seawall to surpass the original plan of thirty-nine feet. He did not live to see what happened in 2011, when forty-foot waves destroyed much of the fishing town of Onagawa, seventy-five miles north of Fukushima. The nuclear power station—the closest one in Japan to the earthquake’s epicenter—was left intact. Displaced residents even took refuge in the power plant’s gym.
In addition, they didn't have hydrogen recombinators, which for example are/were standard in all German plants. Those plants also had special requirements for bunkers for the Diesel backup generators so they couldn't be knocked out by water.
The point is not about "someone may not err" but about "someone may err", or more precisely "someone WILL err", coupled with the effects of such mistakes.
Failing to correctly design, build, exploit or maintain a wind turbine or solar panel isn't a big deal. Failing to do so on a nuclear reactor can become a huge and lasting disaster for many.
You are making the very common "mistake" of comparing 1 nuclear accident with 1 wind turbine accident.
And are completely missing that you need a LOT more wind turbines, and these have a lot more accidents.
For example, wind turbine accidents killed 14 people just in one year, 2011. How many people were killed in the UK in nuclear accidents that year? That decade.
Ladder accidents kill ~80 people per year in Germany.
The various estimations of "victims of nuclear" also neglect victims from such accidents. In 2011 2 workers died while working to build the new EPR in Flamanville, and aren't officially (nor AFAIK anywhere) counted as nuclear victims.
> Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.
You can't build to withstand humans ignorance. You always can argue to do this or that, but if the responsible managers won't approve it, it's all just theory and good hopes. Even worse if the ignorance grows over time; because the last decades it worked out, surely it will work another decade or two...
That's why things like nuclear are so problematic, because small neglections can explode into cataclysmic events.
I read that Germans watched their local nuclear experts explain on TV what was happening while Japanese authorities were still in denial.
They had a stereotype of Japanese hypercompetence and seeing them fuck up and then try to cover it up in the middle of a disaster had an impact even on traditional nuclear supporters.
We're living in a reality where nuclear waste was not always properly contained and the repercussions of it are long-lasting. While this particular case is related to the Manhattan Project, it's causing all types of issues to this day:
I'm still against nuclear and this ruling didn't change it. For me it's still externalising many of the negative effects to many future generations. And with much more spent fuel comes more proliferation risks.
Of course this stuff is not up to me but the parties I vote for are in part because they're anti nuclear.
Or why there is a "clean" energy distinction that some authority has control over in the first place. If CO2 is the thing we care about, then tax CO2 and let everything sort itself out. The fact there are subsidies instead of carbon taxes is revealing all on its own.
Well, its wrong though. Its not the cheapest. Thats solar and by a long shot. Nuclear is literally the most expensive energy source. Also take into account the timeframe to build nuclear powerplants. 9 to 12 Years on average built time and delays often happen.
This. The time for new nuclear plants was 20 years ago. Now it's too late, and too expensive, even in purely practical terms without the question of safety.
It's a bit more nuanced than this, no? It's better to reflect on why we let important things like nuclear energy go to the lowest bidder, or private entities that want to maximize short term profit.
...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason).
Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.
When I referenced long lasting I mean that some nuclear power stations are no forecast to keep going for 120 years.
CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous to stand near for 500 years (without centimetres of concrete), and then dangerous to consume for an further many thousand. It is within our technology to look after the quantities we are talking about indefinitely.
Also, with current plants we could reduce the size of the waste by 30x if we recycled it. Other plant types would burn all the fuel and leave us with very low volumes of radioactive elements.
Wrt Ukraine you choose to focus on the potential for release around Zaporozhzhia Vs the actual destruction occuring from the circumstances of war in the rest of the country?
> CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Yes, we have problem with CO2. The solution is to use Solar + Wind + Hydro + Batteries + long lasting storage. Nuclear causes more problems than it solves unless it used to make nukes also.
See that's the thing, you're trying to argue rationally ;)
But the discussion around nuclear energy stopped being rational decades ago. On one side you have the old guard of the environmentalist movement which got started with anti-nuclear protests in the first place and then had their "I told you so" moment in 1986, and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown, the radiation was actually good for the environment or whatever.
Then I'm seeing that the latest European NPP in Finland was about 15 years late and 3x more expensive than planned (from 3.5 to 11 billion Eu) while wind and solar farms are just popping up everywhere around me without much fanfare, built by whoever has some money and a bit of unused farmland or roof space to spare. And I really can't imagine those same people pooling their money and starting to build nuclear power plants instead ;)
> and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown
You're making it sound like anyone who's not against nuclear, thinks Chernobyl is overblown
I've never heard that sentiment anywhere. (I'm sure you can find examples when looking for it; after all, there's also people who believe vaccines cause bill gates mind control.) Why the strawman argument?
The "grassroots"-Jesus, Michael Shellenberger, who dominates the arguments being spread by this movement, doesn't get tired to repeat it. He even had to comment on the TV Show Chernobyl:
Storage capacity of high level nuclear waste repositories is limited by heat buildup. I think people would notice when radioactive volcanoes start erupting.
The annoying thing is recycling nuclear waste is kind of a solved problem. I've watched this video a while ago but iirc it is just more expensive to build a reactor that can also recycle its own waste. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc
After decades of R&D and numerous lab and prototypes reactors able to do so (mainly fast breeders)... there is not a single industrial model ready to be deployed.
> at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard
Hello, I live in Germany. You can use my backyard free of charge so long as I get a free Geiger counter, thank you!
I'd genuinely be honored to play such an important role in decarbonising Germany's energy supply. Watching the carbon intensity per kWh on electricitymap.com as we creep towards winter is frankly depressing. (I didn't know this site yet last year, so this is the first time I see the dynamics in action.) The coal plant also never turns off, even during negative prices. I presume it takes too long to fire back up and so there's always >100 grams CO2e for every little kWh that 82 million Germans use. The wind turbines / solar panels need to turn off to make space on the grid for the coal plant when there's oversupply. That's what the Germans were made to vote for in fear when electing to shut their nuclear plants earlier than coal. It's like banning airplanes and having everyone drive cars instead due to a national fear of flying, not having considered the safety records of each method. It's so crazy to me as a Dutch immigrant who's new to these people's politics. Anyway, back to storage
I don't see the problem with inert waste under the ground and a good detection system, at least for a few centuries. There's challenges in how to explain the danger to a generation that doesn't speak any of our languages anymore (in 500 years, someone's gonna need to replace the sign), or who lost any translators we've built (imagining some apocalypse, say in 5000 years), but there's research on that as well and it's not an argument why we couldn't find a good storage site for the next century while we deal with this energy transition
> the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason
And yet there are nuclear plants all over Europe! People who mind can already choose not to live near them. Expand capacity at those sites and let's go
Probably said somewhere else, but "green" originally means "does not create toxic waste when used". Nuclear is nice and good for the environment, but it does fit in the definition "produce waste", even if this waste can be considered as small or can be somehow treated.
That's blatantly wrong. Hydro stands out in the data as being the cheapest reliable carbon neutral option (wind and solar aren't reliable, and when you factor in storage to make them reliable then they're not cheap).
Hydro requires large sums of capital to get started, destroys entire valleys, is only viable in a limited number of places, has significant risks if not maintained, and isn't energy dense in the slightest. Nevertheless, it's cheap and it's carbon neutral.
Run-of-the-river hydro in all but a handful of sites tends to be quite dependent on rainfall levels. This means production levels can vary quite meaningfully both seasonally and more importantly year-to-year.
It's definitely reliable in the sense that hydro stations can basically last forever if properly maintained (there are plenty of hydro stations operating today which are more than 100 years old) but it's not quite a silver bullet.
The reason I used to oppose nuclear energy is that its proponents would say nuclear waste isn't a problem, but they would never explain why it isn't a problem. I knew the half-life of uranium was 4 billion years; I didn't see how you could possibly make that safe, and nobody on the pro-nuclear side seemed to have an explanation, so I assumed that no explanation existed.
(Turns out the answer is that you can store nuclear waste deep underground at geologically stable locations where tectonics won't cause it to eventually resurface.)
(Also radioactive waste isn't uranium and the half-life is considerably shorter than 4 billion years, although it's still quite long.)
it’s also true that you get better at using (and reusing) what we would consider waste today over time.
The more energy we are able to use, the more inert the waste material becomes, leading to much lower storage timeframes (though still multiple human lifetimes even in the best case).
I'm not convinced that's true about nuclear power when you look at the full lifecycle costs of uranium mining, maintenance and decommissioning. Also, solar is currently a lot cheaper than nuclear power when you exclude all the various subsidies (which applies to both energy sources). I'm not even convinced that nuclear power is that energy dense when you look at the raw uranium mining - most figures cherry-pick the processed uranium fuel which is indeed a very dense energy source.
It's cleaner than coal and oil. If you upgrade a coal plant to a gas plant, that's a step forward against climate change.
Yes, we'd be much better off with wind farms, solar plants, and nuclear reactors, but a step forward is a step forward.
Countries like Poland, running mostly on coal, would get cleaner air and contribute less to global warming if they were to upgrade their power plants to anything non-coal.
Replace them with nuclear generators and they'd also significantly reduce the amount of radiation people would be exposed to.
It's not that gas is that good, it's more that coal is that bad.
Clever use of the adjective “cleaner”. Try replacing it with “less dirty, but still pollutant and toxic” to see an alternative, correct version of what you have written.
You can put absolutist restrictions on things like that but every time you enter a cost-benefit calculus with such restrictions already in place you're going to end up with more cost and less benefit
A methane molecule is one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms. More than half of the energy released by burning it (53% according to [1]) comes from oxidizing the hydrogen to water. So it's roughly half as bad as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and does not have the additional problems of sulfur (acid rain) and soot.
With that logic, humans aren't climate friendly and should be transitioned away from
Different shades of grey. We'll always cause pollution as part of being. I don't believe that the person above meant it as a final solution to keep burning fossil fuels
At that point human life isn't climate friendly... everyone wants to live like the average american with 2 cars and 4 ac units per households, when Asia and Africa come for their fair share, even if they only claim 25% of it, we're fucked, no amount of battery or solar panel will make this consumeristic and "growth forever" mentality sustainable, because by definition it is a boundless quest. Half of the world still live like medieval peasants with less than $7 a day, this is just the beginning
Is it less climate unfriendly than the alternatives. Every form of energy generation releases CO2. Gas also has the benefit that it doesn't need all sorts of extras to make it dispatachable when needed (which also require CO2).
I forgot to say hydro is also great where possible.
Both nuclear and solar have conditions where they cannot generate energy. Nuclear is also slow to scale up/down. There is a need for something that has the properties of natural gas
Nuclear produces constant amount of energy (while consumption is not stable), Solar and Wind are highly unstable, with peaks not matching consumption. Adding gas (which is fast to adjust/turn on/turn off) for maneuvers makes whole system cheaper and more stable
Except, most regions don't need constant supply, it's actually even harmful for the grid. German grid for example seems to have become significant better since the last nuclear plants were removed.
Gas isn’t climate friendly just because of its debatable attractiveness vs coal. And nuclear comes with catastrophic risks that require large costs to mitigate. Let’s not pretend it’s some panacea. Renewables are better than both.
Shutting down nuclear was a pretty popular policy. But that aside, what the Energiewende was not about was removing obstacles to building out energy infrastructure rapidly (e.g., the delay on the north-south connections).
Germany could have decarbonized faster by maintaining its nuclear power, but only to a limited extent because the bulk of the coal (especially lignite, a high CO2 emitter) is burned to generate electricity in the former East German regions, which have been devoid of nuclear power since 1995 (Soviet reactors were shut down due to their unsafety). Therefore, all active reactors were located in West Germany, and there is no adequate high-voltage line capable of transporting their output to the East.
At its peak (in 1999), nuclear power produced only 31% of Germany's electricity, itself less than 25% of the energy consumed (even considering primary energy, it only provided 12.7%), and by 2011 (Fukushima...), it was producing less than 18% of the electricity.
Moreover, in the East, coal-fired power plants have long produced high-pressure steam for district heating (industry and heating many premises), which a remote reactor cannot provide.
To claim that Germany shut down its reactors for no reason (after Fukushima...) or that only a minority of environmentalists decided to do so is misleading as, in Germany, all political parties close reactors, and most reactors were not closed by "Greens".
Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency since it would have replaced part of the huge coal industry, which is very difficult to get rid of.
> Germany could have decarbonized faster by maintaining its nuclear power
Precisely.
> but only to a limited extent because the bulk of the coal (especially lignite, a high CO2 emitter) is burned to generate electricity in the former East German regions,
Huh? Not shutting down the existing nuclear plants is a pure positive and does not prevent you from doing other things. Such as building out renewables and/or nuclear plants in the east.
For the money we wasted on intermittent renewables so far, we could have built at least 50 reactors even at the inflated cost of the EPR prototype at Olkiluoto 3. Or 100 inflation-adjusted Konvois. So way more than enough.
Nuclear power is well-suited for district heating and industrial heat applications, unlike solar and wind.
> To claim that Germany shut down its reactors for no reason
Nobody claimed that. Germany shut down its reactors for idiotic reasons:
All West German reactors would have survived the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami perfectly fine had they been at the site of Fukushima. And we don't have Tsunamis in Germany. How does shutting down those plants make sense again? When answering, consider that Japan is reactivating its nuclear plants.
It's time for Germany to admit its mistake on nuclear energy
> or that only a minority of environmentalists decided to do so is misleading as,
Again, such a good thing that that claim wasn't made in this thread. Or are you misleadingly claiming that it was?
> misleading as, in Germany, all political parties close reactors, and most reactors were not closed by "Greens".
Who "closed" reactors, now that actually is misleading for a change. The law that required nuclear reactors to be closed was passed by the Red/Green coalition in 2002. Germany happens to be a country with the rule of law, so successor governments can't just act on whim, they are bound by the law of the land. Oh, and it was the Greens who made the Atomausstieg the primary condition for their coalition with the SPD.
So while it is correct that all parties are somewhat to blame, to claim that they are equally to blame is ahistorical nonsense and quite misleading.
> Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency
The money Germany "wasted" on renewables brought down prices a lot, triggering massive investments, which was the plan. My prediction is that even France will scale down nuclear power for fiscal reasons alone - they would need to build new reactors now as a long-term replacement - but it does not look too good.
France keeps talking about the EPR2 program but the government just collapsed because they are underwater in debt and can't agree on any cuts or increases in taxation.
At this moment to go on a massive spending spree for a dead-end nuclear project is not a very sane policy.
Investing in the futur when you have a hard time creating more value than you consume is exactly what you need to do. Reducing investment is precisely the way to reinforce the downward feedback loop.
If they want to keep taxing the common man, they need them to create more value otherwise to are just taking larger and larger share of vanishing small value.
France does have money; it's just all concentrated in the boomer generation who is fighting hard to keep control. A large share of the debt is generated to keep this gerontocracy confortable at the expense of the youth and future.
Which means you need a return on the investment for it to work. Creating self sustaining industries that don’t need subsidies.
Tossing an absolutely mindbogglingly large subsidy to the 70 year old nuclear industry which never has delivered competitive products is not a good use of money. It is like saying we create value by going around breaking windows and paying people to fix it.
France’s problem is that if they don’t fix the spending issue on their own the bond market will do it for them. Maintaining the debt will be a larger and larger portion of the budget until the only option is solving the issue.
Cutting spending will lower GDP and push up debt as a percent of GDP. But it wasn’t real income when the debt you took on did not lead to productive outcomes. Just polishing a pig.
I’m not sure where to begin. Please stop straight up lying? Nothing in this comment is correct.
In France the battle is over how large the subsidies needs to be to even get started on the EPR2 program. Driven by EDF is too financially weak to take on more projects after the recent boondoggles and that new built nuclear power simply does not deliver electricity at a price the market accepts.
That does not sound very self sustaining.
Regarding Flamanville 3 you are likely citing the report with a discount rate lower than the inflation and a 40 year pay back time, while comparing to the first ever off shore wind farm in France. You know, a prototype as regards to working with French industry and bureaucracy.
For anyone even having a slight economic understanding the writers of that report are shouting from the rooftops that investing in nuclear power is pure lunacy. But shrouded in a language allowing lobbyists and blindingly biased people to cite it.
I also love how the fastest growing energy source in human history, for which subsidies are being phased out as we speak, haven’t shown a positive ROI.
What do I now. All that private money going into renewables are calculated in making a loss.
In France the Cour of Audit concluded that electricity produced by the EPR must be sold at 138€/MWh (2023 value) in order to obtain a tiny ROI (4%).
This is a financial disaster.
Proof page 29: https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/publications/la-filiere-epr-une-d...
I love this. Just pretend that no new nuclear power needs to ever be built and it is economical based on the current economics of soon half a century old paid off plants.
Since the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles and the subsidy scheme hasn’t been finalized just pretend that it doesn’t exist!
They are only talking about CFDs, zero interest loans and credit guarantees! Those doesn’t cost money! Not until they start being paid out! Therefore does new built nuclear power does not need any subsidies. QED.
Or the French were talking about it. Until the government collapsed due to being underwater in debt with a spending problem they are unable to reign in.
We all know the one way to solve a spending problem is an unfathomably large handout to the dead-end nuclear industry!
Please. This is getting laughable. Facts be damned, just ignore reality and with a scalpel cherry pick a few disjointed facts.
> The money Germany "wasted" on renewables brought down prices a lot,
It massively increased the price of electricity in Germany. And the same holds true of pretty much every other location that tried it.
And it did remarkably little for CO₂ emissions, massively increased our dependence on cheap Russian Gas thus emboldening Putin, cemented our fossil fuel dependence for reliable base load, entrenched our dependence on China.
On the whole, "wasted" is putting it kindly.
Yes, the prices of the generating equipment have come down from truly astronomical to only "not competitive without massive subsidies".
Had we spend the same money on nuclear power plants, we would have long been done with the decarbonization of our electricity sector, and probably well into the electrification and ensuing decarbonization of the other sectors as well.
Except we would have found it difficult to spend that much on nuclear power plants, because even at the price of the messed up EPR prototypes, the same money would have bought us over 50 reactors. At the price of the first three Konvois, around 100, adjusted for inflation and some increases. But when you build 50-100 reactors of the same kind (that's important: don't make every new one different like we used to do), the cost does go down.
France is increasing its fission fleet again, after repealing a law that made such expansion illegal beyond the then existing generating capacity 63.2 GW.
The goal of a reduction of the nuclear share to below 50% was also repealed. I do believe that the share of nuclear in France will decrease somewhat, because intermittent renewables can let the nuclear plants run at higher efficiencies by taking up some of the variability that is currently handled by the nuclear plants.
Come, please do not repeat all this nonsense from the tabloids. First, you need to specify what prices you talk about. If you talk about household prices, then yes those increased. This, btw, was also intentional. The system was designed in this way to encourage energy conservation. It certainly got too far, but this is largely a political issue. In France prices were kept low artificially (which did not help the nuclear industry!). So these prices do tell you exactly nothing about the merits of the technology, and more about politics.
That reliance on Russian gas was increased is complete BS. Only a very small amount of gas which is imported is used for electricity production (10% or so) and it is certainly not true that this (relatively small) amount increased. In 2024, 80 TWh of electricity were produced from gas. In 2010 it was 90 TWh. In that time frame, renewables increased from 105 TWh to 285 TWh. 1.
CO2 emissions went down with roll-out of renewables exactly as expected2) Coal use for electricity production went down from 263 TWh in 2010 to 107 TWh in 2024. In fact, CO2 emission went down faster than planned which is the reason Germany still managed to meet climate targets despite other sectors (heating and transportation) not meeting their targets. That Co2 emissions for electricity production are still higher compared to some others is that there is still a lot of coal in the system (and electricity from that was already exported a lot until recently). But once coal is pushed out completely then this will be gone. The only real conclusion here is that the energy transition was started to late and is not fast enough. The past, nobody can change, but it would certainly be much slower when building nuclear plants now.
France wants to double down on nuclear for political reasons and my prediction is that they will fail because they can not afford it. They have huge fiscal problems and they did not invest enough to renew their nuclear fleet in the past, sold electricity too cheap (so could not build up reserves), and would now have to invest a lot, but their nuclear industry is in a horrible state and their state dept is out of control already.
The "Russian gas" argument is so grotesque also because Germany quickly stopped important gas from Russia after the start of the attack on Ukraine, but neither Europe nor the US has stopped importing nuclear fuel from Russia.
> Had we spend the same money on nuclear power plants
France ("Flamanville-3" reactor) and the US (Vogtle, VS Summer) did so, and it failed.
> Except we would have found it difficult to spend that much on nuclear power plants, because even at the price of the messed up EPR prototypes, the same money would have bought us over 50 reactors.
Once more: source? The most serious allegations published state about official investments previsions until 2050, and not only for renewables (grid maintenance is a)
> don't make every new one different like we used to do
... therefore if a potentially dangerous defect is discovered you will have to shut them down all. No more juice, yay! It nearly happened in France recently, and the shock was alleviated by the fact that the fleet is NOT made of identical reactors, and therefore a fair part could produce.
Not really. The last project (Flamanville-3) started in 2004, work on the field started in 2007, the reactor was to be delivered in 2012 for 3.3 billion € and only started a few months ago (it did not yet reach full power) for at least 23.7 billion €. https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2025/01/14/epr-de-fl...
Even the official report about it states explicitly that this building project was a failure.
There are claimed intentions to build at least 2 new reactors since 2022, nothing else.
> [renewables massively increased electricity prices, not decreased them as claimed]
> We all have to consider the total cost on the long term.
Yes, we do. When you consider long term, it gets even worse for intermittent renewables. Nuclear, on the other hand is a license to print money when you consider the long term.
> I analyzed it for France.
With all due respects to your "analysis", the French auditors came to a different conclusion.
> Nope [to having little effect on CO₂ emissions]
The graph you linked to proves my point: the reduction is laughable. France's specific CO₂ emissions are less than 1/10th of Germany's per kWh. Have been for decades, at a fraction of the cost.
> France ("Flamanville-3" reactor) and the US (Vogtle, VS Summer) did so, and it failed.
Again, the opposite is true. Those projects did not "fail". They all produce reliable power, which intermittent renewables cannot do, at better prices than intermittent renewables.
Of course, compared to other nuclear projects, they were massive failures, but not when compared to intermittent renewables. The standards are just so different.
And your reasoning is also wrong: those projects "failed" (relative to other nuclear projects) precisely because far too little was being built. They are all First of a Kind (FOAK) builds, and built in countries that built little to no new nuclear in the last 20-40 years.
FOAK builds are slow and expensive (and slow is extra expensive, as most of the cost is financing, i.e. interest payments). NOAK builds tend to go much quicker and be a lot cheaper. As an example, China builds much faster and cheaper. People incorrectly claim this is because they skimp on safety, labor, tech etc.
Not true. Their first AP-1000 took 9 years, almost as long as Vogtles, especially when you take into account the COVID years. They are now building their version in 5 years. Essentially the same reactor, certainly the same country. Half the time.
FOAK vs. NOAK is the ticket.
> .. therefore if a potentially dangerous defect is discovered you will have to shut them down all.
France's primary problem was lack of maintenance due to the de-emphasis of nuclear during the Mitterand years and deferred maintenance during COVID.
And you don't build just one kind. Build 2-3 kinds and 10-20 of each.
Oh, and don't build them too quick. These things last for 100 years, so to achieve steady state you can't build out your entire fleet in 10-20 years, because then you industry has nothing to build for the next 80-90 years and withers.
> Even the official report about it states explicitly that this building project was a failure.
No it didn't. Relative to the standards of nuclear power plants it was horrific. But even under fairly negative assumptions for the price of electricity it will have "modest" profitability. Which, once again, is better than the best intermittent renewables projects.
And FV3 is not "the nuclear industry". It is that particular project.
> There are claimed intentions to build at least 2 new reactors since 2022, nothing else.
That is false. The current plan is to build 6 EPR2 and later on to build 8 more. Sites have been selected for the first 6, and engineering contracts for the first 2 have been awarded to the tune of several billion €.
If that's "nothing", then can I have just a bit of that "nothing" from you? Can send you my bank details.
> When you consider long term, it gets even worse for intermittent renewables. Nuclear, on the other hand is a license to print money
Non-backed-up nonsense.
> With all due respects to your "analysis", the French auditors came to a different conclusion.
Once again: source?
The reality is that the French Cour of Audit officially declared 5 years ago that there could be no more nuclear project without a financial direct public guarantee. Proof: https://www.challenges.fr/top-news/nucleaire-la-cour-des-com...
> The graph you linked to proves my point: the reduction is laughable
Nope, 538 geqCO2/KWh (2013) to 344 (2024) with a huge coal industry which cannot be quickly phased out and while shutting down all nuclear reactors is very good.
> France's specific CO₂ emissions are less than 1/10th of Germany's per kWh.
> and built in countries that built little to no new nuclear in the last 20-40 years.
The projects started 15 to 25 years ago, just a few years after the last reactor built before them. Moreover those nations have active reactors fleets and massive public nuclear R&D budgets, therefore the fable "no-one worked on all this" is ridiculous.
> most of the cost is financing, i.e. interest payments
True, but only because the projects were extremely late.
Very few reactors. Their EPR were officially late and overbudget.
> France's primary problem was lack of maintenance
Source? Not at all. The nuclear authority is very, very picky here.
> due to the de-emphasis of nuclear during the Mitterand years
Nope. Mitterrand heavily helped nuclear, and this is now a well-known fact. M. Boiteux, EDF boss at the time, also did reckon it. French ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rvP1zstk68
> and deferred maintenance during COVID.
Source? Not at all, in practice, as many 'Grand Carénage' subprojects were completed in due time while respecting budgets (this is very rare in this industry and was touted). https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_car%C3%A9nage
> to achieve steady state you can't build out your entire fleet in 10-20 years, because then you industry has nothing to build for the next 80-90 years and withers.
In France the solution was to try to sell reactors to various nations, and
>> Even the official report about it states explicitly that this building project was a failure.
> No it didn't.
Wrong, once more. Proof: "La construction de l’EPR de Flamanville aura accumulé tant de surcoûts et de délais qu’elle ne peut être considérée que comme un échec pour EDF". Source: conclusion of the official report analyzing the EPR at Flamanville, page 31
> "modest" profitability. Which, once again, is better than the best intermittent renewables projects.
Source?
> And FV3 is not "the nuclear industry". It is that particular project.
Granted. Which project succeeded since year 2000?
>> There are claimed intentions to build at least 2 new reactors since 2022, nothing else.
> The current plan is to build 6 EPR2
Yes: it only is a plan. Nothing more. And "6" is "at least 2". Right now we only know where 2 of them can theoretically be built (at the existing plant at Penly).
> Sites have been selected for the first 6
Which ones? Sources?
> engineering contracts for the first 2 have been awarded
Yes, for preparatory work. There is a long route ahead...
> Not shutting down the existing nuclear plants is a pure positive
Ask Japan, and especially Fukushima's residents, about this.
> building out renewables and/or nuclear plants in the east.
Germany chose renewables and cannot quickly phase out its huge coal industry.
> For the money we wasted on intermittent renewables so far
Source (with investments' perimeters and maturities)?
> Nuclear power is well-suited for district heating and industrial heat applications
If, and only if, it is designed for it, and with the appropriate networks. France nuclear does nearly 0 district heating and 0 industrial heat.
> Germany shut down its reactors for idiotic reasons:
Reason: "Fukushima"
> All West German reactors would have survived the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake
In Japan until 2011, officially "all reactors will survive..."
> we don't have Tsunamis in Germany
Tsunamis are not the sole cause potentially triggering a nuclear accident.
> How does shutting down those plants make sense again?
Refusing nuclear-induced challenges (risk of major accident, waste, dependency towards uranium, difficult decommissioning, risk of weapon proliferation...) while another approach (renewables) is now technically adequate makes sense.
> The law that required nuclear reactors to be closed was passed by the Red/Green coalition in 2002.
Don't omit anything: "The phase-out plan was initially delayed in late 2010, when during the chancellorship of centre-right Angela Merkel, the coalition conservative-liberal government decreed a 12-year delay of the schedule."
Then the Fukushima accident changed it all. Exactly what I described.
>> Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency
> That is also not true.
Germany burns its own coal, and by doing so maintains a huge sector. By letting reactors run it would have had to phase coal our more quickly, leading to massive unemployment and dependency towards uranium. This is sad but true.
>> Germany shut down its reactors for idiotic reasons:
> Reason: "Fukushima"
QED.
> > Japan is reactivating its nuclear plants.
>Some sing this song since 2015
And it still happens to be true. And only in the weird minds of anti-nuclear activists are renewables and nuclear power incompatible. Almost the entire industrialized world is investing massively in both nuclear and renewables.
And once again: The law that required nuclear reactors to be closed was passed by the Red/Green coalition in 2002. Governments are bound by the law of the land.
Now other governments should have scrapped those laws, but they didn't. So they bear some responsibility for this disaster, but the main responsibility is still with Red/Green (2002) in general and the Greens in particular, because they were the ones pushing it.
It is also really telling that for some reason everyone wants to ascribe this huge "success" to their political enemies...
Japan: no comment nor "someone sees something" changes anything to the (already stated) facts: since Fukushima (2011) Japan did not restart its nuclear reactors and is quickly building renewables:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
> the entire industrialized world is investing massively in both nuclear and renewables
Fission reactors are not very useful targets in war. In Ukraine, their fleet of nuclear reactors are what's keeping the electricity grid running. And they are building new ones. In war time.
Because presumably France for instance would likely view someone blowing up one of their plants the same way as a nuclear attack. Given their nuclear deterrence policies that would end up badly for both sides
Germany doesn't have a nuclear deterrence and in the event of a nuclear war still might want to avoid having particular bad targets. I'd rather put any new money for nuclear into fusion instead of building large fission reactors.
It is not about blackouts but about the risk induced by a nuclear plant in a warzone.
That's what International Atomic Energy Agency's (UN agency in charge of civilian nuclear) boss said about it: "Director General Grossi reiterated his deep concern about the apparent increased use of drones near nuclear power plants since early this year, saying such weaponry posed a clear risk to nuclear safety and security"
"any military attack on a nuclear site – with or without drones – jeopardizes nuclear safety and must stop immediately"
> And nuclear comes with catastrophic risks that require large costs to mitigate
Those are still very low compared to fossil fuels. I mean in hindsight if that was something people cared about 40-50 years ago we'd be in a much better place climate change wise.
The article doesn't really explain what the lawsuit was over. It's about rules for private sector investment fund reporting. What the court ruled on is whether nuclear (and gas) can be classified as "sustainable investments" under the "EU taxonomy" rules[0].
This may mean that more private investment capital will end up in nuclear power, although my guess is that the impact of the EU taxonomy in driving investment decisions on this type of thing is likely quite small (I suspect the few funds which are out there which have hard requirements around EU taxonomy likely wouldn't invest in nuclear anyway).
Not just build, it is expensive to maintain, and insanely expensive and time consuming to dismantle. Still necessary to complement other green energies in the grid
The incentives of the regulators are not aligned with the public.
Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.
They only care about reducing the risk of an accident however minor happening on their watch while not appearing to completely annihilate the technology because that would open them to political attacks.
So the balance is struck at a point where nuclear power capital costs are absurdly high.
I suspect that trying to make nuclear reactors accident proof has always been the wrong approach. Instead they should have made it so an accident could always be managed - something along the lines of if something happens drown it in concrete and forget about it, because there are 100,000 more reactors. The only safety cost would come from making a meltdown slow enough or happen in a place no one cares about for it to become a balance sheet problem.
> Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.
Of course they do. It's going to feed directly into economic growth in a way that is about as visible as a major accident multiplied by its probability
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants).
Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive.
> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
If the goal is 100% carbon-free energy, then we simply can't let economics get in the way. Otherwise we will always be stuck building some natural gas peaker plants.
And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically.
Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit.
It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage.
The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal.
I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.
Yeah, I'm just arguing that "baseload" should be understood to be a bad thing in my comment above.
If you want to argue that nuclear is affordable as non-baseload power, because the (non-economic) cost to the environment of the alternatives is otherwise too high.... well I'd disagree because of how far solar/wind/batteries have come in the last couple of years, but prior to that you would have had a point. And you still would as far as continuing to operate existing plants goes of course.
Nuclear power has a massive handicap that most R&D was abandoned back in the 80s because it was uneconomic. And another handicap that the R&D it did get was never that focused on economics, commercial nuclear power were always a side effect of the true goal (Small reactors for nuclear submarines and Breeder reactors for nuclear weapons). And to get the promised low costs, you really need to commit and take advantage of massive economics of scale.
I'm not arguing that when taking environmental damage into account, that nuclear is cheaper than current solar/wind/battery technology for any single power project. They have the advantage of massive R&D over the last 30 years.
What I am arguing is that focusing on solar/wind/battery might not be the best route to 100% carbon free power in the long term. Maybe it is? But we really shouldn't be jumping to that assumption.
And we shouldn't be disregarding Nuclear because of any argument that can be summed up in a hacker news comment.
... voters (or however we want to handwave preference aggregation) are very passive about carbon-free energy (and global warming and sustainability and economics and ...)
they either pick some pet peeves (coral reefs, rainforests, global South inequality, desertification) and usually start buying things (EVs, PV panels, heat pumps)
but when it comes to policy they usually revert to Greenpeace/degrowth/NIMBY cult members
This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price. Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%, which makes it quite flexible in real condition. See https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... as a proof - nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day.
New small modular reactors promise great improvements, as they can be pre-built in factories, require limited maintenance, lower risk, and as a result much lower cost per MW.
> This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price.
This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all. You have to consider both operating and capital costs. Nuclear plants are cheap to operate once built, but those operations have to pay off the capital costs. If the load factor is low, then each unit of generated power has to bear a higher portion of the capital costs. If your capital costs are very high, then you either need a very high load factor or very high spot prices to bear those costs.
> Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%
Net demand on CAISO can go from about 2 MW to 30 MW in the summer. 20 MW of that ramp occurs over just 3 hours. I'm sure you can build nuclear plants that ramp that fast, but you need a lot more than the range you're mentioning here. Regardless, I'm not making an argument about the physics of nuclear power plants, just the economics. Expensive plants generally need high load factors to pay off the capital costs.
> nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day.
Most of France's nuclear plants are old and thus fully depreciated. The only one built recently (Flamanville Unit 3), is a good example of the bad cost trend in nuclear. While this was a bit cheaper than Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in the US on a dollars per nameplate capacity basis, at 19 billion euro it's still very expensive (and also way over budget).
France also has high rates of curtailment, which is not necessarily a huge problem for them since so much of their generation is already carbon-free, but it does suggest they're already hitting the limits of their ability to ramp production up and down. Whether this is an engineering problem or something to do with the structure of their electricity market is a bit unclear to me
> New small modular reactors promise great improvements, as they can be pre-built in factories, require limited maintenance, lower risk, and as a result much lower cost per MW.
This has been the promise for years, but so far the low costs have yet to materialize and they are estimated to have a higher LCOE than traditional plants. Currently only 2 are actually operational, a demonstration plant in China and a floating power plant using adapted ice-breaker reactors in Russia. There are a few more in the pipeline, but they are all at least a couple years out from actually producing power.
> This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all.
I'm talking about the wholesale market, which works as an auction, where producers give their price for units of capacity, and the clearing price is set by the marginal producer. Typically, nuclear reactors will give their marginal cost, near 0, and let the more expensive producers set the clearing price. Given that capital cost is a sunk cost, it doesn't matter to nuclear plants as long as the market price is above the marginal one. So called "renewables" do this as well, but have to account for the risk that mother nature doesn't provide, and therefore factor in the risk of having to buy coal or gas-produced electricity on the spot.
> Net demand on CAISO can go from about 2 MW to 30 MW in the summer.
Well if this is the case this is not a "nuclear sized" market then and other ways of supplying capacity are better. But remember that it's estimated that blackouts are much,much more costly society-wise than whatever marginal price you could pay for electricity, so having a baseload and some excess capacity is always good. This is also why many electricity producers are nationalized. It's not a market like the others.
> Flamanville
France has the strictest regulator of the world, which adds a lot of costs, and Flamanville required to re-learn many things after losing the expertise from the 70's. For the record, an airliner should be able to fall on Flamanville without any problem, due to regulations.
> Curtailements
Excess electricity is sold in Germany, which lacks a much-needed baseload, especially since they have a big industry. Most people ignore that electricity consumption follows Pareto's law, with around 1k industrial plants consuming around 50% of the electricity (sorry no source for this, my econ teacher said in a class a few years ago!).
> SMR
Yes, still in development, many different designs so costs estimates are difficult to make. I'm citing Wikipedia's[0]. The good thing is that the possibility to build them serially should decrease a lot the costs as demand ramps up.
The massive capital costs of the plant have to be paid back in the sale price of energy, that’s what makes it expensive. France’s state built plants don’t have that accounting
But the market price asked by nuclear plant doesn't account for capital costs as the real price will always be higher. What is important is the clearing price not the asking price.
Thank you for this, this along with many other comments have really helped me understand.
This isn’t a simple issue, and I think your basic common sense take now mostly aligns with mine (though correct me if I’m wrong) which is something along the lines of that we don’t have to be anti-nuclear specifically but we do have to be bearish because it has downsides that mean if we are going to use it for some specific use case we’d better be sure that the pros are significant to outweigh the natural cons it brings with it.
It is possible because interconnecting grids at continental-level is The Way for quite a while, even without any renewable, because it enables operators to optimize (preferring less-emitting and cheaper production units) and also to obtain a better service guarantee (less blackouts!).
It also enables over-produced electricity to power electrolyzers. 'Green hydrogen' thus obtained can power the backup/peakers (producing electricity to load-follow and also when other intermittent equipment cannot produce enough on-the-spot), further reducing 'intermittency' effects. This isn't sci-fi ( https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydroge... ), many can burn a mix (methane, hydrogen...) and some recent models can be retrofitted into burning hydrogen (no major investment nor need to reform existing heavy resources/organization).
As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means.
But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.
It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]
The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.
Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]
just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60).
That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".
This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.
And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.
> That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants...
It really doesn't matter what the uptime of individual power plants is. What matters is the uptime for the consumer which is essentially 100% in EU countries.
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.
My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.
> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).
I guess, but this article seems misleading to me then. The percentages do seem to mean to constant 1GW supply, not a total supply.
So what’s the total supply?
LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.
I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.
> I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group
I agree it's unlikely you'll just have solar + batteries used just for LV. However, taking a look at the adoption of storage in California and Texas, I think it's safe to assume an upwards trajectory for solar + batteries [1].
I didn't know much about Nevada's electricity generation, but based on current data [1] there are enough alternative sources to support a sizeable increase in solar generation.
Still, I don't know how much solar will be deployed and I hope nuclear does drop in price in order to speed up the energy transistion. It's exciting to see so many great technological leaps in our lifetimes.
The point is that a very mundane setup with small storage is nearly enough to create a flat baseload of electricity.
We both know that neither supply nor demand is that flat.
In reality we can also trivially add wind power, existing hydro, gas turbines ran on carbon neutral fuel etc. to the mix.
How will you force this house that is self-sufficient 97% of the time to buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity to not crater the capacity factor of the nuclear plant?
Because fast to deploy in theory fights quickly with permitting systems and NIMBYism. You need more permits, because a typical solar or wind farm doesn't come close to a nuclear plan's output, so the per-project bureaucracy multiplies. By needing more places, you also have more groups opposing projects for typical NIMBY reasons. You need battery facilities too, and more updates to the grid to deal with having less inertia, and the updates cost money, and the battery facilities themselves face more NIMBYism: Minimum distances to places where people live and such. So when you put it all together, slow bureaucracies just move at glacial paces, and the equipment you would have bought when you sent out the permit is already different than what you want to use when the permitting is approved.
Then we have the tariffs, as Europe puts tariffs on Chinese equipment that change the price quite a bit.
A country that took this very seriously and decided to put renewables as a top priority could go quite fast. But if there's anything one should learn about the last few decades is that modern democracies care too much about vested interest and NIMBY complaints to actually get projects like this done. Just look at charts showing power waiting to go online in most countries: You'll find very long lines, even after dealing with the rest of the the bureaucratic gauntlet.
Quote: The winters in Germany are often colder and the country's climate is generally more continental. The south of France enjoys warmer Mediterranean temperatures and milder winters.
One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters.
First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US.
The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.
I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism
Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you
Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill"
I think if something is built near you that materially lowers the quality of your life, being angry about it is not NIMBYism
I personally think NIMBYism is more along the lines of "this doesn't negatively impact my day to day life, but I'm worried it will lower my property value"
I went right up to a 2MW windmill once to test this hypothesis and all I could hear were cars on a road (100km/h speed limit) several hundred metres away.
The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.
It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
You need a reliable source for energy. Pumped storage is not. They are mostly good for dealing with the fluctuations of energy supply and demand. It crucially requires water to operate. You can't do much when there's a drought. Also, did some googling. The world’s largest pumped‑hydro storage plant (Fengning, China) stores nearly 40 GWh, delivering 3.6 GW for about 10.8 hours when full. Thats not even a day.
There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.
You're looking for the biggest which isn't all that important. It's like saying you cannot deal with a difference in peak and through in production using a single power plant. For example, Norway has just 78TWh[1] in storage like that. Which is 2000x your example
And yes, I realize how well positioned Norway is for this. But you can put these wherever you have a stream and a big reservoir
> Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
It's also the oldest storage tech and I doubt there's a single place in Europe available to build more.
> Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
Not every dam has to be of the size of the Hoover dam. A single huge battery is also not practical.
Yes water shortage might be a problem if the river you're on runs dry. That's not often a problem though, plenty of major rivers. And a dam doesn't change the total amount that flows, it just changes when. As a result it might even help in lowering some flood risks.
Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed.
This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.
EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.
I obviously don't know about Norway, but in most developed countries, the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure. While I can't prove it, it seems too convenient that people suddenly care about "nature" right after they've fucked it up for so many other reasons.
> The surface of both of these things hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.
Source?
It was also my understanding that large amounts of habitat (e.g. Amazon rainforest) are lost for agriculture in general, and that cows are a particularly large part of that
Road surfaces I don't specifically know in terms of habitat area loss, but they split up habitat areas, and surely we'll have gotten more road surface as we went from ~6 to ~8 billion people on the planet in the last 30 years? How could that have stayed roughly the same?!
While that's strictly true, there are a lot of people who wouldnt mind living across the fence from a solar farm. Not so many want to live next to a nuclear power plant. Irrationaly perhaps but still.
> because they want to preserve the nature as it is.
In Norway? Or by nature as it is you mean managed nature "parks" or reindeer herding areas?
Don't Scandinavians generally vehemently support the eradication of native species like wolves (despite much bigger number of them doing just fine in much denser areas like Italy or Poland).
By "nature" i mean e.g., mountains. Not necessarily managed park. IIRC, the people have also protested against high-voltage lines because... dunno, they "ruin the view" across the fjord I guess.
> reindeer herding areas
There was recently a case in the highest court, Sami people vs state where they wanted newly built wind park in Finnmark to be torn down because... reindeer, native land and rights. They (Sami) won. Funnily, some researchers have shown that reindeer got used to the windmills quickly with seemingly no adverse effects. (Truth to be told, Sami are also internally divided on many issues. There's also a bitter (relatively recent) history between Sami and the state where the state had suppressed Sami culture over decades.)
After the verdict, some lower-ranked politicians said that Finnmark is about to become a museum, no development will now be possible there. I jokingly once thought: give the whole area to Russia so Sami can demonstrate in front of Kremlj.
I don't think the windmills will get torn down, and what happens next, I have no idea.
(For reference: the area is about 48000 km2 and population is around 75000 people. Which gives about 1.5 person per square kilometer.)
> eradication of native species like wolves
Not eradication but controlled number reduction. I'm personally opposed to it, but farmers somehow have a strong-hold on the government there. ATTACKS ON THE LIVE-STOCK! I don't know how much financial damage they suffer yearly, but that's the official explanation.
Italy is more densely populated than Denmark for example (and Sweden is an empty wasteland in comparison), yet also somehow has enough space both for wolves and cows/sheep/etc.
"Don't Scandinavians generally vehemently support the eradication of native species like wolves" - Don't know where you got this idea from. Yes, Sweden has started allowing licensed (very regulated) hunting of wolf, but only because the population has increased a lot. There is already tension between livestock farmers and wolfs in places, and I believe allowing wolfes to become much more than what we currently would eventuallt results in _fewer_ wolfs because they would start getting hated.
The greens have long been staunch supportes of wolfs in Sweden, and its the right which is not. Atm we do have a right leaning government so... Im sure it will sway the other way eventually.
> but only because the population has increased a lot
Swedish wolf population is extremely small relative to its geographical size.
There are less than 400 wolves in Sweden. For example there are 1500 wolves in Poland, possibly twice that in Italy. How many times more farmers livestock those countries have? Let alone people. The Baltic states have more than twice as many wolves as Sweden and Norway put together...
Sweden is 50% larger than Italy and six times less people, yet somehow several times less area available for wildlife?
Energy density is unimportant. What matters is cost. A source that has higher energy density but also higher cost is a loser.
The whole energy density meme was propagated by Vaclav Smil. He observed in the past that energy sources had become more energy dense, and then took the irrational leap to proclaim this was some sort of iron law of energy development.
I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will).
However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons:
2. It will take longer
3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles
4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well.
Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.
Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
All around Europe nuclear plants are forced off the markets because the electricity prices are for weeks lower than their wear and tear and fuel costs.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a battery buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity from the grid when they can make their own?
”Baseload” is a title earned by having the lowest marginal costs. There is nothing fundamental about it.
Today renewables have the cheapest marginal cost at 0. They are the new ”baseload”.
This is not true. I assume you are talking about the french nuclear reactors and their abysmal capacity factors?
The reason for the french case is that they were required to reduce output to allow more space for other new energy generation types. Fortunately the French have realised the error of their ways.
I would suggest some curiosity when approaching this topic.
Here's a reactor in Sweden which went offline for ~2 weeks citing market conditions. At the same time as another reactor at the same plant had a 7 month extended outage.
During the infamous Iberian blackout the nuclear output was at ~45%. One reactor was offline for maintenance, the rest had voluntarily reduced their output citing market conditions.
You did not answer my question. Why should someone with rooftop solar and a home battery buy extremely expensive grid based nuclear electricity to prop up the reactors capex when their own installations delivers vastly cheaper electricity?
Sure, if someone wishes to completely disconnect from the grid then they are free to do so. I don't think there is anyone stopping anyone who chooses to do this.
The problem arises when someone wishes to remain connected to the grid so that the grid supports them over the winter/over night/when there's bad weather/when their batteries run out etc etc.
One has to pay for the costs of providing you with power all the time, not just when your solar panels aren't working.
Now the question of why it is economically advantageous to self generate these days over the economies of scale of the normal power industry is a really interesting question. I think the reason for this is ultimately: it is because of a total failure of governments and the energy businesses to provide cheap energy. Something which we know to be possible, but they have failed. I put the blame with governments personally.
Why is it a problem that people rely on the grid when their own distributed resources run out? It seems like you are framing it as a problem because then you know that nuclear power is not the solution.
For those with rooftop solar and a battery the calculation is of course:
- What does creating my own reliability cost
- Can I accept these blackouts? What is an acceptable level of blackouts? The grid is a statistical system so all grids have reliability figure. In Sweden this is currently set at 1 hour of blackout per year.
- What does the grid connection cost?
The grid costs will of course need to be changed to a fixed "connection fee" for maintaining the transmission grid and then the typical per kWh cost, when it is needed as per the market conditions.
The solution for this is of course to add generation optimizing low CAPEX and high OPEX.
Which is.... drum roll. Open cycle gas turbines running on decarbonized fuel. Synfuels, hydrogen or biofuels.
Nuclear power with high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX is literally the worst solution imaginable to create reliability when renewables are inevitably added to a grid.
Take a look at South Australia this past week. Every single day they ran on 100% renewables for a portion of the day. Do you turn off the nuclear plant every single day?
When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be).
> Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Longer than nuclear to do what? I was replying to the above commenter who said the following:
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables
TTL for individual nuclear is obviously always much longer than for renewables but time to any arbitrary large generation goal is almost certainly shorter for nuclear (barring taboo).
China is proving this to be objective false. Their total energy production (not nameplate power) for wind/solar/hydro is growing substantially faster than their nuclear output.
You're wasting your energy on that user, I suspect.
> No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts
...is commonly a rhetorical pattern meaning "I've predetermined my conclusion, but I want to save face by appearing rational and casting those I disagree with as biased or incompetent in one fell swoop."
It's the "Aren't there any REAL men anymore?" of contentious topics.
No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T.
Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
France has 58 reactors with combined power of 60GW. The audit in 2011 (after Fukushima) estimated their cost at 96B euros and the total investment into the nuclear industry since 1950 including research at 228B euros.
And that doesn't include the fact that for all these years electricity prices in Germany were higher than in France which helped to keep renewables afloat.
> But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
That's yet to be seen, doesn't really match the reality I observe so far. They are promised to be cheaper sure, but you end paying more and subsidizing coal power plants in China along the way.
Given surplus over lifespan @ 10% of energy generation is more than enough to assume solar is going to be energetically self-sustaining as a sector.
Before 4x expanding solar push in 2023 they hit solar generation/production breakpoint in 2021/2022, as in surplus generation from old panels generated enough to pay back energy production of new panels. So absolute offset not imaginary, new breakpoint for current production rate is going to be 2027/28 unless they 4x again in next 2 years, i.e. 16x production from 2021, it will be functionally completely offset sector in a couple years. Nitpicking about coal or how solar is subsidizing coal with that on the horizon is are imaginary.
What solar+renewables is doing is reduce coal from ~70% to ~50% of energy mix even though absolute coal #s increased due to massive increase in demand/supply. The offset is that 20% shift over decade where generation 2x, hence actual offset to coal expansion by 40%.
Regardless with EPBT of ~3 years (less after breakpoint), and 25-30y lifespace, it's one of those 2nd best time to plant a tree is today situations. There isn't a solid reason not to hammer cheap PRC solar at scale outside of geopolitics.
> Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power.
Germany has just over 250GW of installed capacity. [0] indicates peak power is 75GW. Replicating the Olkiluoto EPR build for 75GW of capacity would have cost perhaps 500B EUR.
[1] speculates about what would have happened if Germany had retained its nuclear power stations and performed a fleet build-out.
And the CO₂ difference for electricity production, so the only part of the energy system where nuclear vs. intermittent renewable is currently applicable, is not 2:1. It is 10:1.
Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures.
And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.
One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).
In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
One can do modeling based on weather data, yes. There's even a web site where you can do that and obtain cost optimized designs (under various cost and technology assumptions): https://model.energy/
Nuclear proponents seem incapable of avoiding the exact same debunked arguments over and over again year after year. Did you know that the sun doesn’t always shine? Checkmate solar power! Bet you never thought of that. I am very clever.
> Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
Oil and gas and other fossils are finite resources, and we need to replace them anyway sooner or later with pure electrical solutions, better sooner, as we know. And then what I said applies. And, as the only "infinite" resources we have, are the sunlight and the gravity of the moon, it is obvious that we should base global electricity generation on them.
Yes, I looked into it. To store a few days worth of electricity I would need maybe 100kWh of battery storage. Right now I think battery storage costs around $100 per kWh. A whole season of electricity would be prohibitively expensive.
If fossil fuels are available and cheap, unburdened by the cost of their negative externalities, of course they will be chosen instead of a more expensive CO2-free alternative. That's what killed the nuclear renaissance in the US ~15 years ago.
What this means is there's low hanging fruit to solve these problems in other ways, once fossil fuels are no longer allowed to pollute without cost. There are already good ideas for solving the long term storage problem, with many of the component technologies already existing for other purposes.
Renewables and storage wouldn't drop gigawatts off the grid in an instant. They'd be massively redundant and distributed. That's how you get reliability.
There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables.
Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.
And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.
Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.
There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
This statement is very uninformed.
Other sources are intermittent, nuclear energy is not.
The problem about many countries not being able to produce fuel rods themselves is true, but the exact same applies to other energy sources.
Most nations depend on very few other nations for imports of oil gas etc.
Nuclear power plants only have a high upfront cost, which is compensated by their long lifetime of 60-100 years.
Other energy sources also have high upfront production costs + you need to spend additional money on infrastructure for batteries/storage.
I also don't understand your argument on military targets.
A NPP is a target the sane way a solar park, wind-park, geothermal facility or whatever would be a target. And to add to that, wile they are of course not indestrctible they are extremely robustly built. You can literally fly an airplane into them and it wouldnt result in a meltdown..
I do agree on your point on decentralization, yes.
1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).
2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.
3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?
4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)
1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year
1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.
Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.
Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.
Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space.
Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
How plenty is the supply that's not in some other countries control, that might make us dependent on them, yet again, like with Germany, gas and Russia.
Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system.
What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas.
The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.
Renewables and storage have gotten so cheap that the areas where nuclear might still be competitive have greatly shrunk. Right now, the best remaining places for nuclear are in eastern Europe away from coasts. Even there, nuclear is at best competitive with optimistic assumptions.
This also means that, globally, renewables are much cheaper than nuclear in most places. In a global economy, energy intensive industries will migrate to these renewable-rich regions as fossil fuels are phased out. The relative energy ghetto regions will not save their heavy industries by going nuclear.
Luckily EV mandates have been rolled back nationally (although not in my state yet). That’s a sure way to drive up the cost of storage anyway, when maybe battery storage is better served for this power station purpose instead.
Obviously using used car batteries might be a way to recycle these more effectively than what is currently available.
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have.
I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).
Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.
Someone pointed out in another comment that Iowa, USA has installed an incredible amount of wind turbines in the last 25 years. There is a whole Wiki page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa
The answer to this is just "intermittent" : the higher the share of renewables, the higher the share that you have to make up for when you're at night without wind. This can be done through batteries, water storage, or interconnection, but that's the real cost of renewables.
In theory, you can replace nuclear with a massive buildout of renewables and storage and grid upgrades and overcapacity to handle intermittency. The challenge is that doing all of that fast enough
There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost
Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election
If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.
This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors.
For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons.
It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians.
B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times)
You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear.
Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box.
Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.
But you're wrong. Batteries are now fine for diurnal storage, which is their intended use. Batteries are not fine for seasonal storage, but there are alternatives for that when it is needed.
China is installing vastly more renewables than nuclear. Their nuclear builds appear to be just a holding action to preserve their capability to build NPPs; that can't last forever.
Yes the alternatives for the seasonal storage problem are...fossil fuels. So obviously if we can't solve the seasonal problem yet with batteries, current battery tech isn't capable enough to make clean energy a reality without Nuclear.
Also, China's energy mix is irrelevant for Europe, the two regions have vastly different climates, population distributions, and government.
Europe has much bigger seasonal gaps in the winter for things like solar; Hydro is huge in China due to massive river systems like the Yangtze, but basically tapped out in Europe; Wind is a huge opportunity in China but only works Offshore in Europe; Europe can't run cross-continent UHV grid systems like China due to beaurocratic impossibility; etc. etc.
That's an alternative for the seasonal storage problem, and currently the cheapest one. That doesn't mean other alternatives don't exist, just that those alternatives are not currently competitive with fossil fuels.
One should not use this situation that those alternatives can't exist or be reasonably expected to exist, or that a system using them would be more expensive than a system using nuclear. If that were a valid argument, one could equally argue that because new nuclear cannot compete with natural gas combined cycle for baseload, new nuclear is not an option.
No actually they don't. Not sure which market your talking about but I can assure you that re-investing in nuclear power is the right choice for long term energy capability for humans.
I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear.
People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?
Solar and wind are extremely simple machines and are thus much more amenable to manufacturing economies of scale than fundamentally complicated nuke plants. I very much doubt we’d get to 10x , 100x seems impossible.
A 10x reduction is very doable. Consider this: the Vogtle units 3-4 cost about $37 BN [1]. The similar size Karachi units 2-3 cost about $10 BN [2]. The difference is that the Karachi units were built by China. The design used at Karachi is called Hualong One [3], and since China built the 2 Karachi units, it has built 5 more, and has 15 more under construction and 9 more approved for construction. The cost of the reactors that China builds for itself is not known, but it's very likely lower than the ones that China built for Pakistan.
It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear.
For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal.
There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...)
You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though:
Yes, this is the real answer. Nuclear, which is currently dropping as a percentage of global electricity demand and is now under 10% needs a miracle to reverse that and maybe reach 15% if everything goes well for it.
Meanwhile renewables are surging and every relevant expert suggests they'll dominate the future.
Would point to the law of economics which says only renewables can get cheaper with investments? And which law of physics makes renewables work in places, which have little wind and solar?
But it's not a law that applies to all technologies, and it will likely end at some point, but there's at least 1-2 decades of cost decrease left.
There is no law of physics that makes renewables work where there are poor renewable resources, except through transmission, which is usually engineered using several of Maxwell's laws.
I asked which economic law makes ONLY renewables getting cheaper with time. Why couldn't nuclear also get cheaper?
Maxwell laws can't help with geopolitics though.
Some people think that SMRs are a way for nuclear to get on a learning curve, but there's just as many skeptical people as enthusiastic people about that, in my experience.
Natural energy resources are a huge source of geopolitical turmoil since the start of the industrial age. Renewables have the potential to significantly lessen these conflicts compared to what's happened with fossil fuels.
>>Renewables have the potential to significantly lessen these conflicts compared to what's happened with fossil fuels.
I'm not too optimistic about it. As usual, on one side you have countries with big renewable sources, the producers and on the other side, you have countries with strong industry, which requires a lot energy, the consumers.
Nearly all countries will be able to power themselves quite well with renewables, and if not that they can pay the high price for nuclear power.. But in any case, renewable energy provides much more independence than feasible with fossil fuel based industry. Fossil fuels require a continuous stream of transfer to operate. When you buy 5GW of solar panels from a country, you have 30+ years of energy before you need to think about repowering the facility, and even if there's a shortage after 30 years they are still working at merely reduced production power.
Those countries without the option for local renewables are no worse off for independence than before. The option of renewables only adds independence, it doesn't take it away. Thus our renewable future will be far more stable.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine gives a ton of insight about these dynamics, IMHO. Ukraine's energy system was vulnerable because large thermal generators pose easy targets that can be taken out with minimal tonnage of bombs. Taking out a solar field or wind field is not as easy. And Ukraine's nuclear facilities have been actively used against them during the war by Russia. In particular, Russia has used executions/torture/coercion of nuclear reactor staff and explosions around nuclear reactors to threaten melt downs, etc. Plus, it's barely been covered anywhere, but Russia in this year used drones to damage the new brand new sarcophagus that was supposed to last 100 years, with very few paths to repair:
And the war has also illustrated the dependence of so many countries on Russia's fossil fuels, enough to kick off inflation across the entire world. Fossil fuels are a global market, so it doesn't matter where the disruption happens, it affects prices the world over. Even though the US is supposedly energy independent when it comes to oil and natural gas, we still suffer the consequences because of that global market.
A power system bulid on local production via renewables does not suffer these massive disruptions from the actions of single nation states. The inflaction Reduction Act was very aptly named, though few people today understand why, it seems. Future generations will curse us for delaying our true energy independence, which is only possible when we get off fossil fuels.
If you read the definition of wrights law it's fairly obvious.
> Wright's law, also known as the experience curve effect, states that as the cumulative production of a product doubles, the labor time or cost per unit declines by a fixed percentage
We're up to about 8 billion solar panels produced ever, maybe 2 billion or so a year now.
That's a lot of doublings.
There's been about 700 nuclear plants. Not a lot of doublings.
>> We're up to about 8 billion solar panels produced ever, maybe 2 billion or so a year now.
You need a lot of panels to match one nuclear power plant though, and they were/are heavily subsidized.
>> There's been about 700 nuclear plants. Not a lot of doublings.
Obviously, because there was/is a lot pressure against building them. I think China demonstrates, that they can be built rather quickly and cheaper and cheaper, if the obstacles are removed.
It's not really a fair competition when something heavily subsidized and the other thing is almost banned.
I expect that if I had to put numbers on things, I would be subject to the same biases as everyone else.
Or perhaps not, sometimes not being an "expert" in the traditional sense can remove the biases of an industry. Sci-fi author Ramez Naam had some of the most accurate forecasts in the past by doing the simplest thing possible: looking at the past curve and extending it. That is probably the simple type of projection I would make!
The IEA and EIA are two very respectable organizations that make comically bad projections, just absolutely awful. I know I could beat their projections!
Jenny Chase is a highly prominent solar analyst that has some great anecdotes about how wrong solar estimates always are, and she challenges that new analysts face, but I'm having trouble finding the podcast right now... in any case always read the Jenny Chase megathreads on the state of solar or her interviews in order to get some really great insights into what's going on.
In any case the rate of learning in solar tech far exceeds the expectations of most "energy" experts, and also usually exceeds the expectations of even the solar experts.
Which is entering emergency reserve territory. Nuclear power CAPEX to build an emergency reserve would seem to be utterly insane.
The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels.
Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run the grid without help for 14 days.
As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
The uranium reserves does not help when a winter storm rolls through and grid usage spikes. That is "emergency reserves" or the completely black and white "must work 100% or completely unusable" statement you led with.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
> BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.
I don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.
Everyone I know with a BEV and an hourly contract times their charging to perfection to reduce costs.
They are of course willing to pay a premium to charge now if their schedule demands it, but that is a tiny tiny subset of the household BEV fleet.
> Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
That's the opposite, France is exporting in winter and imports in summer whenever the Germany overproduces solar and doesn't know what to do with it.
So for now it's France which helps to stabilize the grid of its neighbors.
There's even price caps against that because France would bleed other countries in winter otherwise.
> don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.
No they can't, you have to understand how the EU consumption works, surplus are in summer and max demand is in winter. Nobody is going to store electricity in summer in their car to use it in winter, this is nonsense.
You need to differentiate beteween exporting when the grid is strained and facing a grid collapse when a cold spell hits.
Click around the weeks and you will find enormous exports happening the week before. Those are the averages you mention. But as we can now both see the French nuclear grid is incredible inflexible when dealing with the demand curve.
> No they can't, you have to understand how the EU consumption works, surplus are in summer and max demand is in winter. Nobody is going to store electricity in summer in their car to use it in winter, this is nonsense.
Please, this is getting ridiculous. I presume you are smarter than thinking that when I put forth people with hourly contracts for their BEVs I am doing it suggesting seasonal storage.
Have you heard of this thing called wind power? Have you heard of the demand curve not being flat throughout the day?
You know, delay the full charge of the car by a day, two or five if you didn't need to go anywhere and simply worked at home this week.
It seems you are pointing to the 2022 incident which is the only time it happened in 40 years (so clearly not random!). At the time the nuclear plants had unplanned maintenance, the wind power didn't produce much (bad luck) and the solar production wasn't producing (winter). The combination of all these factors made it an exceptional outlier.
Any other time it's France which supported it's neighboring grids.
> Have you heard of this thing called wind power? Have you heard of the demand curve not being flat throughout the day?
Nobody cares about the daily demand curve, it's a solved problem, even my parents had a hourly contract since the 80s (!).
You should look closer rather than attempting a shallow dismissal. I specifically chose to not include dates in 2023 and 2024 due to the maintenance crisis. I also included 2021 numbers.
Looking at the 2022 numbers nuclear power supplied almost 47-49 GW compared to hovering around 52-54 GW last winter.
It does not change the outlook of France and its neighbors relying on 35 GW of fossil based power to manage nuclear inflexibility.
> Nobody cares about the daily demand curve, it's a solved problem, even my parents had a hourly contract since the 80s (!).
So now when you apparently couldn't backtrack more no one cares about meeting a varying demand?
Please. Come with curiosity instead of digging the hole you are in ever deeper.
This is the reality of the grid, France is a net exporter of electricity in the EU and has been for the longest time. The only outlier is 2022.
You have to understand that the debate in France for a long time in the 2000s was that building capacity was not needed because there's already too much of it (!).
The country also pushed to electric heating to use some of this extra capacity making France one of the highest electric heating share at around 40% (Germany has less than 5%).
> So now when you apparently couldn't backtrack more no one cares about meeting a varying demand?
The varying demand always meant the seasonal demand! You are in europe here and not a tropical country. The problem has always been meeting the winter load.
Is a cold spell a yearly happening or an instant? It is an instant.
What does French neighbors do? They have large amounts of fossil capacity because they know they can't rely on French exports when a cold spell hits.
They need to both supply their own grid and supply France.
Who cares if France is exporting enormous amounts of electricity all around Europe during early autumn when temperatures are mild and no one cares?
When the grid is strained France relies on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production since the nuclear electricity is so incredible inflexible that it can't be utilized to match a grid load.
What would happen if you had two French grids next to each other both trying to export massive electricity when no one needed it while not being able to supply itself when a cold spell hits?
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
Yes in theory, the problem is when you try to apply theory to practice: I don’t want to make a disservice to this discussion and as I don’t have the figures at hand anymore but there have been thought experiments around this and one was to hypothetically have two dams that would pump 2 meters of water out of the sea between France and UK and then release it. If my memory serves well this would only cover 1 week of France’s energy consumption.
Okay, appart from the fact that you would require far more space in term of infrastructure for renewables, the most interesting issue with renewable energies for me is that they are not controllable (I don’t know if this is the correct term in English): basically you cannot command WHEN you produce energy, you are dependent on weather (sun/wind) or water current (tidal power).
What that means is that you cannot aling production with supply and you end up in some cases with acute mismatch: for instance in France, the peak of energy consumption is during winter, a time where there is very few sun, while Japans peak is in summer which could be more convenient.
The Rule when dealing with energy production is that you can’t produce less than demand nor more than demand otherwise you end up with a blackout and potential damages.
To mitigate both the rule of energy production and the non controllable aspects of renewable there are strategies. The two most common ones are buying/selling your energy and storing/unloading it. Those work but they do have their own pitfalls. Buying/selling for instance does work for adjustments but not for peaks because usually during peaks your neighbours are also peaking and thus also looking for selling.
Storing/unloading is its whole set of problems making it hard. You will find a lot of documentation on the subject but here is the gist of it: fist of all it is inefficient meaning you need to produce far more energy than you store and are able to unload in the end. Storing in batteries takes a lot (like really a lot) of place and we are talking nation wide production. Storing using a dam (pumped storage power plants) which is quite a nice way of doing it requires to have places to build them, meaning the correct geographical circumstances. In France for instance we already have quite a large dam network and couldn’t really build more (added to the fact that you usually need to flood a valley which gerenally is not well taken by the inhabitants of the place).
So here you are with your whole lot of space used up to produce renewable energy but you are still confronted to the issue of its non controllable nature. Sure you can store/unload a bit, you can buy/sell another bit, but in the end you still have to face the fact that it is not controllable. So how do you solve the issue ?
Here comes your friend, the controllable energy. A solution to your issue, and the one which is basically always applied is to have a mix of energies, meaning adding a controllable one along your non controllable ones to make up for the highs and lows of the latest. And the king of eco-friendly controllable energies is a nuclear power plant, not only because of the ecological factor but also because of the ratio space/energy produced.
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.
Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.
That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies.
It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.
> Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.
You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
> You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.
Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.
But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries.
So yeah. Regulation.
Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima)
3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore
Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully.
Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)
So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.
It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.
I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.
And then there's coal. The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills fewer people than coal kills as part of its normal expected operation.
>The great thing is that coal is not the alternative in 2025.
Unfortunately, there is a country that shut down nuclear power plants while they still have operating coal plants. Over time, coal use is declining in Germany, but that isn't the story so far in 2025:
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
Shutting nuclear power plants down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable... I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
Personally I would of course prefer to phase out fossil fuels before nuclear power. But we are where we are in 2025 and there is no point crying over spilled milk.
We can only look forward and make sure we spend our money wisely. We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end, it is only the beginning of our decarbonization journey.
The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.
>...But we are where we are in 2025 and there is no point crying over spilled milk.
It would be one thing if Germany's bad mistakes in this area only affected Germany. Unfortunately people downwind of Germany die because it is still burning coal. Unfortunately climate change will affect everyone.
>...We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end,
Many of the changes needed to decarbonize those industries will rely on using electricity, so the grid is critical.
>...The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.
We will see if Germany is still burning coal and natural gas when countries like Finland are not.
Is your suggestion that Germany instead of building renewables quickly displacing said coal instead invests their money in nuclear power?
That would mean they get a fraction of the capacity (in TWh) online and the people downwind of Germany would have to live with the emissions as they stand today without any abatement until the mid 2040s.
Unfortunately Germany dug itself into a big hole and the choices aren’t that great. (Yes, continue to build more solar and wind. Though that is what has been happening in 2025, and coal use has increased this year due to the variability of renewable sources.) To move away from coal in a more reasonable timeframe, other approaches could also be done. Like I mentioned in a previous comment, I am sure Germany will decarbonize before Poland, but that is kind of a low bar. Some ideas:
- Restart the nuclear power plants that are feasible to restart. The last 3 plants were only shut down in 2023 - it isn't like all the plants were shut down in 2011. It may very well be that Germany doesn’t feel it has the expertise to run nuclear power plants in the long term, so once the power isn’t needed or can be replaced by clean energy (either produced in Germany or imported), feel free to shut down the nuclear plants.
- Work with Denmark and France to import more of their power that is not coal based.
- Reward conservation more.
- Move the big industrial users of electricity out of Germany.
Some of these alternatives are likely not palatable, but like I said, Germany dug itself into a hole. Any of these alternatives sounds better than essentially deciding instead to murder people by burning coal when you have other options.
This comment shows that you don’t really grasp how the German grid works.
The German grid is currently constrained north-south due to limited transmission capacity. Over production of renewables in the north and over consumption in the south.
The reactors the pro-nuclear lobby in Germany identified as ”most easily restartable” are in the north.
Therefore restarting them is a pure waste of money. It does not solve any problems Germany has with its grid.
Then it comes down to the cost question. You can maintain a piece of infrastructure forever but at some point the costs does not justify the gain. Better spend the money on renewables and storage instead.
An example of such stupidity is Diablo Canyon in California requiring a $12B subsidy on top of regular income for selling electricity to run 5 extra years from 2025 to 2030.
You do know that France is on a downward trend of nuclear power as well? Reactors are entering end of life and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
>Over production of renewables in the north and over consumption in the south.
Well I guess it is impossible to upgrade the grid in any kind of reasonable timeframe in Germany. There are still other options that could be done to hasten the end of burning coal - I pointed out a few, there are likely others.
>Then it comes down to the cost question. You can maintain a piece of infrastructure forever but at some point the costs does not justify the gain. Better spend the money on renewables and storage instead.
Yes it is a question. Unfortunately you have given no evidence of the actual costs.
>...You do know that France is on a downward trend of nuclear power as well?
In 2014 France set a goal to reduce nuclear's share of electricity generation to 50% by 2025. This target was delayed in 2019 to 2035, before being abandoned in 2023. (I am sure France is also trying to increase renewables and storage.)
>An example of such stupidity is Diablo Canyon in California requiring a $12B subsidy on top of regular income for selling electricity to run 5 extra years from 2025 to 2030.
This comment shows you don't really grasp the issue of power in CA. The 12 billion dollar estimate included costs unrelated to Diablo Canyon according to PG&E. Their estimate is closer to 8B, of which the majority will be covered by selling the electricity. They have a 1.1 billion dollar grant to help with some of the rest, though unclear how much the state will have to subsidize things in the end. The issue is that Diablo Canyon provides about 1/4 of the clean power in CA and can provide it when renewables can't - like every other place, CA currently has a tiny amount of grid storage. Without Diablo Canyon, CA will likely have to buy power from coal plants in other states. So CA is willing to pay extra to avoid having to burn coal. That is different than Germany that decided it would rather burn coal than use nuclear.
We will see when Germany actually stops during fossil fuels. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.
Upgrades are on the way but you were trying to frame it as a desperate issue to solve immediately, without realizing your solution didn’t solve anything.
Just keep hiking the rates in a monopolized system. All good!
You do know that California in recent years has cut fossil gas usage by 40% due to storage? Many evenings batteries are the largest producer in the Californian grid for hours on end. Happened yesterday for example.
But batteries are of course insignificant. Just delivering the equivalent to 8 nuclear reactors pretty much removing the duck curve.
The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills as many people right here and makes as much land uninhabitable right here as coal does in our enemy countries within its normal expected operation.
Meltdowns aren't physically possible if we're building newer types of plants, so there can't be a new Chernobyl or even Fukushima if we're using modern types of passively cooled plants.
There’s generally significant costs and asterisks around such claims.
You’re much better off paying attention to site placement than trying to design something to safety handle getting covered in several meters of volcanic ash Pompeii style.
Not a commercial reactor but US lost 3 people trying to hand operate a small reactor with minimal safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
“On Tuesday, January 3, 1961, SL-1 was being prepared for restart after a shutdown of 11 days over the holidays. Maintenance procedures required that rods be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect each one to its drive mechanism. At 9:01 pm MST, Rod 9 was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize.”
The industry didn’t just randomly get so risk averse there where a lot of meltdowns and other issues over time.
Do stupid things and stupid things will happen. There are plenty of similarly stupid accidents on stupidly run construction sites and chemical plants all the time. Also lots of accidents with trains, lots of accidents with temperamental chemicals.
> In July 2007, three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured at the Mojave spaceport while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. An explosion occurred during a cold fire test, which involved nitrous oxide flowing through fuel injectors. The procedure had been expected to be safe.
N2O is very good oxidizer + it's a molecule that can fall apart (and turn into N2 and O2) in a very exothermic way if you look at it wrong.
Oops.
Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.
> The effort to minimize the size of the core gave an abnormally-large reactivity worth to Rod 9, the center control rod.
> One of the required maintenance procedures called for Rod 9 to be manually withdrawn about four inches (10 cm) in order to attach it to the automated control mechanism from which it had been disconnected. Post-accident calculations, as well as examination of scratches on Rod 9, estimate that it had actually been withdrawn about twenty inches (51 cm), causing the reactor to go prompt critical and triggering the steam explosion.
and:
> At SL-1, control rods would sometimes get stuck in the control rod channel. Numerous procedures were conducted to evaluate control rods to ensure they were operating properly. There were rod drop tests and scram tests of each rod, in addition to periodic rod exercising and rod withdrawals for normal operation. From February 1959 to November 18, 1960, there were 40 cases of a stuck control rod for scram and rod drop tests and about a 2.5% failure rate. From November 18 to December 23, 1960, there was a dramatic increase in stuck rods, with 23 in that time period and a 13.0% failure rate. Besides these test failures, there were an additional 21 rod-sticking incidents from February 1959 to December 1960; four of these had occurred in the last month of operation during routine rod withdrawal. Rod 9 had the best operational performance record even though it was operated more frequently than any of the other rods.
Hindsight plus other people doing the analysis always makes things seem more obvious.
The people designing this system were not trying to kill the operators. They made tradeoffs that seemed reasonable at the time and then things failed badly because something unexpected happened. The only way to avoid that is to be extremely cautious which then feeds back to nuclear being expensive.
Risk aversion gets expensive, but so does taking risks. That’s the nuclear dilemma. It seems reasonable to say just take more risks, but that’s how you get accidents that people look back on and think how could they be so dumb.
I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all.
So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.
The costs of cleaning up Fukushima, including the wider effects on the Japanese economy, are estimated to exceed US$200 billion. That makes it a pretty EPIC disaster in economic terms alone.
Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.
Fukushima was partly an issue of flawed risk assessment. The tsunami that took down the plant was believed to be an incredibly rare even, expected to happen once every ten thousand years.
However, that was a result of faulty assumptions made when the plant was initially planned. With better data and methods, the event would have seemed a lot more likely.
It was perfectly fine because the operators stole the batteries from all the cars in the parking lot to run the control room. Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.
> Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima)
Don't put the emergency diesel generators in the basement where they are certain to be flooded if the tsunami wall is too low. Also, don't build too low tsunami walls.
> So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
> which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal
Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments on fuel matter.
> You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems, loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
> Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway. It’s also impractical for a bunch of other reasons.
> But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
No nuclear power plants has ever actually been required to carry a policy with that kind of a payout. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
However, the lesser risk of losing the reactor is still quite substantial. You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
> Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power.
But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems
These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.
> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.
> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.
> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.
Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?
> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?
> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.
> You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
Nuclear is inherently vastly more complicated requiring more maintenance, manpower, etc per KW of capacity and thus has more operational costs. A 50+ year lifespan means keeping 50+ year old designs in operation which plays a significant role in costs here.
> 5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant.
A cooling tower isn’t dealing with any radioactivity and it’s not a safety critical system yet it’s still difficult to build and thus way more expensive per cubic foot of concrete than a typical surface road. When road projects get complicated they can quickly get really expensive just look at bridges or tunnels.
> You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day.
Hydroelectric dams have directly saved more lives than they have cost due to flood control. The electricity bit isn’t even needed in many cases as people build dams because they are inherently useful. Society is willing to carry those risks in large part because they get a direct benefit.
Wind turbines are closer and do sometimes fail early, but they just don’t cost nearly as much so the public doesn’t need to subsidize insurance here.
Both of your posts contain very little self-doubt and curiosity. Many points don't seem convincing, and you're consistently not steelmanning the arguments you are replying to.
> it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source
This isn't how radiation works. Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source. Contamination refers to radioactive emitters being somewhere they don't belong.
> Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source
There is this thing called neutron activation.
But the elephant in the room is of course that coal plants emitted way more radioactivity than nuclear ones even taking into account every disaster on even non-power generation plants.
That’s not an economic problem for people operating the power plant.
Nuclear power plants need shielding to avoid their workforce being killed off very quickly. Obviously safety standards are much higher than that, but significant shielding is inherently necessary.
I consider myself reasonably pro nuclear, but this is just like some developer going:
“Oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard, I could probably implement that in a weekend”
Fact: hard complicated things are expensive.
There is no “just it’s just some concrete…”.
That is, translated “I do not know what Im talking about”.
Hard things, which require constant, high level, technical maintenance…
Are very expensive.
Theyre expensive to build. Theyre expensive to operate. Theyre expensive to decommission.
Theres no magic wand to fix this.
You can drive down the unit cost sometimes by doing things at scale, but Im not sure that like 100 units, or even say 1000 units can do that meaningfully.
…and how how are we planning on having the 100000s of reactors that you would need for that?
Micro reactors? Im not convinced.
Certainly, right now, the costs are not artificial; if you think they are, I would argue you havent done your due diligence in research.
Heres the point:
Making complicated things cheaper doesnt just magically happen by removing regulations. Thats naive.
You need a concrete plan to either a) massively simplify the technology or b) massively scale the production.
Which one? (a) and (b) both seem totally out of reach to me, without massive state sponsored funding.
…which, apparently no one likes either.
Its this frustrating dilemma where idiots (eg. former Australian government) claim they can somehow magically deliver things (multiple reactors) super cheaply.
…but there is no reality to this promise; its just morons trying to buy regional votes and preserve the status quo with coal.
Real nuclear progress needs realistic plans, not hopes and dreams.
Nuclear power is better; but it is more expensive than many other options, and probably, will continue to be if all we do is hope it somehow becomes easy and cheap by doing basically nothing.
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.
When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.
This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm.
A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
Well, no, that's more down to nuclear fans constantly using the worst possible comparisons, and creating false dichotomies. The better comparison are renewables or natural gas, not an ancient technology literally everybody (outside of it's investors) agrees is bad and should go.
Nuclear sits just between wind (slightly more dangerous) and solar (slightly less dangerous) per unit of electricity production, all of them being much safer than hydro; and ridiculously safer than gas, oil and coal. It's a really, really safe option.
Note that these number are a bit old and since then, installation of consumer solar has increased significantly. Installation of solar panels on consumer roofs is much more dangerous than installation of solar panels in solar plants, so death rate for solar are significantly underestimated. Meanwhile accident rates of plant construction (nuclear, solar or otherwise) keep dropping.
The trouble with liability is that if your nuclear plant has an accident and the cancer rate in the area doesn't detectably change, everybody in the area who gets cancer will sue you anyway.
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
> This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years.
But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power.
Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated
Except for Chernobyl clean up workers, no one lost their lives taking a deliberate risk in any other nuclear incident. And Chernobyl clean up workers didn't die within months either - in fact the story of their health outcomes is quite nuanced, but yes they most definitely took high risks.
In fact Chernobyl is incredibly badly remembered, because the firefighters who died responding to the initial blaze died of sepsis related to beta radiation burns from spending hours wearing their firefighting coats covered in radioactive dust.
Had they been removed promptly and hosed down, those people would've survived because they would not have received essentially a third degree burn over their entire body. And that's the point: they died of sepsis related complications, not any type of unique radiation damage and the Soviet doctors who treated them did get better at it once the protocols were established.
Life of hundreds of millions were/are/will be affected by Chornobyl. Nobody can calculate real death toll of Chornobyl accident because it's impossible to control radiation. Moreover, nobody wants to pay for those deaths or partially lost health.
Millions, sure. Hundreds of millions? Probably not. And don't forget that a LOT went wrong in Chernobyl, it's literally impossible for another disaster of this magnitude to happen again.
> Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.
Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.
Mostly, yes, but also consider that both were exceptional circumstances that happened to outdated reactors.
IIRC Fukushima didn't actually leak enough radiation out to cause any significant environmental harm - quite possibly, most of the evacuations weren't even necessary, and the total toll among responders was only 25, with only 1 death.
Chernobyl was much worse, but other than responders and the high incidence rates of thyroid cancer in young children close to the disaster area, the total casualties were also lower than people assume. A lot of the early estimates were massively inflated.
Honestly it's quite possible that in both cases, we could have done much less relocation and evacuation, especially the fukushima response was largely driven by Japan's fear of nuclear technology.
Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.
This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.
Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
I would happily live next to a nuclear power plant, the reason not to is mostly to do with "it's still an industrial site". But like, lakeside land where I'm up or down stream from it but can clearly see it nearby? Sure.
It's one of the rare forms of industry where if I was ever worried about contamination a cheap portable device will warn me remotely. Unlike say, Asbestos and heavy metals...one of which there's a bunch in my current backyard.
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.
I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.
My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.
I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off.
> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
it would be unwise to put all of ones eggs in someone else's basket.
having as much wind solar and nuclear as possible will ensure humanity has a bright future. 18% seems like a good number. how much storage are they investing in?
Which is kind of funny as they where storing energy from a hydroelectric power plant, so building a larger dam would have been way more energy efficient.
You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change.
And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.
There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.
Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.
>A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions
This is not true. You are using the lawyers definition of damage from Chernobyl, but the doctor's definition for fossil fuels. Chernobyl was much worse than you believe, but I don't expect to change your mind on that point here.
But why are you arguing as if it's either nuclear power or global warming?
China has added the equivalent of 25 nuclear power plants worth of solar generation yearly for the past couple of years. Not even China is able to build nuclear plants faster than in 5-6 years or so - it takes too many workers, too much resources. It's too little and too slow to make a difference.
Efen if you believe it is safe, Nuclear is clearly a roadblock, or a detour. We should instead build storage and solar, which can add orders of magnitude more power in shorter time.
(But even then we'll have to deal with global warming).
No, I'm not. Pick whatever estimate of deaths from Chernobyl you like. Take the highest, most unreasonable estimate. It's still true. And yes, _now_ we have other options. In 1960 we didn't. We have nearly a century of carbon emissions and particulate deaths that were unnecessary. There are literally _millions_ of premature deaths every year as a result of fossil fuel particulate emissions.
Nuclear may not be the best option anymore (I'm skeptical that an ideal power generation mix doesn't include more nuclear than we currently have, but agree that it probably shouldn't be the primary source anymore), that doesn't change the fact that not using it for past 80+ years as our primary energy generation source was a huge civilizational blunder.
>No, I'm not. Pick whatever estimate of deaths from Chernobyl you like.
That's the lawyer definition though - because some 50 people sacrificed their lives and because we spent 600 billion euros on remedies during the first 30 years, nobody can prove how bad it might have been.
But scientists will tell you how much caesium and iodine was released per day of that fire burning, the force of the steam explosion that might have been, how close it was to the contaminate the ground water supply and so on.
Then doctors will tell you how that would affect the people living in the fallout areas, and for how long the ground and food supply would be affected.
So if you let go of the lawyer definition, estimates are easily in the double-digit million dead.
Which we risked for a grand total of 28 TWh of electricity produced from Chernobyl.
And that's the bigger point here - even if the risks were way less than they actually are, the payoff is not worth it. Electricity generation causes less than 1/4 of the co2 emissions in the US - road transportation alone is a larger source.
Nuclear is not and never was a solution to global warming. Best case it helps of course, but only until something happens like Fukushima or Chernobyl. The billions spent on those two incidents alone would have had a bigger effect if they were spent subsidizing electric cars, solar panels, battey production and such.
If you did what nuclear fans did and tried to cover most/all of the load with nuclear, you would necessarily need to build more nuclear power plants, which esp. in Europe would automatically put them closer to population. That would automatically increase the lives lost from catastrophies.
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
And that might work if there is a linear relationship between apparently unnecessary engineering work and deaths. My argument is that such a relationship does not exist, or is not something we can model.
As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.
I get your point and would be much more inclined to agree if we were talking about trying to hit a 3x risk increase. But we are talking about huge risk margins here, many OOMs.
My problem with your argument is that as framed it’s a fully generic argument against doing anything; there is always a risk of bad outcomes for any action. What we must do in practice is look at risk/reward and try our best to estimate each.
Data breaches are a bad analogy because you are presenting this as “I get to make a bit more money by lowering security”. A better analogy would be something like colonoscopy; some people will die from cancer if you advise nobody has this procedure. Some people will die from complications if people do get this procedure. How do we as a society choose how many people should die and from what? This is a trolley problem, there is no choice where people don’t die as a result of the decision. The answer is that we must do our best to estimate the risks and minimize them.
This is not what we are doing with nuclear right now. We are simply trying to reduce the risk of nuclear, without making any attempt to model the harms that are being introduced.
This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.
Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.
People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:
If one tries to quantify the value of those deaths, using the "statistical value of a human life" (somewhere around $12M/death), one finds in the case of both wind/solar and nuclear, using those numbers, the value of those lives contributes negligibly to the cost of energy. This is unlike with coal.
This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).
No, I don't think we need both. In particular, building new nuclear plants would be worse than just putting all that money into renewables + storage. The latter displaces fossil fuels more quickly and more cheaply.
That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.
You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.
> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.
Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1].
For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year.
I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution.
On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins.
> For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year,
... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.
> power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does.
In the sense that you're using this, doesn't this apply to every power company?
Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.
To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?
All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.
> per capita
Did you continue reading and see how that's 200mg of long lived waste? France has 66.7 million people. For long lived waste that's 13k tons total. That's a bit shy of the trade waste per capita. So about 67 million times more. Or let's go back to full. For power reactor they only produce 60% of that 2kg, 1.2kg. So that's 80k tons of waste, total, per year.
Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate
Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1].
Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive.
The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.
The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022:
~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.
~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100
~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100
~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.
It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Etc etc.
Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.
As an expert remarked way back in a time when the nukes were conveniently making plutonium, and kids got free comic books promoting them, and the plans for handling waste seemed sound :
"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."
— C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951.
(Hanford today, sitting on 56M gallons of leaking wastewater, is debating whether that newly-constructed vitrification plant should be allowed to operate, since it'll emit dangerous levels of toxic acetonitrile.)
Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production.
Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.
Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.
Regulation still plays a role in the final cost. Sure it has to be safe. But we need to draw the line. Nuclear is arguably way too safe currently (zero death for a long time). Some regulations could be relaxed to speed up the construction, and make the operations cheaper.
We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.
This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output.
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.
Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.
Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Refining gets rid of even more uranium before it gets to the reactor. CANDU tried to get around that by using unenriched uranium, but ran into other issues.
And that’s what pro nuclear people seem to miss, really smart people have been trying to solve this issue for decades there’s no easy solutions with well understood downsides. Let’s quickly build some new design isn’t a solution it’s a big part of why nuclear construction costs are so high.
> Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.
Paying out lawsuits is an economic cost. Regardless, disposing of low level radioactive components of the reactor had to happen at some point, and the cases where it's not offset by decades of recouping on that investment is are incredibly rare. Regardless, this is mostly moot in new designs because they are considerably safer, as I said. What's left is really the regulatory burden. In France and China, they build reactors in less than a decade. Can't happen here in America.
> Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons.
Which is besides the point, as I said, you get a lot more energy per gram of fuel with modern designs or fast reactors, which mostly mitigates the objection about fuel cost, regardless of what stage the highest cost to obtain fuel is incurred.
Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk, which leaves the modern designs on the table where this risk is even lower than LWR.
Fuel is north of 1c/kWh for nuclear reactors, +/- if you count various things as fuel costs, that’s inherently a big deal if you’re trying to compete with 2c/kWh solar.
> Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk
So you said that fuel costs dominate the cost of energy delivered, I'm saying that you can deliver the same energy while purchasing less fuel, but now you're saying that that's not a metric that matters for the cost of energy delivered. Err, wut?
> nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate.
True, but you also get large amounts of electricity in return.
You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99?
The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture.
I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated.
Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc
Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
> A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:
Exactly. What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise, where the engineering effort is concentrated in building economies of scale. To me it's clear that nuclear energy's pros largely outweigh the cons, and that it is a perfect complement to solar and wind power generation.
I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.
Injury rate is 6x other space vehicle manufacturers. If you were to slow them down by 6x they would pretty close to the 20 years it’s already taken to get SLS/constellation to do a test launch.
Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation.
To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade.
They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power.
Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out.
The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility company cannot, because for the Navy it's about having a necessary capability. There's no economic break even to consider.
I thought I'd mention that ship supplied short power has been a thing for ages. USS Daniel Webster even trained for this for new years eve apocalypse nothingburger. And its almost always been used for only powering something critical. Today's subs are <10MW. Nothing for utility scale. I can't imagine the economics are ever good. More of a: we've already got this boat.
Secrecy isn't the obstacle here. Naval reactors are optimized for combat performance, costs be damned. They aren't economically efficient for commercial power generation.
At least Russia is doing fine with SMRs, thought the fuel enrichment level is around 20%. They are building new reactors all the time and they seem pretty efficient. E.g. they have even floating nuclear plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.
Submarine reactors run on super high enriched fuel instantly one could instantly repurpose into a bomb. Lots of gen 4 and 5 reactor designs that combine low cost, compact footprint, and running on less expensive and carefully controlled fuel.
> If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale
You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times
A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.
Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward
You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.
Even if the storage got somehow compromised(extremely unlikely), the disposal sites are distant enough from civilization and the amounts small enough that the environmental harms would still be far below tons of other manmade events.
'Apart from terrorism ... or war, seismic activity, etc.'
I'm not sure where you're getting cheap from, or low-maintenance.
The above-ground stuff is locking future generations in for on-going maintenance for several centuries, perhaps longer. There's been think-tanks trying to work out how you just signpost such a place, given storage may exceed the expected lifetime of languages, and we'd want to be polite and at least contend with societal collapse.
It is hubris to observe that the many locations chosen now will remain 'distant from civilisation' for many centuries.
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.
I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.
If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!
A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh
> It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.
And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.
> I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.
And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.
I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.
I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned
We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.
Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]
Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
> I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
> Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.
Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.
Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):
> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.
I'd say it's a call for more appropriate regulation. Regulations are not a bad thing, they can be a great enabler when used well. Well defined thresholds beyond which your ass is covered are necessary for any complex project to proceed. Obviously anyone building a nuclear powerplant better budget enough to make it a safe one.
The issue is when the goal posts are ill defined or just straight up moved. Things need to be overbuilt to satisfy demands the regulators may not even have, and still you might get caught up on something that you didn't think could possibly be an issue. There is excessive conservatism because you have at least some track record of regulator decisions, even if it's an imperfect indicator of their future requirements.
Overzealous but well defined regulations, like you need 3 backup diesel generators, obviously add cost, but this can be easily priced in at the beginning of the project. Typically, the more regulations you have, the more likely some of them will be vague, so keeping the number of regulations manageable is often a good thing, but is not strictly necessary. Where you really run into problems is when there is an unreasonable fear which draws strong support for "something" to be done, but there really isn't an appropriate action to take given the severity of the risk and the cost of eliminating it - that's how you wind up with bullshit like ALARA.
And safety regulations are just one facet. Environmental regulations, particularly NEPA requirements, are a major driver of construction costs for big projects and especially nuclear plants. If nuclear plants were primarily facing only the same issues as general construction, you'd expect the labor productivity to be similar to comparable scale projects. The fact that labor productivity is an order of magnitude lower indicates something specific to nuclear plants is lowering labor productivity. While many potential things could be causing that reduction in labor productivity, it's hard to think of any that don't stem from or are made substantially worse by the regulatory environment.
1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital.
2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab.
3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.
China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe.
Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles.
Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper:
> We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.
> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution.
That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.
That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.
Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.
If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.
However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)
That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.
Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
> ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.
Yeah. Due to armies of highly paid experts spending almost a decade of their life arguing if the design is up to the regulations. And also when because of these uncertainties you start building before full approval and then requirements change.
It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.
China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?
I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."
It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.
I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
Perhaps the are talking about Unions and the regulations around minimum pay and working conditions.
I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.
We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer.
Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns.
I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
Thats not the full picture. Aviation exploded in growth -- you can easily expand operations and work to smaller margins. The US shut down the nuclear industry intentionally from the 80s until the last 5 years from regulations.
It's a bogus talking point that the nuclear industry in the US was shut down due to increase in regulation.
The actual situation was that relentless 7%/year demand growth for electrical energy suddenly stalled, while at the same time a large amount of new capacity from cogeneration, made possible by the passage of PURPA in 1978, suddenly started to come on line. In this environment, and with the cost overruns and delays of the earlier nuclear builds, utilities could not make a case for new nuclear construction. High interest rates also didn't help.
I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.
This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.
Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.
A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing.
Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.
Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.
The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate.
However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.
We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China.
I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.
I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.
Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.
That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?
Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.
I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!
As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.
If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.
Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.
Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
> At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.
It depends how much competition there would be if for-profit company owns them.
If there is just one source nearby, isn’t that another monopoly risk? The price starts to balance with high distance tranmission cost monopoly vs monopoly of nearby energy source.
If we find many small renewable sources that are cheap to build, maybe that balances it out.
Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.
I don’t follow. If nuclear initially costs more than coal, then the first effect as it decreases is displacement when the prices cross over. Then if it falls further you will notice consumer price drops.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
The places with worse sun conditions tend to have amazing wind resources. Or be such a tiny niche that caring about them is irrelevant, like the few people living in the wind kill of the arctic high north of the polar circle.
Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action:
> and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.
It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."
No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."
> Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.
It is not like nth of a kind Hinkley Point C, EPR reactor number 5 and 6, at $32.5B per reactor is going any better?
Also do note that no one knows the true cost of Olkiluoto 3. The $11B figure is from a settlement many years before it was completed as interest and construction costs kept accumulating.
It is probably infuriating to many that costs are that significant and that important. France should be the model for nuclear, but mismanaged EDF which now has €54.3 billion debt and is years behind in maintenance. (2022 debt was €64.5 billion). And the public and politicians pitch a fit if the PM proposes a balanced budget with cuts. Nuclear doesn't make the cut when there are multiple competing interests of nitwits.
What's the evidence that there's "flooding the market" going on? It seems to me wind turbine prices have followed a plausible looking downwards hill and there's no sign of dumping excess inventory or otherwise unsustainably low prices.
I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.
This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.
- a system of lords and peasants, where the lords are held accountable and kept in check by the peasants, as the social contract obliges, or
- a system of lords and peasants, with no checks and balances
Obviously, corruption can creep in any system, but the one that states "let's give it all to the lords with nothing in return" seems asinine to me.
Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US.
China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it.
The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.
$50M is obscene, but not really a needle mover for rate payers. You could pay the whole executive team $0 and it would save the average residential ratepayer a few bucks per month, probably less than $5 per month.
Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.
It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.
The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.
A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
I see. So Nevada and the 46 other states with electricity cheaper than California[1] all have stricter regulation than California then? That's why their electricity is so much cheaper?
A big part of the cost is financing the project. It is capital intensive, and even few interest points more impact a lot the cost over time.
Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.
I can see a future where everyone can have free access to nuclear power.
I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station".
Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.
Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.
The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state
Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.
>SVP vs PG&E
This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas
True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure.
Great idea to napkin math it, but I think you're off by a very large margin. CA energy commission shows PG&E's energy consumption to be over 70,000 GWh.
$2,500,000,000 profit/70,000,000,000 kWh consumed is ~$0.035 per kWh.
So not exactly the smoking gun that CA ratepayers are looking for.
What about long term environmental cost?
I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.
> if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard
What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.
Thanks for the downvote and not being able to distinguish hyperbole from strawman. I guess the former is the price for getting the amusement of the latter.
> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation
Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"
Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs
People like you believe uranium is growing on trees. Have you actually looked up how it's retrieved? The costs are insane and the ecological damage unrepairable.
Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant.
Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.
More people die every single year from the radiation parts of coal power (excluding accidents), than have died from radiation of nuclear power's entire decades long history, including accidents.
Yes, they should be made safe, but we need some perspective here.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.
And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.
> The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge.
Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time.
We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.
You should fix your model of governance, because by that measure, any hope for progress is futile. The simple fact that we were better a few decades ago should be comforting. Enough of the shirt term profiteering sociopaths running the show, we can certainly cautiously swing back towards more technocracy and careful strategic planning.
This page and organization, WePlanet, is a rebrand of RePlanet. They advertise as a grassroots movement, but are funded by a hedge fund with a significant investment in fossil fuels [1].
I think their whole schtick is prolonging the current situation and betting on slow and expensive nuclear is a good strategy to prevent real change.
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
Germany doesn't need to participate in the next. They need to participate in something though. They are too small to do everything alone. Even the US depends on a lot of other countries to make things work.
Could you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
The German car companies are struggling intensely against Chinese competition, everywhere outside of the US, and especially in China. The Chinese electric cars sell for 3 times less than the German ones in EU. The Chinese also invested heavily in e tech. The Germans? Not so much.
Ah yeah, now that you mention it I’ve heard BYD is doing well in most markets (plus others, I assume). Even ignoring current tariffs, I’m not sure an overtly Chinese car would catch on in the US, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been wrong before.
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.
It'd be way easier to build a few nuclear plants than it would be to build an equivalent constant energy source from solar+wind and batteries. The nuclear plants would also consume far less land area.
True. I'm biased by living in a place where the peak load does happen during daylight hours (because that's when you need to run the A/C) and where heating usually happens via gas. Electric heating would indeed shift that dynamic (though municipal water heating would shift it the other way).
Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
Because nuclear engineers, plant operators, radioactive mining facilities, and other types of workers that will be needed across both, need to be employed from today until fusion reactors are made.
If AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)
There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.
Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
Cool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
Given how fast compute needs replacing, it's not much of a fall behind.
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.
> Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims shared another chart, saying: “The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months alone.” Man, are they optimistic. Mims linked to an article by Paul Kedrosky, who offers another perspective [1] on the AI bubble, as a percentage of GDP. Kedrosky, in turn, quoted Chinese President Xi Jinping, who warned of overinvesting in AI-focused datacenters. When Xi Jinping and Wall Street traders are on the same page, you know it’s bad. [2]
They can’t even use the products as a result of their obsession with government regulation. For example, Apple released a universal translator, literally right out of Star Trek, but the EU won’t be getting it either.
Well, not really. Investing in heating homes or powering light bulbs is, outside of extremely extreme situations, always a good investment, because people will always want to do that.
AI is also just super young, has apparently zero mote, requires insane amounts of hardware that basically becomes useless after a couple of years, and has promised, over and over, the AI revolution is just around the corner multiple times without ever delivering.
This is shortsighted. China routinely experiences large overcapacity in their electricity grid just to deal with the unknown unknowns of outages and other new demands. Suppose that the AI bubble burst and AI energy use is negligible, the extra capacity could be used for something else: retire your traditional coal fired furnaces for steel making and replacing them with electric arc furnaces; produce more aluminum; build more EV chargers.
Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell.
Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?
The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
> if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
So basically, be the only energy source not subsidized? There are plenty of decent reasons to be against nuclear, and there's a discussion to be had on its price, but pointing out subsidies in the energy sector is like casting stones from your glass house.
Let's not pretend that the companies running those plants are being hindered by the government. They themselves have said turning them back on is a stupid idea.
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.
> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.
The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.
It is not. We’re discussing what coal is being replaced with for electricity generation. But let’s talk about it.
> high electricity prices
Let’s ask the obvious question: are high prices caused by wind/solar? No, they’re caused by the extremely volatile prices of fossil fuels: “high fossil fuel prices were the main reason for upward pressure on global electricity prices, accounting for 90% of the rise in the average costs of electricity generation worldwide (natural gas alone for more than 50%).” [0]
So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
> heat pump sales
From your own link: the lengthy and public political debate about the legal framework and subsidies for heating buildings has caused people to lose confidence”
> So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
So Germany is _deepening_ its dependency on natural gas prices by building more plants because it's... more volatile?
Just imagine if there was some other reliable form of energy that doesn't require fossil fuels.
> None of that has to do with electricity.
It has everything to do with electricity. The government understands that the grid can't handle additional load from heating, so the subsidies are not pursued vigorously.
electricity is only one power source - you not gonna use it for e.g. heating because its expensive. When you look at graph with energy consumption by source german situation is bad and solar provides less than 6% and wind less than 11% [1]. Now go compare with france where nuclear provides 37% of energy.
Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.
Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start.
Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.
I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy. There must have been stronger political reasons behind it than simply « not liking nuclear ». I’d be curious to read something deeper on the subject and understand the reasoning behind those strategies since the Fukushima accident.
Nuclear is really unpopular with a significant part of the German electorate especially on the left. So, yes, it’s entirely political.
I guess sabotaging France by preventing it for exploiting the advantage its great strategy in energy should have afforded it is just cherry on the cake.
The historical data shows that France didn't have upwards trend in nuclear generation since early 2000s.[1] I wouldn't bet on it to change regardless of political climate.
Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
The EU is fining France because they don’t have enough clean energy in their mix despite France having the cleanest energy in Europe because nuclear used to not count. They are also forcing the French national energy company to resell their electricity at a loss to competitor moving money which should be used to invest into the pocket of private investors. And let’s not talk about the utter stupidity of the current discussion on the dams.
Then you realise that a significant part of France new debts was due to them shielding their population for the soaring prices of electricity despite France producing cheap energy, said prices being due to Germany brain dead strategy leading to a dependence on Russian gas and the obligation to go through the European market, and you start to see the double whammy.
Well, at least, the energy market is not as bad as the ECB rules.
You do know that a large portion of the energy crisis was caused by half the French nuclear fleet being online when it was for once truly absolutely needed?
I also note that you didn’t have anything to say about the EPR2 program and the absolutely insanely bonkers large subsidies needed to get it off the ground.
It was a nuclear + a renewable crisis. When the nuclear production dropped to 65% in France because of the offline plants, the wind production was hovering at 9% (bad luck) and the solar production at 5% (because it was winter).
That event was actually the final nail in the coffin for the all renewable policies of France, seeing that when the nuclear plants had a problem, the renewables failed even harder than the nuclear plants made it hard to make a case for all renewable policies
How so? Why is that a nail in the renewable coffin, but not the nuclear one? Nuclear is constantly sold as a miracle base load cure, but it can't even manage that.
Why isn't that instead a call for more storage, in general?
> As a result of this incident, France pushed for more nuclear investments and dropped the mandatory renewables share.
Which has not materialized. This is where the thread started:
> The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
> Currently the French can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
> Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
> A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
German people mostly just listen to what their leaders tell them. If their leaders change their mind then the German people will step in line and believe they changed their mind out of their own free will too.
You know what, let’s turn popular city parks to windmill and solarparks.
NY central park for example. Copenhagen has a few beloved open green places we could clean out and replace with solarcells, so does Berlin.
Im unscientifically guessing support for nc energy would rise very quickly and wed have a whole bunch of them within a decade.
Source, I live near a windmill, they are loud as f*k. I drive by solaparks nearly every day.
They remind me of those horrible deforested areas in Sweden called kalhygge. Nothing green about those atrocities.
I don't doubt your experience but this is not at all mine. I live by, cycle by, and work by windmills and there is no notable noise from any of them, even the older ones don't make a noise that I'd hear through a wall.
And the argument you make against PV is absurd, no one suggests that that's the way to use PV. Where I live everyone has PV on their roofs to produce mostly for own consumption. There are also many concepts to use it on otherwise unused spaces more at scale (office buildings and train stations for example, but also in combination with greenhouses, as roof for farm areas, ...
Yes you can do both of them badly but nuclear takes a huge space and makes it unusable for generations, and in addition requires vast infrastructure to actually get the energy safely into the grid. I'm a fan of nuclear power, but the arguments you make renewables are neither actual arguments pro nuclear nor do they seem to me to hold much water.
Newer wind turbines don't have a gearbox and are almost completely silent. When standing next to one, the loudest components are the electrical inverters/transformers.
Yeah have seen them. Down south of EU, in Portugal, they are buying land used for agriculture for these huge solar farms. And it is as sad as it is here. Surely, food is more important no? If they were placed in some deserts like in Spain... maybe they make sense, but these are very arable lands.
Wind is yeah... a whole other beast, although I do like what they have done in the Baltic and North seas.
Seems like an economics problem? Is farmland cheaper than buying some otherwise less usable land? Or is there now much land available and a huge unmet energy need? And there are also models to use solar that still allow some farming below (e.g. strawberry, beans, greenhouses, ... But maybe not cost effective in this case, or the incentives don't align well.
Agrivoltaics (dual use of land for solar energy and agriculture) is gaining ground in many nations. This is heavy industry, the pace is slower than in most sectors (IT...).
It's not particularly practical of course, because the real estate is expensive and the tall things in a city all fuck with the airflow... but then that's why this is a publicity stunt and not where we usually put them.
You are sarcastic, but seriously I sometimes have an impression that people are so invested in the slogan of green energy that they would be fine with cutting down last tree on this planet to put a solar panel in its place, while believing they save the planet and environment.
> We still need to overturn national nuclear bans, unlock more funding, and push democratic countries to support clean energy development abroad: especially where it is most needed to compete with Russia’s growing influence.
We also need to figure out how to build reactors in months to years instead of years to decades to failure.
And to build reactors at a cost less than $10 to $20 million per megawatt capacity.
France, heavily invested in nuclear, now has to shut down their reactors each summer as, due to climate change, the cooling water from rivers cant be used any more to cool the reactors. So much about being future proof. And let's not even get into the argument why no private company ever financed a nuclear reactor, but only build them with huge subsidies from states. Hint: it is because they are completely uneconomically. (and dont come with the argument of experimental small scale reactors, they are all just experimental and none proven)
> the cooling water from rivers cant be used any more to cool the reactors. So much about being future proof.
There are more reactor types than water-cooled reactors, and modern energy plants should use cooling towers even if some water reservoir is available, nuclear or not.
> it is because they are completely uneconomically
This is why private sector cannot provide infrastructure. State is not a company.
Not all need a river to cool but every single nuclear power plant needs a consistent water source 1) to actually generate the energy (steam!), 2) to cool, 3) as emergency safeguard when things go wrong. If you followed the news about Russia's attack on Ukraine and the risks to Zaporizia much of it was about fear of an incident, among others due to water sources or the energy to bring water to the plant being at risk
Secondary loop can be made closed system. This reduces efficiency, but this could be acceptable considering water scarcity.
Of course there would be some leaks etc. so water needs to be resupplied, but in much lesser amounts.
> 2) to cool
Not necessarily true, because primary loop doesn't need to have water (HTG, MSR, LMR reactors).
HTG reactor actually doesn't need water at all and can power gas turbine directly. LMR, depending on chosen coolant, can do this as well, though it requires heat exchanger.
There are nuclear plants in much warmer places than France. And well.. in hindsight climate change probably wouldn't be as bad as it is if nuclear continued growing at the same pace as in the 60s and 70s.
> Hint: it is because they are completely uneconomically
Yes, natural gas and fossil fuels were cheaper than nuclear too. That and the irrational panic is what killed it. At this point its probably too late (and renewables are more feasible option unless there are some significant technological advancements), but if you add up all the long-term costs and externalities nuclear would have turned out to be much cheaper in the 80s and 90s than it seemed on paper.
Just coal alone used to kill (probably still does worldwide) more people every year than Chernobyl ever did... What is the cost of that?
It is expensive because we choose to make it expensive. It is regulation pushing safety levels far beyond other industries, and far beyond science (radiation is far less harmful than regulatory models suggest)
You do NOT get to constantly taut the low mortality rates of nuclear AND call for less regulation at the same time.
But even from a very matter of fact point of view, I'd rather have 1000 people die every year for 20 years, than have 20.000 people die on a single bad day/week. The economic and social impact is far, far bigger when it can't be "spread out" over multiple years.
Yes, you do. Especially given the outstanding new levels of nuclear tech and safety. The economic and social impacts are hugely positive. You will see this in the next decade as new facilities come online.
Your comment is just disinformation at this point. If nuclear was very expensive China wouldn't have built 30 in the last 10 years despite massive opposition.
In reality when you take all the costs into account there is no cheaper form of energy generation and there likely never will be, outside of cost decreases in Fission based nuclear itself.
But you don't need to work with exponential curves to know that you can use solar only for like half a day and even less during winter. Those solar installation now are big part of overall cost. And with majority of EU population living in flats where you gonna install them?
you have to start paying interest on loan from first day 1 even if construction starts on 100th day and if safety committee rules some part of approved design needs to change to improve safety it's own to demolish, clean and rebuild the new parts.
The problem is not design regulations but how much difficult on purpose goverment has made it in the west to construct one.
LCOE does not account for the full (system) costs. Nuclear power plants have capacity factors over 90%, while PV/Wind have less than 25%. LCOE does not account for the added costs, such as increased transmission and storage/backup costs.
Berlin – According to a study, comprehensive insurance against the risks of nuclear power would cause electricity prices to explode. According to calculations by actuaries, the premiums to be paid could cause electricity prices to rise more than forty-fold.
"Nuclear energy is ultimately uninsurable," said insurance expert Markus Rosenbaum on Wednesday in Berlin. If an insurance company wanted to build up sufficient premiums for a nuclear power plant within 50 years, for example, the remaining operating life of a reactor, it would have to charge 72 billion euros per year for liability insurance.
The German Renewable Energy Association (BEE) commissioned the "Leipzig Insurance Forums" to conduct the calculations even before the Fukushima reactor disaster. "The true costs of nuclear power are ignored and, in the event of a serious accident, are passed on to the public," said BEE Managing Director Björn Klusmann.
LCOE refers to the price in MWh (produced electricity), so it takes capacity factor into account. Whatever electricity you produce and sell depends on your installed capacity multiplied with the capacity factor.
Similarly, you pay for the electricity you receive and this is priced as say 40$ per MWh. Obviously when you receive nothing the price is 0, you don't pay them to idle, they either produce or not. Thus when storage costs kick in you don't add the costs of both together. You either pay one or the other, not both.
You might average them out taking into consideration what their output is, but you don't stack the costs on top of each other which I often see people do.
Funny how all the nuclear chills forget the plethora of issues that come with that tech.
- who has access to nuclear power?
- what happens to nuclear reactors during war?
- where does the Uranium come from?
- how long does it take to build a reactor?
- how many long term solutions have been developed in the more than 60 years of this technology’s existence?
Not saying nuclear doesn’t have a place, but let’s not be blind to the long list of complications that come with it.
You suggest people forget that without considering that perhaps you don't know:
- We killed nuclear power in countries that can be trusted so that is not relevant.
- Nuclear accidents are not as harmful as people imagine.
- We have plenty of access to uranium resources in the west.
- the time to build a reactor is often in large parts regulatory burdens. France built out 10% of its electricity generation needs in a year, for a number of years. That is what is possible.
- Part of the reason there is no innovation in this sector is because regulation has strangled it. There are many innovative ideas in nuclear.
You mean western sources like the USA, that suddenly starts waving it's dick around when the wrong dipshit is elected? The USA that made a nuclear deal with Iran and then scrapped it for no fucking reason?
Is that a joke? You are conflating US meddling in international politics vs. protecting themselves and the world from Nuclear catastrophe by not fighting the likes of Iran, who openly admits wanting to nuke other countries, namely Israel (and by extension radiate Gaza, Jordan, Egypt, the nearby oceans, etc, as well) and the US. Iran who hid their nuclear enrichment facilities underground, which were known to enrich Uranium beyond what's needed for energy production.
The EU may have a geopolitical interest in taking another look at nuclear. The dependance on Russian natural gas and expensive imported US natural gas is not good for their economic outlook long term. Honestly I am surprised Germany has not fired back up a couple of its plants considering its difficulties with Industrial output and competing in a world market.
This is just utterly and completely wrong. EVEN THE COMPANIES THEMSELVES say it would be stupid to reopen those plants.
And, of course, the idea that "dependence" on Russia is bad, but replacing it with dependence on other states AND with building a bunch of nuclear bombs in my backyard that are PRIME targets to literally take out my entire grid, is laughably bad.
We have plenty of uranium in Europe. Australia also has plenty. Lots of countries have plenty, both friendly and not so friendly (that we still buy lots of stuff from anyway). We absolutely don't need Russian uranium. Uranium is also easy to store long-term (years).
There is zero risk of a new stupid energy dependence on Russia.
I read a lot of comments talking about „getting down the operational costs“ but i am missing someone talking about the costs of depositing the nuclear waste until it has no more risks. Am i missing something?!
Yes the cost of depositing nuclear waste is trivial, it takes a small number of large concrete structures underground in well picked locations.
The US produces about 1250 cubic meters of waste per year. For comparison the empire state building has a floor area of 208000 square meters, assuming a 3 meter floor height you could fit about 500 years worth of spent fuel inside it.
Yes. This. Nuclear waste storage is extremely cheap.
Also, we only "use" 3% of the fuel in current nuclear power station designs so we could just reprocess the fuel and vastly reduce the volume of waste too.
For anyone interested in the history of Sellafield and its role in reprocessing, "Britain's Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield" on BBC 4 at the moment is worth a watch. Presented by Jim Al-Khalili.
> Germany, long a symbol of anti-nuclear politics, is beginning to shift.
err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
but no: there is no Endlager (permanent spent nuclear fuel waste site) in sight, the costs of dismantling used plants are outrageous and if it were not for nimbyism, we'd be essentially self sustaining on wind and solar within a decade.
matter of fact fossil and nuclear sponsored fud on wind and solar is the single biggest issue we face in Germany.
> but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight
The Problem in Germany is that by law the state has to build a repository, while the operators have to pay for it. The operators did pay (~24 bln EUR), but politically either NIMBY parties (such as CDU/CSU/SPD) block it, or the Greens (under Habeck) block progress so they can continue to shout "what about the waste???"
In Finland the operators can build their own repository and they did it cheap and relatively fast.
Also from an even more anti-nuclear country (austria): Kernenergie? Ja bitte!
I propose we store it in your basement. It's really not a flame war, but people that consider themselves rational argue it's no big deal, so they should be prepared to store it in their immediate vicinity. I support renewables and don't have a problem with solar panels on my roof or even a windmill in my backyard.
Finland is the world's first and only such facility so far.
the law to build it is pretty universal, the world has essentially agreed to not export nuclear waste.
associating the progressive innovative green party with blocking progress is an interesting turn, there was no progress in the topic for decades, and the reason is rather that nuclear waste is like toddler art: first no one wants to take it, trying to toss it is met with loud and hefty protest, and at the end nobody knows where to take it.
don't the alps have lovely granite areas for the Finnish model?
State level NIMBYism is what's happening with nuclear. The state decides we won't have that in our back yard in the case of Germany.
Fear uncertainty and doubt is the only thing blocking nuclear power.
The irony is that the fud has been spread by "environmentalists" and has only managed to keep fossil fuels around for the last 20 years greatly exacerbating our climate change predicament.
Nuclear is more expensive and more geopolitically dangerous than renewables. For a short time, Germany was even leading in PV technology, it could've been our new sector we dominate in. But, as always, greedy investors and corrupt right wing politicians starved out any possibility of positive change.
And I find it horrendously hilarious that you believe the same people that work tirelessly against renewables would actually EVER build nuclear. It's about milking the status quo for cash as long as possible and then fucking off into retirment with that stolen money.
Btw, what's the german energy companies opinion on building nuclear? RWE a big fan? (They aren't!)
> err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
Is the lobby trying? Last I checked the head of RWE himself said that going back to nuclear in Germany was infeasible. It seems to be conservative politicians who had been keen on it before winning the election and before the industry pointed out that it's a bad idea actually.
RWE is not the oil or coal lobby. they pay for coal and gas. never would they ever finance a nuclear power plant. to them .02€/kWh (wind/solar) is _super_ sexy/profitable.
the fossil fuel lobby is in Texas, Middle East, Russia,and likewise uranium. add Siemens and their nuclear shares in other companies, for the plants.
Ruling nuclear as green is something I can understand (though I still vastly prefer solar), but I've read elsewhere that natural gas has also been ruled green, and that just makes no sense.
Personally I see gas and nuclear as transition technologies until we can go fully renewable, and I can tolerate gas staying around for a bit longer as long as we phase our coal and oil as soon as possible, but that doesn't make it green. Gas is still a CO2 producing fossil fuel.
Whether you're pro-nuclear or not, this ruling feels like a turning point. For decades, nuclear has been stuck in a weird limbo. Fascinating how youth climate activists are now some of the strongest voices for nuclear. That would've been unthinkable 10 years ago
Asking because I don't know. How is enrichment governed? Say for instance if a country is only using it for energy vs defense/offense. And are there elements that can be specifically used for energy vs otherwise? Last I remember, having access to enriched uranium was grounds for a country to bomb another one.
The only way to ensure that a civil uranium enrichment program remains strictly civil is via transparency and monitoring. A country that has mastered uranium enrichment technology for fueling civil power reactors could use the same technology to produce bomb-grade uranium. It actually takes more work to enrich natural uranium into fuel for power reactors than it takes to further enrich power reactor fuel into bomb material:
This is scary. so the extra effort to move from, say, 20% to 85% is relatively small compared with the effort to get up to 20% in the first place. Might as well build a feature into the reactor so that it only works with <=20%
I think two reasons. If reactors can't function above 20%, a country having access to >20% enriched payload is a certain violation. Vs "60% enrichment is still for clean energy, my reactor works with it". 2. If you are only buying the payload and not enriching it yourself, you can't do anything with >20% . More like mixing methyl alcohol in lab available ethyl alcohol, to deter lab techs from mixing water and having a rager.
You should read the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as it addresses several of those issues. Possession of highly enriched uranium isn't necessarily an act of war by itself.
Natural uranium on earth is currently about 0.7% U-235; civilian power reactors typically need low-enriched uranium which is 3% to 5% U-235.
The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).
Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
Modern weapons use plutonium not uranium, uranium weapons can be constructed.
All it takes is the enrichment to produce the fissile material for a weapon.
As far as I know countries have agreed to not build weapons, with the exception of those that already have them, there is an international body that monitors enrichment sites, but checks are voluntary a country can choose to not accept inspections and/or build additional secret enrichment sites.
The fissile material is not sufficient for a weapon though, as I understand there is quite a bit of science that goes into making a bomb.
Additionally, first generation weapons are large and unwieldy, i.e it takes a bomber to deploy a single weapon with a very small yield.
Miniaturization, building a weapon small and light enough to put on a missile is a significant problem that took the current powers years to get over.
But that's about it, if you can figure out how to make a small bomb of variable yield, you can make bombs small enough to fit a large backpack, and thermonuclear weapons that fit in a ballistic missile as well.
IAEA inspections verify your claimed inventory and enrichment facilities. They are trying to detect if any nuclear materials are being skimmed/diverted. As for weapons, nuclear fuel is very low enrichment (usually under 5%). Iran surpassed 60%, which has no peaceful use, so that is why it was said they were perusing weapons.
You don't actually need enriched uranium for nuclear power. The design is easier if you enrich it, but there are reactors that would work on unenriched uranium.
The solution to these issues is just to manage the enrichment supply chain. If a country wants nuclear power but can't be trusted, supply then with at cost uranium.
Imo that's a pretty complicated topic. On one side if you just build LWRs you just don't need very highly enriched uranium or plutonium so posession of those is a red flag. On the other side fast breeder reactors are the ones which are able to produce the least harmful waste. But fast breeders and closed fuel cycles produce and handle plutonium which in turn can be used for bad things.
One of the reasons they judged this way is the lack of feasible low-carbon alternatives. Which is hilarious because we're talking about EU taxpayer money here. Money that can be spend only once. If you spend it on a nuclear reactor which may or may not be build within 10 years, you can't spend it on those "feasible low-carbon alternatives" which we already have and which would have produced a lot of energy in that construction time.
The court however said also, that the strict regulations, which are often the main argument of nuclear fans, are not to be lowered. Therefore there is no outcome for nuclear where it will get cheaper. The French, which have never stopped building nuclear all over the world, still didn't manage to get it cheaper. There are always cost explosions which cause the energy price to rise over time.
Which brings us back to why we're even talking about this:
France has a fleet which needs more and more maintenance. It is costly and the state already supports every Watt of nuclear energy through their tarif bleu. They desperately need this EU money to support this show. Without it, they'd be forced to innovate and expand on renewables, like the rest of the planet.
...but just like the Germans with their fossil fuel cars, they'll try to keep it alive as long as possible, even though the market comes apart around them.
Price per Wh plays no role in the coming decades. Solid fuels can become x10 or x100 more expensive as they deplete. So the now extensive nuclear can become relatively cheap.
The globe must change its behavior NOW: electricity prices at night, under shade or without wind must become very extensive because they need extensive tech (batteries, nuclear, fuels).
If I were a regulator for a day I would strive making fossil fuels and night elecricity x10 more expensive and leave the market regulate by itself. In ten years I would make them x10 once more.
The person who wrote that has a conflict of interest, because he developed a nuclear reactor:
"In 2011, Devanney shifted his attention to nuclear power. He formed a small team to develop a design that combined a high temperature, low pressure, liquid fuel reactor with his background in ship production. This became known as the ThorCon project. Devanney continues to serve as ThorCon's Chairman although the day to day operations of ThorCon have been turned over to younger, more capable hands."
Or he knows what he's talking about. Could be either but you've chosen the reason that supports your perspective. I appreciate that he may be conflicted.
Finally, France will be happy after years of being pushed back on this with the drive for solar and wind turbines, which sadly all got supplemented via gas on the back that nuclear was bad.
Sadly, with electricity becoming more reliant on gas and other fossil fuels when it is not so sunny in winter, or on those cloudy days with no wind, means fossil fuel usage ends up higher than if they had stayed and expanded nuclear - instead they closed many plants(Germany a prime example, in favour of....gas).
Then the whole over-dependence on Russian gas and oil really did whammy the energy price market, not just for Europe, but with a knock-on effect across the world. One we still pay for today.
The problem with all kinds of "green" movements and such is that they only _demand_ solutions without being involved. That also means they might have very little idea if their premise is even valid, they just put all their energy towards organization, making signs n stuff and are very emotion-driven.
People thinking fission reactors might randomly explode like nuclear bombs Simpsons-style and so many green parties in Europe being anti-nuclear has held progress back too much. Minimal climate activism isn't bad, but they really bit hard in to the fork on this one.
Phew, thankfully I did not need the EU court to know nuclear is clean energy. In any case, any pros of it being considered clean in an official capacity?
Oh well then the Oligarchs have spoken,let the world be green, glowing green. I'm not anti nuclear but the technologies used to date have been seriously flawed. But It is the Idea that people who really have no technical knowledge of this technology its supply chain issues or its real impact on long term health are so arrogant that they believe they alone can dictate to the world, that I find offensive. We look at immediate effect but a study by a Japanese researcher after Fukushima shows the effect of irradiation may not show for multiple generations after exposure.
Clean, mostly. With future? No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not.
Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source.
Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding].
And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in storing. Except for costly disasters in how not to intermediately store it, here in Germany.
If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful, why not make future generations happy by preserving it for them, and for now, limiting its use until we learned how to add to the initial price the full cost of long term storage, with further disasters as a learning experience for that?
Saving lives and being cost-effective in the short run might work, but every energy expert says in 50 years, nuclear will have to be phased out anyway. And fusion could provide clean, but also primary heat inducing energy. So even that will not save us.
Primary heat on this scale isn't nessisarially a bad thing. It has a very small impact on the global power balance with respect to the effect global warming.
There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.
I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.
>If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful
It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.
Well, good thing that we have no reason to build these reactors as far away from population centers as possible, right?
We already have enough heat for that, from industries. Distribution is the biggest factor, and in that, distance. It's really cool, but it's stupidly expensive up front. Not to mention, you need to require EVERYONE in the area to buy in and stay in to have any hopes of being worth it in the long run. NIMBYism strikes again.
And the EU are correct. Stop crying about it. Nuclear is the future of human energy on Earth.
No other source provides energy as dense safe and reliable.
Hacker news people believe it’s not the cheapest. But with accounting for environmental and human impact and freeing from unnecessary restrictive regulations it can and will be.
Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage
It's so clean that you can swim in the reactor water. You can even drink it after running it through a water filter. No waste disposal required. It's that clean.
All the smart people of my generation have spent their time working on burning energy. For AI, crypto, etc. Imagine if they worked as hard on making energy instead.
Everything good Greenpeace may have ever done is probably overshadowed by the death and planetary destruction caused by their opposition to nuclear power.
Why mine uranium? Only about 4% of nuclear fuel is actually used before the fuel rods need replacement, which makes uranium highly recyclable. Given all of the “spent” fuel rods in storage, mining operations for additional uranium are unnecessary. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for millennia, provided we are willing to begin a recycling program.
Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use isotopes from it. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.
What do you mean? Modern in situ uranium mining is one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have. It's not perfectly clean, but it's pretty darn good.
Ok, well by this definition, all human development activity is unclean. This is a perfectly valid point of view but is pretty distinct from the modern definition of clean.
The problem in my mind with a "clean is clean" litmus test is that it eliminates the word "clean"'s ability to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable human development.
Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.
OK, but then by that logic, solar and and wind shouldn't be categorized as clean energy either. Clearly it's a matter of degrees and meant as a useful segmentation for taxation, etc.
I will save you the trouble because I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago. These numbers have been thoroughly debunked [1]. They are simply wrong, likely out of laziness more than malice.
But the people that spread this around do it out of malice to dupe people and influence opinions. You've been duped.
> I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago.
That turns out not to be the case.
Even if it were the case: an official study by the DOE was "thoroughly debunked", in your esteemed opinion, because some random Australian twitter user claims to have talked to a friend.
Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar.
The death rates might be a difference in units; the Forbes article is using deaths per trillion kWh, the other might be deaths per thousand/million kWh.
The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.
E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.
These are death rates with the current saturation of plants. If we wanted to cover all of Europe, a much more densely populated area, with nuclear, the deaths (and other negative consequences) would be far greater, no?
The thing about nuclear is that the land area consumed per unit of energy is, like the deaths per unit of energy, extremely low. You can “cover all of Europe” without needing to put very many people (if any) in the potential exclusion zone.
Even with that being said, those safety numbers have held even with China building large numbers of reactors in relatively dense areas. I'd be surprised if European reactors turned out to pose much of a higher risk.
Sure, in deaths per unit energy. But the real risk of nuclear is financial. The tail risk is huge for any producer on their own, which makes insurance extremely expensive, and which means that usually only nations bear the full financial risk of nuclear.
The nuclear industry did say that this would happen but the reality was the exact opposite:
>According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.
Western designs are safe, most Soviet-era ones are/were not. It's unfortunate that nuclear power still has this stigma, as it's like saying "all cars are unsafe" while comparing the crash test ratings of a modern sedan to a 1960's chevy bel aire.
To put a number on it, linear no threshold models predict ~130 deaths as a result of the radiation (and are known to over-estimate lethalities at low doses).
Around 50 people a year die while clearing snow in Japan, so it's ~ twice as dangerous as shoveling snow in worst-case predictions.
LNT is not known to over-estimate lethalities at low doses. The actual situation is that the predicted deaths at low doses occur at such a low rate that the signal cannot be detected above the noise. That doesn't mean the prediction was wrong, just that it cannot be verified. It's possible (as in, consistent with evidence) that LNT under-predicts deaths at low doses.
Even if LNT would under-predict it is still a rounding error in the big picture of the tsunami disaster.
And, let's put it straight: LNT is scaremongering fiction. People who live in Ramsay, Iran, are exposed to higher level of background radiation that n what is allowed for nuclear workers. Yet, there is no elevated levels of cancer or birth defects, not is there a shorter lifespan for people living there either.
Epidemiology is a very blunt instrument. The data you mention there cannot be used to reach the conclusion you are trying to reach, since confounding effects cannot be excluded (and because the doses they receive can only be estimated, not actually measured). Yes, radiation biologists know all about those people and have judged that evidence as part of a larger picture.
The main reason is a combination of negligence by the owner of the plant and not enough enforcement of standards.
The fukushima powerplant was known to have sea wall lower then required and as such was vulnerable to a tsunami (this was known for quite a long time)
Combined with backup power in the basement (also against standards)
For an example of what happens to a reactor build according to safety requirements see the onagawa nuclear powerplant
The Chernobyl plant had known construction defects that could impair safety. These things would prevent a western plant from starting operation, but did not stop the Soviet plant from beginning operation:
They did not even have any automated safeties in place, because their philosophy was “faith in the worker” while the western philosophy is “humans are fallible”:
They then ignored their own safety procedures when operating the plant, which ultimately is what caused the disaster.
Saying that Soviet designs being in the same generation as western designs makes them equally safe/unsafe is quite wrong when you look at the details. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one mistake after another.
That said, the plant was designed by a country that shot down a civilian airliner that had strayed into their airspace due to a navigational error, when they knew it was a civilian airliner:
They had no regard for human life, so of course, they built things that are incredibly unsafe. There is no end of examples of them simply not caring about human life.
Pebble-bed reactors are incapable of catastrophic failure, and molten-salt reactors have negative feedback loops with increasing pressure. Nuclear doesn't have to mean the same designs that were used in the 60s.
Both those design types were operational in the 1960s in the US but have been shut down due to lack of performance and industrial interest. New interest has started today, but let's not claim the new ones are some kind of new improved tech that evolved out of our workhorse water cooled/moderated plants.
I'd say a reactor in inland Europe is far from the craziest place to put one. God forbid someone were to put one in the Pacific ring of fire... oh, wait...
Why? Are you concerned that, like Lex Luthor in that worst-of-all Superman movies, someone will use nuclear reactors to somehow cause damage to continental plates? Actually, that's more of a stretch than the movie took.
So funny. After the whole bullshit and hysteria post Fukushima and the German bullshit. But now it's the good narrative because of the war with Russia.
It's so funny to see the shifts of peace or war with eastasia. So obviously propagandistic and so obviously supported by all the psychophants...
Today we're on the right side until it's inconvenient again and then we'll burn the witch of anyone who dares go against the narrative.
I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence.
However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.
I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.
The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.
For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.
A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.
The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.
By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.
I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?
How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?
Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.
How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.
Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.
Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.
Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable.
Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
Nuclear reactors can’t adjust production rapidly and require peaker plants. I don’t have to squint to see how this is also solved by grid scale storage.
There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.
Why not? Grid scale batteries will allow using solar/wind throughout the day and not only peak times, eliminating the duck curve problem. This is already only a few years away.
This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.
> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.
None of this happens to be true.
A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.
And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.
What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?
Here the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.
> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.
> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.
True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.
> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment
Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.
> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.
The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.
> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
The main factor determining build times appears to be "how much do you want to?". France built 50+ reactors in a total of 15 years, the fastest build times are Japan, South Korea, China and Germany.
Secondary factors are "is this a FOAK build or NOAK", and "how much experience is there building nuclear plants". When Japan was good it built in under 4 years, and had plans to go below 3. And no, that's not detrimental to safety.
> and use just isn't that important of a factor.
It is when land is expensive.
> With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
Typical dodge into the qualitative: the additional grad capacity required to ship power across the country from where it is produced to where it is needed is a multiple of that required to strengthen it for additional consumers. Never mind the whole "smart grid" madness.
> Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself.
That's also false. These costs are almost always included and have little impact on the total cost of power. For example, the Gösgen plant in Switzerland produces for 4,34 Rappen / kWh, including all costs and including a profit.
> At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize
That's also not true. When subsidies for off-shore wind were reduced, Germany, Denmark and the UK had zero bids for wind-parks, and immediately the discussion was "new subsidy models". Intermittent renewables in Germany currently get €20 billion in direct subsidies, never mind the advantage of having feed-in priority and being able to burden other producers with cost of intermittency.
> The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables
That's also not true. There was a trigger (in PV production) that led to a substation having problems. But that was just the trigger, not the cause. Grids have to be able to deal with faults like that from time to time. The grid in Spain wasn't, because there were too many intermittent renewables in the grid, and too few rotating masses that stabilize the grid.
> Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
Are these grid scale batteries sufficient to power an entire industrialized nation for a week or more in the room with us now? How much are they?
First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).
Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.
Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.
Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany). Thus, a comparison isn't that easy to make.
System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.
That is also not true. For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all. Even Greenpeace and the Green's chief anti-nuclear Lobbyist, Jürgen Trittin, called nuclear power plants "money printing machines".
> Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France)
Those are minute compared to subsidies intermittent renewables get in Germany. In particular as there is the ARENH program, which is effectively a negative subsidy (it takes money away from the nuclear company EDF), and of course EDF is profitable and gives money to the government.
When you add it all up, France has a negative subsidy of € 0.1 - 7 billion yearly, whereas Germany subsidizes intermittent renewables to the tune of around €20 billion a year.
> System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend
That is also not true. System costs are actually rising, because yields are dropping, the share of renewables has risen and the (fairly cheap) coal backup is to be eliminated. Total costs are now estimated at several trillion euros. For comparison, France's nuclear program cost a total of €228 billion through 2011.
Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany. [1]
EDF was nationalized in 2022, doesn't have to build money reserves for decommissioning (which would be tens of billions), is about 50 billion in debt and just got a 5 billion government loan to keep some old reactors running and another government loan to build new plants. These are not minute interventions, both France and Germany heavily subsidize their sectors (in different ways). With the ARENH program ending in 2025, a more fair comparison will be possible.
I have to read up on the system costs though, that may be ai fair point.
> Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany.
That's not true. That report is based on a completely ridiculous paper by the FÖS, the "Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft". Calling the numbers it uses "completely made up" is putting it kindly.
"The disregard for scientific methodology, for basic knowledge of economics and business administration, environmental economics, energy economics, and nuclear technology, the biased selection of sources, even the use of newspaper articles as supposedly scientific sources, and the denial of the positive effects of nuclear energy, which far outweigh its social costs, are unworthy of the FÖS. Either they are a sign of insufficient economic expertise at the institute, as well as a lack of knowledge of scientific methodology, or the FÖS is deliberately misleading readers with the aim of being able to cite the highest possible fictitious costs for nuclear energy on behalf of its NGO clients. Both discredit the study and its client."
The debt that EDF carries is completely normal for a company this size, especially one that does infrastructure. It would be unusual for a company not to use the capital markets to finance such projects. EDF has been highly profitable for decades, recently while being used to subsidize other parts of the economy via ARENH as well as being used to buffer the effects of the energy crisis, not just via ARENH, but through massive expansion of ARENH.
ARENH is not "ending", it is being replaced by a comparable scheme that is structured slightly differently.
EDF was not "nationalized" in 2022. It was always a state company, with the state never holding less than 85%. The period where the state held less than 100% was relatively short, from 2005 to 2022. The state bought out the minority shareholders in order to streamline the planned nuclear expansion.
The "subsidies" for EDF (cheaper loans etc.) amount to around € 2.7 - 3 billion a year. By itself, that's obviously not "minute". However, these sums are dwarfed by the ARENH program and the profits that EDF pays to the state, which turn the subsidies into "negative subsidies" in sum. That is, the state gets more money from EDF than it gives it, by a good amount.
Even if that weren't the case, the sums are dwarfed by the German subsidies for renewable, which are an order of magnitude higher than the gross subsidies in France (and infinitely higher than the net-negative subsidies).
> For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all.
Except financing research and development, guaranteeing loans to reduce default risk and interest rates, capping liabilities to enable insureability at lower rates by guaranteeing to fix damages in case of critical failures with public money, financing and organizing emergency civil protection measures, as well as waste disposal, granting massive tax cuts, doing the diplomatic leg work to import uranium and protecting its transport with the police, all and all summing up public spending on making nuclear energy in germany to 169,4 billion euros according to the scientific service of the Bundestag (Document Number WD 5 - 3000 - 090/21), with the more green leaning FOES calculating 304 billion. And on top of that it is estimated that another 100 billion in public money will be needed to fix up long term waste disposal sites morsleben and asse.
... well except from those few hundred billion euros they barely ever subsidize it at all.
The FÖS "paper" that gets circle-cited everywhere in anti-nuclear advocacy is complete bollocks. This is obvious from even a cursory reading, but many have also done it in detail.
i only cited it as a side note for the upper bound. the more conservative estimate of the scientific service of the Bundestag still shows that your claim of zero subsidies is made up and unsubstantiated. Discrediting the radical other position and ignoring the center positions does not make your own radical claims true. I can give another source: "Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945-1975" by historian Prof. Dr. Joachim Radkau. However that one you have to get from a library, it describes in detail how the nuclear industry in germany was build and what role and subsidies the government provided.
Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.
There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
I'd agree with that in the context of an individual or a small local group or something.
For a well-established organization like Greenpeace, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe it's a matter of them collectively having an emotional reaction. They have the resources to look at the evidence, and have indeed almost surely done so; when it comes to explaining their refusal to accept that evidence, ”their jobs depend on rejecting it” is a much simpler explanation IMO than “they are experiencing a collectively-identical ideological quirk that their organizational bureaucracy somehow has yet to iron out”.
>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure.
It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.
Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
The more I observe a lot of activists the more I suspect, a lot of organizations and movements are cold war era Soviet psyOps that outlived their handlers.
Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented.
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:
>…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated
economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US
$70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.
Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.
In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.
If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
>Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid?
I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Germany is merely transitioning the fastest and doing it without the overpriced and risky albatross that is nuclear power.
>shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable
It's unbelievable that the country some people are most furious at is the one that has decarbonized at the fastest rate.
Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
>I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades.
Maybe you didn't intend too, but your words certainly implied it:
>>...it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
Since you reference Germany later, the implication above was that Germany did prove you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Which might be true someday in the future, but Germany certainly hasn't decarbonized their grid yet. The one thing that Germany did "prove conclusively" is that thousands of lives were needlessly lost over the last 15 years because of bad policy.
>Germany is merely transitioning the fastest
Germany will certainly not be carbon neutral the fastest. I guess it will beat Poland though.
>Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
You have a point - it is the responsibility of every country to decarbonize. I guess a big issue here is simply money - Poland GDP is much smaller than Germany and they have less available options. Though besides your claim, I've never heard anyone actually lauding Poland's efforts or thinking it was a good thing they are using coal.
>...They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
Like I said, I find that those who actually want to decarbonize the grid, don't particularly care what clean technology is used and different countries will have a different mix of technologies they use. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.
These are orchestrated by Russia. They want to destabilise European energy sector and economies and they are sponsoring various organisations to spread such misinformation.
The West is losing information war with Russia - see the downvotes. Sites are infested with Russian bots and useful idiots helping the genocidal regime.
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
You need more centrifuges, several times more, but not orders of magnitude more.
And you need nuclear reactors to make plutonium. The weapons you can make with plutonium are qualitatively different from the ones you can make with uranium.
Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb.
Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.
If you're going for the enriched uranium route to a bomb, nobody is going to start with used nuclear fuel, because dealing with the highly radioactive spent fuel is such a huge PITA.
If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.
That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.
Not everyone has a U mine or pre-existing bomb industry. The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is "yes", bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a "PITA") if you have a reactor core handy to start with.
That's... not the way the burden of proof works here. You don't do non-proliferation analysis by only worrying about it after someone has proliferated. I think if you want to announce that reactors are useless for building bombs you need to provide a cite. Certainly nuclear non-proliferation work by real professionals does include the existence of a domestic nuclear industry.
> That's... not the way the burden of proof works here. You don't do non-proliferation analysis by only worrying about it after someone has proliferated.
Well, let's put it this way. If you want to create HEU you can either start from natural uranium, which is significantly easier to come by and isn't horribly radioactive. Or then you start from spent fuel, which is under IAEA safeguards (for other reasons), is very radioactive and thus very cumbersome, expensive and slow to deal with. Now which is more likely?
Not saying creating HEU from spent fuel is impossible, it's just a stupid way of going about it, and spent fuel already being covered by IAEA safeguards for other reasons so it's probably also going to be easier to detect such a hypothetical clandestine nuclear program.
> I think if you want to announce that reactors are useless for building bombs you need to provide a cite.
If you read my original response I explicitly mentioned that you need a reactor if you want to create a U233 or Pu based bomb. So I have no idea where you get such a notion from.
> Certainly nuclear non-proliferation work by real professionals does include the existence of a domestic nuclear industry.
True, but again not a point I have argued against.
There's a fun game you can play with countries that build nuclear power plants: "guess the existential threat".
In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.
In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.
I doubt it was for any particular energy policy objective, if they were Soviet funded. The soviets (or whatever name you want to give them now) are masters of finding fracture points in relatively stable western societies and exploiting them to make unstable western societies that are less effective at combating Soviet policy. See: almost the entirety of the modern political discourse.
given how the united states starved them of foreign currency and then introduced economic shock therapy that reduced life expectancy of the population by 10 yrs particularly for men one might say the western imperialists were better at that
No but every nuclear power plant requires local military defenses, and every country that expands nuclear power requires this state power even if they don’t have nuclear weapons.
Please don't post sneering, unsubstantive comments like this on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'm not arguing about whether we should or shouldn't use nuclear energy. We should.
> 1. Only six reactors have had meltdowns, partial meltdowns, serious core damage, or fatalities.
If we assume that everything above INES[0] level 4 is already serious enough, then there were 11 accidents [1] and around 4484 fatalities (mostly 4000 indirect from Chernobyl but still).
> Gen 4 reactors have gravity driven control rods, passive cooling systems, core catchers, safer fuel, and moderators.
And yet, 100% safety is not achievable. But the risk is probably quite acceptable now.
I had the same response. History has shown that the high-priests of government are the least reliable, least consistent of all we’ve allowed to be the arbiters of truth.
I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.
> I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place.
The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s.
Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind.
It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks.
Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity.
I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.
Coal kills far more people than nuclear yet you never read about it. I think partly because any nuclear catastrophes are visible and concentrated to a single area.
Coal smoke kills over a much wider area and this impacts that 'newsworthiness' of this fear to spread. It's a class data vs feelings issue and yet again peoples feelings trump the data and undermines what experts familiar with both the danger and the data say.
Don't judge plane safety from the design of the brothers Wright aircraft
Fun fact: in the 90's, the reference gauge for aircraft safety was 1 accidental fatality per 100 million hours of passenger flight. Which is amazingly safe, far better than car and on a par with train.
Now, facing the growth of air travel, it was decided to raise this bar to 1 per billion hour. Not as an end by itself - this comes at very high cost and had a significant impact on travel prices. But because, with the growth of air travel, this would have implied one major accident per fortnight on average. And because those accident are more spectacular and relayed by media, civil aviation authorities feared this might raise angst and deter the public from air travel.
So, safety was enhanced, but mostly for marketing reasons.
I'm trying to reconcile your numbers with the Wikipedia "Aviation safety” article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety
which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.
Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?
My numbers come from conversations I recall with René Amalberti, a notable specialist in the area, having advised, among others, Airbus. The conversations were around 1993-96, when I was doing my PhD, and thus may be a bit blurry by now. Also, it is perfectly possible the reference values and measurement units have evolved since then.
Still your projection shows that both reference indicators and actual values are in the ballpark of the estimates I cited.
My (and Amalberti's) main point is that safety assessment is not just about minimizing the raw number of accidents, but involves tradeoffs between various concerns, including psychological perception and revenue. Otherwise, the safest airline would be the one that does not fly anyone.
It's absolutely insane how safe we've managed to make plane travel considering all the variables involved.
Statistically, taking a flight from NYC to London is safer than walking from 5th avenue to 4th avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
And yet we could regulate even more to make flying even safer, but likely negatively impacting the cost of flying.
This is a balance/tradeoff. We agree for some deaths, for a given price. It is the same for food safety, workplace safety.
With the latest designs and regulations there has been no major issue across all the nuclear facilities, except for Fukushima which sustained a 9 earthquake + a tsunami... and yet hardly any death (in the 10 years after, one death by cancer got compensated but still not clear if it was directly linked... the evacuation itself might be responsible for up to 50 deaths though, showing how the perception of nuclear can be overhyped).
It is possible that the nuclear industry is over-regulated (done mostly after Chernobyl) and could benefit to be reviewed based on the current knowledge.
But how much does a modern jet cost, including insurance? Compared to an armada of solar driven mini drones?
Without doing or seeing the actual math, my intuition leans on the side of it's probably much more efficient to put people together under certain constraints and fly them in one big container, than lots of unconstrained individual containers. See public transport vs cars for a similar tradeoff.
You have not understood the analogy, and I am not explaining it.
Remember that Poe's Law makes subtle parody or sarcasm almost impossible on the Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
Now the only real way I can understand your original comment is that lots of little drones can't actually do the job of commercial passenger planes, and therefore it's an ironic send-off of the people who try to compare the safety of lots of little intermittent renewable generators to nuclear power plants.
Because lots of little intermittent renewable generators can no more do the job of a nuclear power plant than the drones can do the job of the big passenger jet.
Well, if you don't even want to be understood, why say anything to begin with?
People fear what the media tells them to fear. I still remember the (publicly funded so not really independent from government) TV here having someone refer to a beech near Fukushima as "possibly one of the most dangerous places on earth" while holding up a Geiger counter that showed radiation levels barely above background levels.
Nuclear accidents have been a nothing-burger compared to all the deaths and health issues caused by coal and gas - but those are more spread out over time and don't make for as exciting news so no one cares. Shutting down nuclear instead of coal was never a rational decision but an emotional one.
And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.
Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.
I'm open to Nuclear if it can be done safely and if we can show we have the cultural maturity to keep it safe...but in the case of Chernobyl at least I think that statistics and other officious BS has been used to greatly downplay the true human cost in death, sickness, displacement and on many other metrics.
Two points:
Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time.
The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.
We do not even have to go as far as killed; injured will suffice[1]. The differences are extremely huge between fossil fuel vs nuclear.
[1] ... and it is on-going. It is happening right now.
We don’t actually do that, at least not in the USA. America’s industrial policy — until Trump — has been (politicians from certain areas of the country excepted) a gradual phaseout of coal and other fossil fuels. It’s taking time because West Virginia produces a lot of coal and their politicians have been assholes about it.
Fukushima, lack of insurance, and lack of waste storage facilities that no one wants to manage.
So in other words: FUD
Not only designed decades ago (which the PWR also was) but the designers also cut corners, ignored its faults and pushed it through politically because it was cheap and the Soviet governments could meet their 5 year targets easier. Early incidents were treated with cover-ups.
"The RBMK was considered by some in the Soviet Union to be already obsolete shortly after the commissioning of Chernobyl unit 1. Aleksandrov and Dollezhal did not investigate further or even deeply understand the problems in the RBMK, and the void coefficient was not analyzed in the manuals for the reactor. Engineers at Chernobyl unit 1 had to create solutions to many of the RBMK's flaws such as a lack of protection against no feedwater supply. Leningrad and Chernobyl units 1 both had partial meltdowns that were treated, alongside other nuclear accidents at power plants, as state secrets and so were unknown even to other workers at those same plants."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
Ok plenty of responses to the Chernobyl thing, but without a definition of "safe" it's a moot argument. The injury per watt hour speaks for itself, unless you had something else in mind.
It turns you are right that there was a ton of BS around the Chernobyl accident...but going in the other direction.
Every decade, the WHO publishes a report on the health effects of Chernobyl. Every decade, they had to reduce the projections for casualties.
By an order of magnitude.
When it happened, we didn't know better. Now we do.
This. People have phantasm about Chernobyl that are straight out of their imagination, in a fear driven narrative that is very far from the reality. When you look into it, you find that deaths directly linked to the meltdown are contained to people on site and first responders. Even the army of cleaners suffer more from random life risk (alcohol, smoking, cardiovascular diseases, etc...) than anything related to nuclear meltdown induced health issues.
But people are ideologically driven against it, in a quasi-religious way (worse than actual soft religion followers actually). There is no way to properly argue with those people, just like flat earthers, so we get the current sentiment on nuclear.
At least it's changing and those people will go the way of the dinosaurs, I hope.
It's not just about deaths. That's the thing. People can get sick, the environment gets polluted. A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back. The area will remain closed for generations.
Counting deaths does not do the actual damage justice.
How many towns were closed in order to strip mine coal? And no, that's not just a thing of the past but still happening today.
How many people's health was impacted from coal and coal burning exhaust, which btw. also includes radioactive particles.
Defending nuclear by saying coal is worse is kinda weird and comes across as "motivated reasoning". Nobody worth listening to wants more coal.
A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back
How does that measure against a whole planet being pulled out of thermal equilibrium, and the projected displacement of 1 billion people?
> was
vs.
> projected
> Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.
On the other hand, me falling of my roof, isn't going to put sheep farmers livelihoods at risk 1,800 miles away
Most importantly if you scale fatalities by power generated Nuclear is one of the best (last I checked only bested by solar). Coal generates releases way more radiation into the environment and has way more deaths during mining.
People are irrationally scared by large incidents and under-represent the regular deaths and costs that occur during operation.
What sort of nonsense statistic is fatalities per watt hour?
People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.
Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.
You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.
> Coal
Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.
Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.
[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.
Yes, that’s my point. They are scary - memorably so - in a way that very few other forms of power generation are. The closest equivalent I can think of is a major hydroelectric dam breaking.
Also remember that at each major incident, despite the failures that led to it, people fought tirelessly, in several cases sacrificing themselves, to reduce the scope of the disaster. Each of them could have potentially been worse. We are lucky in that the worst case death figures have not been added to the statistics.
Yes that's the point. Dam failure is much worse and actually the largest event of fatalities related to power generation was a dam breaking. Yet people are not against dams at all, even though they are not much better in terms of risks.
It's entirely irrational just like people who are scared of flying.
Irrational, perhaps, but also totally understandable and unlikely to change.
People fly but it requires a huge amount of trust to put yourself in someone’s hands like that, where if something goes wrong the results are catastrophic. People have faith in the regulations, they trust that the pilots are well-trained and the planes well-maintained, to the point where the chances of catastrophe are so small it overcomes their natural fears.
The same is true of the nuclear industry. The only thing making nuclear a remotely popular option is the extensive regulation which makes the risk to the consumer so small it outweighs their fears.
And the trouble is that it is up against solar and wind, where the cost is much smaller, and the absolute risk - if you discount people who choose to working to install them - really is very close to 0.
I think this line of thinking comes from a westernized world where all water is controlled.
Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.
In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.
The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.
Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.
We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.
Why you would be downvoted for mentioning this is beyond me. The numbers are well documented and hold up. Compared to every other major source of energy production, nuclear has the lower rate of fatalities by far, by any metric, and this despite it being far from a minor source of power globally.
Not only that, but it also produces less radioactive leakage than many other kinds of power sources that depend on resource mining on a large scale (looking at coal plants in particular here)
>50 direct fatalities
This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives.
Just saying that only 50 people died is pretty messed up in my opinion.
It's actually not, as it correctly states 50 direct fatalities.
What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.
The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.
One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.
And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.
Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
I will use the "rabid" replies I got as evidence towards interests of minimizing the scare for nuclear because there's many other interests behind it and I doubt it would get a fair shake. A lot of political and economic interests are known to muddy the truth.
And this isn't the first time this happened, had a few debates before and out of nowhere quite a few people insist going as hard as possible, to no end, to dispel "misinformation", like that is what normal people do. I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose".
>Radiophobia
I do not have this issue, I am not scared of a bit higher radiation, I understand the body can deal with quite a lot (compared to normal background).
I am scared of what could happen when humans and their politics get involved. There's more dangers than proper implementation, there can also be sabotage fears, as recent events have shown. I really don't understand why you'd accuse me of such a thing unless you're trying to smear me, which again...makes your rabid responses rather suspicious.
> I will use the "rabid" replies I got...
All the replies other than yours have politely pointed out that you were incorrect.
> >Radiophobia
> I do not have this issue,
The definition says: "...leading to overestimating the health risks of radiation compared to other risks."
That looks exactly like what you are doing.
> I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose".
Nobody here has done that...with possibly one exception.
You are denying the pain and suffering of the people who suffer due to us not adopting more nuclear power. For what "higher purpose" this should be I can't fathom.
The adoption of nuclear power had saved an estimated 1.8 million lives by 2011.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html
Conversely, the turning off of nuclear power plants or delaying/cancelling of new builds post Chernobyl has cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives.
We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the U.S., 33 in the U.K. and 318 million globally
https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/sites/science...
A more compact read:
Coal Pollution Likely Kills More People Annually Than Will Ever Die from Chernobyl Radiation
https://reason.com/2016/04/26/more-deaths-from-coal-pollutio...
> How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short.
Not that many, according to long term studies.
Not many unlike what you want to believe. And there is no mechanism to directly link them to the nuclear meltdown. Since they are suspiciously clustered in specific places, it is more likely that there are other environmental and genetic problems that have more influence than the result of secondary radiation.
In addition to what other comments have said below, it's also important to state that the indirect impacts of the alternatives aren't widely studied, so it's practically impossible to compare. How do we figure out how many people have a significant impact on their life because of the fossil fuel we burn and put all sorts of crap into the atmosphere?
Okay, my reflection is as follows. Investing in nuclear power today is a bit akin to betting against solar/wind + battery. In my opinion it is a losing bet.
For a nuclear powerplant to be economically feasible, it first needs to be built (10+ years at this point), and then run for tens of years at consistent output rates. To make this worth it for investors, the state often guarantees the price for energy for tens of years after construction, picking up the difference if the electricity price falls.
So in essence, building a nuclear power plant today is locking in that price of electricity for something like 50 years. Solar is today already much cheaper than nuclear, and is coming down in price very quickly, as are batteries and other storage methods. If this development continues and there are further breakthroughs in storage, the taxpayer would have to keep footing the bill to buy expensive nuclear energy for years in the future.
Therefore, instead of investing in reviving nuclear, I would much rather invest the same amount in upgrading the grid, researching storage methods, and subsidizing grid-scale solar and wind. I think this will be the better choice for the taxpayer in the long run.
I am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?
This is the main reason why I am, generally speaking, against nuclear as a universal solution.
A question for pro-nuclear folks: Would you be okay with having a highly corrupt low HDI country building nuclear facilities (conversion and deconversion, enrichment, power plants) next to your borders?
This is similar to the reasoning of Austria vehemently opposing nuclear reactors to be built in neighbouring countries, even if downstream on the Danube, even if 200 km from their border.
The latest decision (although on the surface, not on an environmental issue like the article is about, but on state aid measures - but actually not the real reason for Austria's opposition): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...
So, I believe, yes, low HDI countries with high corruption do have the right to build nuclear facilities. This is not like a combination of low HDI and high corruption index awarded by some international organization has the approval rights to such questions of sovereignity. There is a whole range of special regulation regarding who can build nuclear stations and under what conditions, with a special agency to ensure the safe use (IAEA) - that should be the only criteria for letting nations build nuclear stations, not corruption, HDI or how rich the countries are.
Slovenia has been running a reactor for a good long while without any problems and it's extremely safe. So from our POV, it's much more likely that Austria would prefer everyone around them to import Austrian energy instead of producing their own.
Also, Austria makes no sense. It opposes a new reactor in Slo being built but that means that the current one will just keep getting its life extended. Clearly it's not about safety.
They are more likely to cause more damage, just less visibly, in building substandard fossil fuel plants.
Absolutely. Just stop using LWR as the blueprint.
So you would oppose an entire, globe-spanning branch of deeply necessary technology (clean energy) with all its vast opportunities for improvement, innovation, and management under all kinds of more responsible means, because the government functionaries in your specific part of the world can't get their moral shit together (and given what you describe, wouldn't be able to do it well no matter what kid of large-scale energy is put into their hands)?
They're concerned about the safety of corrupt management. Several posters here reassure that Chernobyl etc. were poorly managed and that we've learned a lot since then. But ongoing corruption doesn't instill confidence that learnings will be incorporated safely.
Saying that catastrophes have been uncommon over decades is also not reassuring as one would expect catastrophes to increase if we go from not building and decommissioning to rapid building and recommissioning.
Maybe the upper limit of atomic power catastrophe is still a low casualty count. In that case we shouldn't reassure people that we've learned and improved and instead show that even rampantly corrupt administration cannot do much harm, if that's the case.
No. I only vote in my country. Other countries can do as they see fit.
This is true regardless of how the electron potential is generated.
I was involved in the nuclear industry in the 90's.
Why impose externalities on others when solar and wind are so cheap and less risky? It seems like proponents fall for technological aspirationalism without considering pragmatic consequences and risks of shoveling enormous sums of money for unnecessary risks and inefficient allocations of capital because it's seems just barely unobtainable or blocked by "them" when it's simply economically unviable.
And it's selective technological aspirationalism. Why is unbounded optimism appropriate for nuclear but not for renewables? The engineering principle of KISS says renewables should be much more improvable, as indeed the data indicates they are.
It's the other way around.
Nuclear works now. We just have to build it.
Intermittent renewables supplying an industrial society does not. And there is no way to get from here to there except a lot of handwaving and "magic happens here".
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/20100608webcontentchicagosli...
When you have to build Nuclear Reactors then this is not now. The avg. building time of Nuclear Reactors is 9-12 Years.
6.5 years.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
I am counting delays that are always occuring. There is only two reactor blocks that I know that didn't have delays in recent years.
These are build times for just single Reactor Blocks, in 2020 to 2022. https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2023-v5.pdf#...
Real examples in the last years: Olkiluoto 3 - 17 Years SHIDAO BAY-1 - 9 Years Flammanvill-3 - 17 Years VOGTLE-4 - 11 Years FANGCHENGGANG-4 - 8 Years RAJASTHAN-7 - 14 Years
No you are cherry picking specific examples that fit your incorrect claim. 6.5 years is the current average.
Even more reason to start now.
PV has improved in cost/W by nearly three orders of magnitude since it was introduced, and by an order of magnitude since 2010.
Nuclear fans could only dream of this rate of improvement.
Nuclear doesn't work in the sense of being competitive. It's behind and falling farther behind with each passing day.
The best time to have given up on nuclear was decades ago. The second best time is now.
> Nuclear fans could only dream of this rate of improvement.
Nuclear doesn't need this rate of improvement, because it was always cheap.
> Nuclear doesn't work in the sense of being competitive.
Empirically false.
Also: if it weren't competitive, Germany wouldn't have had to outlaw nuclear, it just would have disappeared on its own.
> The best time to have given up on nuclear was decades ago.
Your incorrect and unsubstantiated opinion is not shared by the rest of the world.
The reason to be against nuclear energy is quite simple - human error.
Unlike flying, we’ve not shown nuclear energy to be sufficiently idiot-proof for many people to be comfortable with it. That and the fact that radiation is invisible, which makes it somehow almost paranormal.
The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered).
But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it.
The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl.
Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven and earth to solve the problem… and if they hadn’t, then the entire continent might be dead today.
And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.
It’s important to understand the qualifier per unit of energy.
The correct parable for you would have been the number of bear deaths vs interactions with bears weighed against number of car deaths vs interactions with cars.
You mean, number of deaths per incident? Yeah, that makes sense.
With that logic, we should put 100.00% of all public funding into protecting us against world ending asteroids.
One day we might wish we did.
Not apples to apples.
Just being near a potentially aggressive bear is a bad situation.
Being near a car or a nuclear power plant is not a bad siuation.
Of course you should run in the other direction if you're close to a potentially aggressive bear.
Same thing if you're in the path of an out of control car, or near a nuclear power plant accident.
But you've got to separate the "probability of bad situation occurring" from the "severity of the bad situation when it does occur".
You generally can't really pet a wild brown bear, since they are not interested in humans and would avoid you. You can't run away from it either, since it can outrun you easily
By your logic, it's wrong to spend many billions per year on traffic safety. It should go into bear safety instead.
"Average deaths per TWh produced" is a good yardstick to me.
This analogy is probably wrong.
No. You just have an irrational fear of brown bears.
I disagree with cheapest. If you factor in twenty years build time and nuclear waste disposal, the whole thing is not economically viable.
Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on.
You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.
It is expensive because of the regulatory burdens associated with making it unreasonably safe. By unreasonably safe I mean that harms predicted by radiation models are unscientific, and death rate expectations are far lower than alternative power generation technologies.
Nuclear fuel storage is relatively straightforward, and volumes have potential to be reduced 30x through recycling.
Nuclear power plants require international laws and international cooperation for insurance, because one serious incident, such as Chornobyl, can wipe a continent.
In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.
Still, though, if nuclear continued growing at the same pace it was until the 80s we'd be in a massively better spot climate change wise.
Sure, these days its too expensive in relative terms but switching back to fossil fuels due to all the Chornobyl/Three Mile panic (but mainly likely because of the cost) might end up being one of the bigger mistakes in human history.
We can make nuclear safe (enough) but after one big incident nobody wanted the political career suicide to push for this. So we are stuck with criticizing stone-age level nuclear power because we never took it further. The West never stopped doing something just because the USSR didn’t do it properly.
If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking kills 7-8 times more people than cars every year (that’s 80-100 Chernobyls worth every year) and we still allow it.
The reasons are political not technically or financially insurmountable obstacles. We didn’t shut down nuclear in Europe for “green” reasons or because we can’t improve it, or because it kills too many people, but because enough Russian money went into politicians’ pockets to do this.
You arguments boils down to «it's OK to wipe a continent once in a while, because nuclear energy is the safest energy option per megawatt produced».
No, the argument is that it didn't "wipe the continent" and in fact caused far less damage than other things we're totally fine with. I don't see GP saying that they want an incident like this to repeat, just that, if it did, the consequences would be far less severe than "wiping the continent".
> OK to wipe a continent
Why not exaggerate to the "entire planet" if we are going this way..
Regardless, in hindsight humanity could have prevented (at least to a significant extent) climate change if we doubled down on nuclear 40-50 years ago instead of stopping most expansion. What will be the cost of that?
I doubt so: 416 industrial nuclear reactors are deployed in the world today. They produce 10% of the electricity, itself 20% of the final energy, so nuclear power produces at best 2% of the energy consumed.
Nuclear power would provide 10% of the energy, which would be far from sufficient since it is necessary to electrify uses (in order to reduce the quantity of fossil fuel burned) and therefore produce more electricity, if we could multiply the power of the fleet by 5, therefore building around 1500 new reactors and keeping the existing fleet active. Hoping for this before 2100 would be absurd.
Well, its way too late now. 80 reactors were launched between 1960 and 1970, 185 between 70s, 237 in the 80s, in the 90s it was barely 60.
Instead if it kept doubling every decade it would be well over 10%.
Of course electrification of transportation etc. should have starter much earlier.
Obviously none of that was economical compared to coal/gas/oil back then.
> doubling every decade
Uranium deposits mined under the right conditions can supply the current stock for at best two centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium
To extend this beyond that, we must hope for a revolutionary production process (pursued in vain for decades: breeders...), the ability to exploit less promising uranium deposits, thus tolerating increased emissions and costs, or the discovery of a large deposit.
Hoping for such a discovery is risky because intensive prospecting began at the end of the Second World War (the quest for nuclear weapons), and the rapid and sharp rise in the price of uranium (a bubble) that occurred around 2007 triggered a massive investment in prospecting, the results of which (15%) are very inadequate.
Therefore, multiplying the stock by five would leave at best 40 years of uranium certainly available under current conditions, and would therefore be an inept investment (one needs to amortize the plant).
Moreover there are geostrategic considerations: many nations don't have any reserve not want to have to buy uranium (creating a dependency) or technical expertise.
Since the 70s, oil reserves only lasted for another decade.
"Current reserves" is a moving target: once scarcity raises prices, prospecting makes sense again. Uranium is incredibly cheap. Prospecting is not worth it as there are enough reserves to exploit in the foreseeable future.
Seawater extraction is starting to be competitive with mining. With that, even natural Uranium becomes essentially unlimited.
In addition, we currently throw away >95% of the energy potential of the Uranium we use. Why? Recycling is not economically viable, because raw Uranium is far too cheap (see above). So facto 20 of what we've used so far is just sitting in Castors. And fortunately not in deep geological repositories, out of reach.
And then there's Thorium, which is significantly more abundant in the crust than raw Uranium. And of the Uranium, only a small percentage is currently usable.
Fuel is simply not going to be a problem.
> Uranium is incredibly cheap. Prospecting is not worth it as there are enough reserves to exploit in the foreseeable future.
A huge uranium bubble between 2004 and 2008, which triggered massive investments for prospection... and a ridiculous result (15%). The cause is known: the quest for atomic weapons triggered during the 1950's and 1960's massive prospection, and there is no decisive way to better prospect and few not yet prospected zones.
> Seawater extraction is starting to be competitive with mining
This is periodically announced since the 1970's, and no-one could industrialize. Bottomline: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium" Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...
> In addition, we currently throw away >95% of the energy potential of the Uranium > So facto 20 of what we've used so far is just sitting in Castors. And fortunately not in deep geological repositories, out of reach.
It would be sound if a ready-for-deployment model of industrial breeder reactor. There is none.
> And then there's Thorium
Indeed, but not industrial reactor. Next.
LOL. An overview article that was obsolete even in 2016 when it was published. You need to get with the times.
"... the amount of uranium in seawater is truly renewable as well as inexhaustible."
"New technological breakthroughs from DOE's Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater economically possible."
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1882/nuclear-power-becomes-...
More recently:
Ultra-highly efficient enrichment of uranium from seawater via studtite nanodots growth-elution cycle
Nature, 2024.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50951-4
High-capacity uranium extraction from seawater through constructing synergistic multiple dynamic bonds
Nature, 2025
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-024-00346-y
If you prefer a popular overview:
Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
A speculative bubble is not the same as serious serious demand, and the actual demand never materialized. The vast majority of the "prospecting" was just speculators, not serious mining companies. And for serious prospecting, the 4 year time-frame was way too short, you just barely get done with the early stages of
- land acquisition and permitting
- Geological surveys (airborne radiometrics, mapping, geochemistry)
- Target generation
- Initial drilling programs
- Preliminary resource estimates (if successful)
You don't have enough to get to actual serious exploration and feasibility studies:
- Infill drilling
- Metallurgical testing
- Environmental baseline studies
- Scoping and feasibility studies
- More permitting
- Community consultation
Breeder reactors exist, they face the same problem as recycling: mined uranium is still way too cheap to make investment in those technologies economically attractive.
Should Uranium get more scarce and thus more expensive, the economic incentives change very quickly and then we can pull those technologies off the shelf.
Same for Thorium reactors: currently not necessary, as we have plenty of Uranium for the existing Uranium based designs. Doesn't stop companies like Copenhagen Atomics from investing, as they see other advantages in addition to very readily available fuel.
Having a massive head start at stopping or slowing down climate change would have been quite nice, though. Even if it weren't a permanent solution.
But yes, I agree that fossil fuels also had a lot of very significant political, economical and technological advantages over both nuclear and renewables which is why coal/gas/oil won. For renewables it might be changing now it just might be a bit too late...
No, those are your words. The dumbed down, skewed, ragebaity, Fox News level strawman. The guaranteed way to drag down the conversation when you have nothing of value to say: pretend the other guy said something just as worthless and then fight that because it’s easier and you think you have a shot.
Your arguments have been shot down all over this thread. Do you need a win so bad?
We have had several serious nuclear incidents and none have destroyed either a continent or the people on it
That it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it couldn't happen in the future. We have never had a worst case event but we do know pretty well what the consequences of a worst case event could be.
The worst case consequences of Chernobyl were stopped because people literally risked their lives to prevent it. The fire was put out, the steam explosion was prevented, and countless lives were saved as a result.
Even so, many countries spent billions, over several decades, to minimize the consequences. As far as 2000 miles away, animals are still to this day fed special foods and managed to avoid prolonged grazing in contaminated areas.
Think about it for a second - over 2000 miles away, almost 40 years later, this still requires active management. Despite best efforts to handle the situation when it happened.
Now consider that every reactor carries it's own copy of the risks, and they only generate around 10 TWh of electricity per year.
That's just way too little electricity for such a risk. It makes no sense.
Meanwhile solar and storage is deployed at a rate equivalent to a new reactor every month as we speak. Faster, cheaper, and comparatively risk-free.
Most Russian Roulette games have many 'clicks' before the 'bang'.
these were the bangs
Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody knows for sure, however after each of these click/bang the "there will be no more problem!" thesis seems less and less prominently published.
> Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking
Avoiding car accident and not smoking is way, way easier than avoiding most effects of a major nuclear accident (fine dangerous and very durable dust disseminated on a vast geographical zone, thanks to wind and rain).
The total amount of victims of the Chernobyl accident is a matter of debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
No, we can't. I worked in the industry when there was strong, independent regulation and private engineering consultancies. These don't exist anymore. The NRC is stacked politically and it and EPRI lack the gray beards it once had and the engineering industry is a shadow of its former self. Dunning-Kruger ignorant proponents advocate for it without understanding the issues or the complications in this current situation that is a far different situation than 30 years ago that might've been reasonable when Duke Energy wanted a revival. Its time has passed because the economics of conventional alternatives make it moot.
I meant “we” as humanity. You gave a very US-centric perspective at a time when the US finds it challenging to deal with many long solved issues. Why conflate not wanting, not caring, not wanting to pay for it, or just not being able right now with it being humanly impossible?
We didn’t get to making the calculations of economics to improve the tech because of the corruption and lack of education I was mentioning before. What we have is calculations based on 60 years old tech and risk analysis based on a 40 year old accident.
As I said in the previous comment, if you’d do the same for commercial flight you might find steam ships are a better deal.
You would need to wait at least five years to make sure Europe will not go the way of the US due to the similar uptick of the same ideology now in power in the US, more if it's still a tiebreak in five years time.
Betting on a technology that has a catastrophic likelihood of low probability but high impact at a time when your scientific and regulatory institutions are crumbling is a high risk strategy. Unless you're arguing that modern nuclear tech is literally childproof and not susceptible to catastrophe under idiocratic regimes.
Your mind appears closed and you're not interested in having a normal conversation because you don't have any valid points. Best of luck to you.
I worked with Japanese and Germans in the field, so I guess you don't know what you're talking about and are projecting your biases. The owner of the company was a Jewish Moroccan expat who contributed greatly to the field. Please have a look inside yourself before confessing your issues.
Rude and aggressive reply to an otherwise perfectly civil comment, “trust me bro, I’m an expert”, bringing up “arguments” but never actually stating any, and chatgpt-like random statements about Jewish-Moroccans from “the company”. Hallmarks of competence. Color me humbled...
What kind assumptions is this based on?
> can wipe a continent
Sorry, but no.
Chernobyl exclusion zone is less than a single area of the Agent Orange usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial-herbicide-spray-mi...
Again, Chernobyl was not the worst case scenario. Everyone knows the story, some heroes sacrified their lives to prevent it.
You mean, everyone watched the TV story which has little basis in fact. Chernobyl was the worst case scenario - there's no way to build a reactor that would produce worse radiation effects when destroyed than to use a pile of graphite.
> harms predicted by radiation models are unscientific,
Where are your scientific alternative models?
Long build times are often the result of constantly changing regulations. Also it’s interesting that build times in Japan are almost 2 times smaller than in US.
Nuclear doesn't have a great record in other countries either. I might have the wrong figures but Hinkley Points C is over 2 times over budget and likely to be 5+ years late.
The exemption being France and maybe China?
France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well.
I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong
No, the exceptions are builds like HPC.
The average build time is currently 6.5 years. The median is lower at 5.8. The variations across both time and space of those average are neither large nor particularly systematic.
There have always been outliers, so if you focus on those you can "prove" anything you like.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
Which for western construction creates a dataset weighted around ~1980. Not sure why that is relevant half a century later?
Instead taking the average of all modern western construction and we get close to 15 years.
With the recent insanely subsidies european projects being proposed even the initial timeline calls for a ~10 years build time. Assuming everything goes to plan.
In France, the last construction is Flamanville EPR. It is at least 5 times over budget and 15 years late
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...
We’ve had our share of anti-nuclear activists in France. The project got endlessly stalled, with shifting legislative grounds, and general opposition. Also, the general inefficiency and incompetence from Areva meant this was a match made in heaven (or hell, depends) to get nearly infinite delay.
Flamanville 3 failed because of screwups in the design and construction. What you're blaming the opposition for is exposing that and holding the nuclear people responsible. How dare they, right? /s
> Flamanville 3 failed because of screwups in the design and construction
Indeed, and it is so undeniable that it is the official conclusion. Source (French): https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/media/organes-parleme...
At least 5 times, indeed: it was due to cost 3.3 billion euros, its cost to date is 23.7, it it not running at full power and a major update (reactor cover) is already planned.
https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2025/01/14/epr-de-fl...
And even that absolutely catastrophic nuclear construction project has a better ROI than any German intermittent renewables. After almost 25 years of renewable subsidies.
Note: catastrophic nuclear is still better than best renewables.
Source please. That truly does not make sense given that renewable subsidies are being phased out around the world and renewables are the fastest growing energy source in human history.
In contrast nuclear power is backsliding, and the few projects which get green lit have insanely large subsidies attached.
> That truly does not make sense
Reality doesn't have to make sense to you.
> renewable subsidies are being phased out around the world
Nope. Countries are trying to phase out renewables subsidies. And failing. Recently, the UK, Denmark and Germany have had offshore-wind sales with exactly zero bids.
> fastest growing energy source in human history.
People love those delicious subsidies.
> In contrast nuclear power is backsliding
Nope.
> and the few projects which get green lit have insanely large subsidies attached.
Only in markets that have been thoroughly distorted by subsidies and other preferential treatment for intermittent renewables.
Let’s begin with concluding that you could not find a source for your claims. Instead you go on a tangent hoping to muddy the water.
I find it interesting how someone so smart can just lie through their teeth.
Now you’re trying to paint the entire renewable industry, solar, storage, onshore wind etc. with the paint brush of off-shore wind.
The German and Danish auctions were negative bid auctions.
To explain what that means: companies were asked to pay for the privilege to build off shore wind at a set very low CFD. Those delicious subsidies right?!? Might even call them negative subsidies!
Given recent interest rate hikes and increased cost for construction materials off shore wind is right on the cusp of viability.
Other projects like this one in Germany moves forward without any subsidies.
https://group.vattenfall.com/press-and-media/pressreleases/2...
What you of course don’t mention is that the recent interest rate hikes and increases in construction costs impacts nuclear power far more than off-shore wind and other renewables.
So someone actually knowledgeable in the topic would not promote nuclear power as the alternative.
So again. Please stop lying and misrepresenting cherry picked stats. You know better.
> Let’s begin with concluding that you could not find a source for your claims.
The source is the report by the French Cour des Comptes. I am not your research assistant.
> I find it interesting how someone so smart can just lie through their teeth.
I find it interesting that you have no arguments left and have to resort to ad-hominem attacks.
And thank you for confirming my point:
>off shore wind is right on the cusp of viability.
Meaning the very best off-shore wind projects may or may not be profitable. We don't know yet.
Whereas the worst French nuclear project in recent history (FV3) is predicted by the Cour des Comptes to have "modest" profitability in the worst case scenarios.
So once again: worst nuclear >> best intermittent renewable.
QED.
The report with a discount rate lower than the inflation and a 40 year pay back time.
For anyone even having a slight economic understanding the writers of that report are shouting from the top of their lungs that investing in nuclear power is pure lunacy.
But shrouded in a language allowing lobbyists and blindingly biased people to cite it.
Any understanding of economy and shilling for nuclear power seems to be a very disjoint set given what we are seeing in this thread.
"Interesting" unsubstantiated opinions.
And counterfactual, as nuclear is immensely profitable and the world is investing in nuclear.
Here’s the source Cour des Comptes report validating that you are incorrect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45243337
The world also very much is not investing in nuclear power given how it is backsliding as a % of the global energy mix with a huge number of closures looming in the close future with no replacements in sight.
Given this answer I don’t know if you are either trolling or have serious problems with delusions.
I dislike drawing conclusions so I will end this conversion with a question:
If you are not trolling, have you tried seeking help from the mental healthcare system?
Sorry, you are still incorrect.
Nuclear had a record production year in 2024, despite the German exit.
2025 is predicted to be another record year.
There are currently 60+ reactors under construction, 90+ in preparation and 170+ announced/in planning.
The future is nuclear.
Please. Do tell me where I am incorrect. You just keep making unsubstantiated claims about me being "incorrect" and when we go to the sources they contradict you.
Or you are explicitly going on tangents attempting to muddy the water. Nuclear power having a record year in 2025 and me claiming:
> The world also very much is not investing in nuclear power given how it is backsliding as a % of the global energy mix with a huge number of closures looming in the close future with no replacements in sight.
Are both correct statements. I even acknowledge that we have a lot of existing infrastructure while commmenting on the trend line.
That 60+ reactors number also includes several abandoned projects. In 2024 the world managed to complete 6 reactors. So far the number in 2025 is a 1 reactor.
Of course ignoring that this is a debate focused on the west with western construction costs. In which the nuclear construction rate far under the replacement rate.
But you can't deal with reality. When it came to the future you went straight into hypotheticals not backed by firm deals hoping no one noticed.
This is not a sane behaviour, nor commenting in good faith.
Nuclear projects are easy to announce. Maybe we can ask these reactors how it went getting a final investment decision:
France:
EPR2 project, do I need to say more? Stuck in financial limbo due to the insanely large subsidies needed to get it off the ground with a government that just collapsed due to being underwater in debt while having a spending problem and being unable to reign it in.
UK:
- Sizewell C - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sizewell_nuclear_power_stati...)
- Wylfa-Newydd - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wylfa_Newydd_nuclear_power_sta...
- Oldbury B - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldbury_nuclear_power_station#...
- Bradwell B - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradwell_B_nuclear_power_stati...
- Moorside - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorside_nuclear_power_station
US:
- Bellefonte - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellefonte_Nuclear_Plant#Units...
- Bell bend - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Bend_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- Callaway - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Nuclear_Generating_St...
- Calvert Cliffs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Nuclear_Power_P...
- Comance Peak - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_Peak_Nuclear_Power_Pl...
- Galena - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- Grand Gulf - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Gulf_Nuclear_Station#Uni...
- Levy County - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levy_County_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
- Nine Mile Point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Mile_Point_Nuclear_Genera...
- River Bend - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Bend_Nuclear_Generating_...
- Shearon Harris - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shearon_Harris_Nuclear_Power_P...
- South Texas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Texas_Nuclear_Generating...
- Victoria County - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_County_Station
- Virgil C. Summer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...
China:
Keeps announcing reactors without starting to build them. China also recently revamped the financing side removing the previous CFD are instead forcing the reactors to compete on market terms which is slowing down investment.
China averages ~4-5 construction starts per year which cumulatively leads to nuclear power shrinking as a part of the electricity mix.
Sorry, I have no time to debunk all the disinformation you put out.
> China: Keeps announcing reactors without starting to build them.
I asked ChatGPT:
Is it true that China keeps announcing nuclear reactors without building any? ChatGPT said: No, it's not true that China keeps announcing nuclear reactors without building any. In fact, China is one of the most active countries in the world in building nuclear power plants. Here's what the facts show (as of 2024–2025): China is actively building nuclear reactors As of 2024, over 20 reactors are under construction in China, making it the country with the largest number of reactors being built. Many more are in various stages of planning and permitting. China has over 50 reactors in operation already and continues to expand its fleet aggressively. China’s typical process China often announces long-term nuclear energy plans as part of its five-year plans or carbon neutrality goals (aiming for carbon neutrality by 2060). Not all announcements lead to immediate construction — some projects are proposed or approved but not yet started, due to: Regulatory approval processes Site selection Financing and technology partnerships Local opposition or environmental reviews Examples of real construction and completion The Hualong One (HPR-1000), a Chinese-designed Gen-III reactor, has been built and connected to the grid in multiple locations, including: Fuqing-5 and Fuqing-6 Karachi-2 and Karachi-3 in Pakistan (exported models) China is also investing in SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) and fast breeder reactors, including: The Shidao Bay HTGR (high-temperature gas-cooled reactor), which reached criticality. The CFR-600 fast reactor, under construction. Why might people think China is only announcing? Some reasons for the misunderstanding: Media headlines often report announcements, but follow-up coverage of construction or completion is rare unless it's a major milestone. Some proposed projects take years to move forward, so people may assume they’re stalled. There is general skepticism toward state announcements in some international media.
Conclusion:
China is not just announcing nuclear reactors — it is actively building and commissioning them at a faster rate than almost any other country. While not every announcement leads to immediate construction, a large percentage do eventually get built.
----
> That 60+ reactors number also includes several abandoned projects.
The PRIS database lists 63 reactor projects.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstruction...
How many of those do you consider "abandoned"? Is it a significant number?
----
Financial Limbo. Once again, I asked ChatGPT:
"Is the EPR2 project stuck in financial limbo? Not exactly. While the EPR2 nuclear reactor project faces significant financial uncertainties, rising costs, and regulatory hurdles, it is not truly "stuck in financial limbo." The project is currently in a prolonged but fairly typical preparatory phase for large-scale infrastructure, where securing financing, approvals, and detailed planning takes time. These challenges are common in complex, capital-intensive projects—nuclear or otherwise—and reflect the cautious and deliberate approach needed before construction can begin. The French government and EDF remain engaged, with key decisions and financing strategies expected soon, indicating the project is still moving forward, albeit slowly and with some risks."
It won’t be competitive with anything.
But that’s OK, Theresa May signed a guarantee that they’d get paid an uncompetitive price by the taxpayer, regardless.
But that expensive guaranteed price still wasn't enough to cover the actual costs and the EdF CFO resigned in protest.
Once that became too obvious to deny, after the French government had renationalised EdF, they were begging the UK government to give them more money, possibly buried in the contract for the second plant build.
For that build they stopped using CFD, a financial instrument designed for nuclear but which has massively helped renewables, be ause it couldn't hide the nuclear cost overruns. They're now charging electricity users in advance for the nuclear they are going to build with no guarantee of eventual costs.
South Korean company build a NPP in 7 years in Saudi Arabia.
United Arab Emirates.
Fastest build times are Japan with under 4 years.
Germany built its Konvois in just shy of 6 years.
Just before we stopped building altogether.
France built 50+ reactors in 15 years.
We know how to build nuclear quickly, reliably and (relatively) cheaply. We also know how to do it slowly, eratically and expensively.
Fortunately the former comes almost but not entirely automatically with building lots of them.
During the past 25 years there were projects aiming at building industrial nuclear reactors. They all ended badly (canceled, way over budget or delay...).
That's completely false.
The Konvois in Germany were extremely successful.
France built 50+ reactors in 15 years from a standing start.
I wrote "During the past 25 years"
Please describe any nuclear reactor which was successfully built in France or Germany during the past 25 years.
France: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
Germany didn't build any.
France built hardly any.
And that's the complete answer: we know how to build nuclear reactors quickly and cheaply.
Building only very few of different novel designs while slowly (or quickly) losing the industrial base to do so, for example by making it illegal to build more (or at all) is exactly how you don't do it.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
But nuclear is fast to build, if we ignore all modern western examples!
> South Korean company build a NPP in 7 years in Saudi Arabia.
Barakah (delivered March 2024) was late (by about 3 years?), undersold (KEPCO hadn't any other ongoing project and the Korean government at the time wanted a nuclear phase-out) and various tricks are now known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
but comparing to solar / wind there you also have to factor batteries production, battery replacement, wind turbine replacement and recycling (they are not easily recyclable), cleaning solar panels etc.
'recyclable' is such a vague term. E.g. radiation-affected typically easily recycled materials are very hard to deal with (think e.g. pipe steel from power plants) and are effectively non-recyclable, instead of close to 100% recyclable, as their non-contaminated counterparts.
Opposed to that, battery recycling is mostly hard to deal with in terms of economics, and admittedly the chemistry involved is complex, but at least from a technical point of view, plenty of solutions are available - and the tech is coming in relatively quickly now that the demand is there (remember, first generation EVs are just now getting closer to EOL).
It's slightly amusing that recycling of a wind turbine is treated as if it was a big deal - yes the laminated rotor parts can't be part of circular economies, but the total material amount of this laughably small. All the metal components are very easily recycled.
I'm talking about wind turbine wings. A lot of stuff is fiberglass and have to be buried.
In many Western nations bury them is now forbidden. Most are burnt in cement kilns (producing useful heat).
In France, 95% of the mass of a wind turbine must be recycled (legal obligation), the concrete base is not spared and the law requires wind farm operators to lock (upfront) a financial guarantee (deposit).
Recyclable blades are appearing (RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...) and even existing ones are being considered: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...
According to EDF (multinational electric utility company owned by the government of France, the giant in France, owning and operating all nuke plants) 94% of a solar panel is recyclable. In France most of it is already recycled.
Yea, I know. Their volume may look impressive, the actual amount of material is quite small and 'burying' that absolutely non-toxic stuff isn't any problem.
They are easily recyclable. Nuclear isn’t, unless of course you have a 24/7 protected and monitored by 100’s of people storage place to keep all that safe for the next 10000 years. Very ‘cheap’ indeed.
From a technical point of view, nuclear waste is a solved problem. The issue is political.
Ibidem for the fuel: yes, you can depends on wild countries; You can also depends on Australia, Canada and India, which seems like not-so-bad countries (in my opinion);
> From a technical point of view, nuclear waste is a solved problem
When it comes to nuclear waste repositories real experts official publish: "Internationally, it is understood that there is no reliable scientific basis for predicting the process or likelihood of inadvertent human intrusion."
Source: https://international.andra.fr/sites/international/files/201...
I have no idea how this information relates to the parent post;
A problem with nuclear waste is that living being (especially human beings) must not be exposed to it.
Yes
Like magma, sulfuric acid, mercurium, lead, basically thousands of stuff
You eat it, you die
You're being obtuse on purpose and that's not nice. Could you please just respond to the argument in a good faith manner rather than pretend you don't understand the argument?
Yes
As I said earlier, I do not understand the relation between the answer and its parent
Yes, toxic waste are toxic, this is not the issue (as far as I know)
The issue is the long life of nuclear waste, which is a solved problem due to fast breeder reactor (half life ~30ky, which is nothing compared to what light water reactors produce); Also, the quantity of waste is drastically reduces;
Why are not mass producing them: political issue;
> solved problem due to fast breeder reactor
For this we need an industrial model of breeder reactor. Please name it. There is none.
Many nations (US, France, Germany, Japan...) engulfed huge amounts of money on this quest, during decades.
TLDR: this works on lab reactors cajoled by scientists. It doesn't work industrially.
Russia has (by far) the most advanced potentially pertinent reactors ("BN"), and they work so well that this nation pauses on this architecture (sodium) and is back to the lab (300MWe) with another architecture (lead) named "BREST".
> the quantity of waste is drastically reduces
Therefore it would not solve the problem (we would have to put this waste somewhere then pray that nobody ever mingles with it).
> Russia has (by far) the most advanced potentially pertinent reactors
Wikipedia disagrees
> we would have to put this waste somewhere then pray that nobody ever mingles with it).
Preventing people from killing themselves is not an issue per-se.
> Wikipedia disagrees
? Please quote and source, or name a model of industrial breeder reactor ready-to-be-deployed.
((nuclear waste))
> Preventing people from killing themselves is not an issue per-se.
"Wikipedia disagrees": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
Ethics?
Knives can kill: should we destroy them ? Height can kill: should we make the earth even ? Rock can kill: should we ban rocks ? Water can kill: should we destroy all waters ?
(yes, this is argumentum ad absurdum; Effort is made to prevent access to the nuclear waste, like all toxic materials)
Solved problem? Have you ever waited 10000 years to see if the waste really decomposes and the area where it was stored is safe for kids to play?
Ergo FBR, no 10000y+ nuclear waste, problem solved
(there is still very low amount of waste that have a long half-life, really not a big deal)
How is it not economically viable given it is actively used since multiple decades in France? I also disagree with saying it is the cheapest, in practice it is actually pretty expensive compared to solar and wind, but economically nuclear makes a lot of sense, it fits a really good role in the grid
Just that it is used does not mean it is economically viable if the government is deeply involved - which is the case in France.
That’s not how economic viability works. EDF posted €11.4bn net profit in 2024[0] and France is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity precisely because nuclear is economically viable.
Government involvement doesn’t negate viability, it enables it, just like with roads, ports, or any other infrastructure requiring long-term capital deployment.
0: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...
Until we solve the long-term energy storage problem that renewable sources have, we're going to need a backup of some sort. Something you can turn up late at night in the middle of winter.
So far the cleanest solution we've come up with is gas plants, but gas plants made Europe extremely dependent on Russia. The alternatives are oppressive regimes or the US, which has been starting trade wars seemingly out of boredom.
Nuclear fuel, on the other hand, is exported not only by Kazachstan, but also Canada and Australia. In terms of "countries you don't want to depend on", I'd rather have Canada than Qatar.
I'm not sure if the economics still work out if you factor in the ineffective, half-assed Russian sanctions that have Europe fund Russia's war economy. The only alternative is probably coal, but only if you don't hold coal to the same standards in terms of waste disposal and nuclear exposure of the public as nuclear plants.
Nuclear isn't cheap, in part because it's become a niche market only some countries still participate in, but the politics and large-scale economics aren't as bad as the anti-nuclear crowd make them seem. They'd probably be bad for America, because the mighty oil industry stands to lose money and they'd need to import their fuel, but for countries already importing their fuel the balance is completely different.
Infuriatingly, the crowd that wants to do something about global warming also seems to think every nuclear reactor is going full Chernobyl within the decade. All of the parties I even consider voting for are staunch anti-nuclear activists for no documented reason other than "we don't like it".
> we're going to need a backup of some sort. Something you can turn up late at night in the middle of winter.
AFAICT this is not really nuclear. They excel at constant production, not switch ability to fill in around renewables.
Nuclear can be turned up and down relatively easily. It's on/off that takes a long time. And you can supplement nuclear with pumped storage hydro to steepen its turn up/down curve in extremis.
The less a traditional nuclear reactor contributes to the grid the worse its economics.
If you have a nuclear reactor you want to run it 24/7 at max output for it to make any economic sense. Otherwise you have all your fixed costs which need to be offset by the few hours that the reactor is actually selling energy, making this energy even more expensive.
> Nuclear can be turned up and down relatively easily
TLDR: it doesn't work this way.
Detailed version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796580
What's the point though? Isn't the variable cost of nuclear very low in relative terms?
sure state funded solar panel that you need to change every 10 year and batteries with rare minerals are cheaper.
Not true, lifetime is longer and there are no rare earth elements in battery cells themself. Rare earth are not really rare btw.
Solar panels can now last as far as 30 years.
So far it was either the cheapest or the safest.
Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).
And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
A look at destatis tells me something else for Germany (in 2024): Solar has a share of 15 %, and wind 28 %. In total 57 % of the produced energy comes from renewable sources. (https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...)
They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks).
They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.
In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.
An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
I really want to see a heat pump being used to make a real world high temperature process more efficient and cut natural gas use by 40% or so, this might destroy the latest talking point
the problem with heat pump is require quite well isolated building to make it efficient. Also after talking with a friend he had to change all radiators in his parents home since it didn't work well with previous old one he had.
I'm also not sure if heat pump is a solution for multifamily apartments.
> the problem with heat pump is require quite well isolated building to make it efficient. Also after talking with a friend he had to change all radiators in his parents home since it didn't work well with previous old one he had.
no, it doesn't require good isolation. Good isolation is beneficial, like for type of heating.
Radiators don't have an effect on isolation. However, modern radiators usually have a way higher surface area, which allows heating rooms with lower water temperature.
Heat pumps are more efficient if the difference between source and target temperature is closer.
I wonder what the nuclear alternative is... a reactor in each building?
Nuclear heating of such buildings would use heat pumps too.
1. Nuclear district heating.
2. Just electric heating, if electricity is cheap enough. Very simple and cheap.
But yeah, heat pumps make that more efficient. At significant higher investment costs. Gotta do the math of whether it is more efficient overall to invest in an efficient energy producer (nuclear), efficient consumers (heat pumps) or both.
Using resistive heating with nuclear electricity would be very foolish, unless you have a money wasting fetish.
Nuclear district heating would be very difficult to retrofit.
> Using resistive heating with nuclear electricity would be very foolish, unless you have a money wasting fetish.
Hmm. "... if electricity is cheap enough."
> Nuclear district heating would be very difficult to retrofit.
Who said anything about retrofitting? Just build district heating nuclear plants.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sollid_denmark-to-investigate...
Again, building one nuclear plant is expensive. But building tens or hundreds of thousands of heat pumps is certainly also and likely even more expensive.
I think you're looking at electricity here, not energy. Energy is much more than electricity.
60% of that energy is lost as waste heat and doesn't need replaced as we decarbonise and electrify.
For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.
Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste.
I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail
Apart from cities with crazy density, you underestimate how much solar we could put in the city outskirts, and it would be fine. We have already the power lines anyway to bring electricity from power plants that are far from those apartments you mention.
You would have to either cut forrest and trees or remove farm fields. I'm looking at my home town and I really don't see any barren land around many cities in Poland. I would rather they use those city outskirts land for new real estate that is lacking to deflate the bubble.
Building roofs, parking lots, streets, rail tracks, etc.. are all spaces that could have a canopy installed overhead and solar panels providing power and shading. As solar panels continue to lower in cost the sides of buildings, fences, etc.. There are lots of opportunities to install solar panels in a crowded city.
maintaining such infrastructure would be really costly: installing extra canopy, cleaning, removing snow (not easily accessible), extra inverters. I think solar only make sense if it's installed as solar farm (easy to maintain by one company) or in residential houses (owner maintain) or commercial units (owner maintain it). Solar prices went down but cost of installation and maintaining not much - this is the reason why many people in my family didn't buy it since it's still big investment and maintenance burden currently not worth the effort unless you are building new house.
Take all the land area that we currently devote to oil extraction, refining, delivery, etc.
Just that tiny amount of land is enough to supply the entire world's energy needs, if covered with solar panels.
Power line transmission losses are negligible. We don't need to put solar directly at the site, just as we don't need to put nuclear directly at the site of energy use. The round trip efficiency of energy storage is accounted for in the cost of the storage, whether that storage is hydro, battery, or hydrogen.
Solar really is the holy grail of energy: super cheap, super scalable big, super scalable small, and highly distributable or centralized. Pair that with the incredible cheapness of current batteries, and their falling prices in future years, and we are looking at a future of incredible energy abundance. As long as we are willing to accept it.
Nuclear by itself isn’t either. A balanced mix is needed.
Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option.
Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
> Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations.
Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).
Global solar potential atlas:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
Solar is the current cheapest and will be the biggest source of electricity in 2033 and continue to accelerate away from others for the rest of the century.
Offshore wind helps their situation somewhat.
I was talking about the situation once fossil fuels are no longer used ("in a renewable powered world" was the relevant phrase). We are not yet in that situation, so your observation there is beside the point.
During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.
I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
Existing nuclear, fine but new nuclear isn’t going to work, it takes way too long to build. Solar is just plug in and go.
Have you ever heard of batteries?
Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.
https://www.tesla.com/megapack
Total annual global electricity consumption in 2024 was 30,856 TWh so 36GWh of capacity is about one millionth of global electricity consumption.
Which is why you don't use batteries (at least, Li-ion batteries) much beyond diurnal storage. Systems analysis for renewables that assumes batteries are the only storage mode requires massive overbuilding of solar/wind, and this strawman engineering makes the nuclear alternative appear more competitive than it actually would be.
So what do you use instead for storage? This is a very important detail you didn't mention.
Hydrogen or heat. The former would be stored like natural gas currently is stored, underground. We store months of natural gas consumption.
Heat (at 600 C) is potentially even cheaper to store, with a cost of storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th) of capacity. This could yield 365/24/7 heat for $3/GJ, competitive even with cheap natural gas.
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/building-ultra-cheap-ene...
https://standardthermal.com/
Round trip efficiency if you go back to electricity is nothing great, but this is not important for very long term storage, where capex is king, not RTE.
Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.
Even if you can't get to 100%, it would still make sense to strive for as large a % of renewables as you could achieve. So, that's going to involve batteries necessarily.
For context I work at a company in Japan working on this problem. The entire reason the company exists is Japan's energy policy in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Batteries are severely underutilized in Japan at this point in time, so we can at least vastly improve on where we are.
My question is a few math operations away from "how much batteries capacity can we deploy to support how much % of renewables in the short-medium term, while still having a stable grid". My "100%" phrasing was sloppy, no need to index too much on it.
Since you're in the industry, maybe you can answer this question and change my mind.
I forget the exact numbers but from my recollection it relies on widespread adoption of EVs and being able to leverage their batteries as part of the grid.
Batteries alone cannot handle all storage use cases, but also including an alternative long term storage mode (syngas, thermal) can get to a 100% renewable grid. Use of hydrogen vs. just batteries cuts the cost of an all renewable grid in Europe in half.
https://www.tesla.com/megapack
Asked for numbers, got a link. Let's see.
They can manufacture 80 GWh a year. To get through dunkelflaute with moderate renewable percentage we need tens of TWh. Not to belittle Tesla, but that's 3 orders of magnitude difference.
Are you changing your mind or can you give me numbers to change mine?
Yep, the data suggests that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
And some of those data seems sane: the cost of solar panels reduces due to tech improvements: ok
The cost of coal increases a bit, maybe due to geopolicital issues: ok, seems legit
The cost of nuclear increases .. why ? Why the step between 2016 and 2017 ? Does tech "de-improved" ?
More insights would be interesting
There are several factors, but the single biggest reason for nuclear's ever increasing cost is due to construction productivity.
All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages. (Let's just elide the disconnect between wages rising fully with productivity increases, but they do rise some!)
Despite being far more wealthy today than centuries ago, we don't build cathedrals with super intricate stonework, because labor is so much more expensive.
I fear that nuclear is like the gothic cathedral: something that was far easier to do when labor costs were low, but at wealth increases it becomes far more difficult to make economic sense.
Baumol's Cost Disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
This doesn't measure the cost of providing dispatchable electricity though. If I want 1MWh of electricity at night provided by solar, it's going to cost more than solar's LCoE because I will also need to pay for a way to store and dispatch it.
Which again does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
Solar has this problem to a much greater extent though. If you have a market where solar is >100% of demand during the day then it will be dispatching at or below $0/MWh for almost all of its life.
But of course the marginal market is not the whole story. In reality solar largely receives effectively fixed prices in most markets (via CfDs or PPAs). Nuclear does the same and can also take capacity payments and sell into flexibility markets where those exist.
Which is shifting as that is getting saturated. In those markets renewables are built with storage now to deliver the electricity when needed.
Nuclear power also used to get built with PPAs. Look at Hinkley Point C for a completely insanely expensive contract, that EDF is now looking to make to make a loss on.
For Sizewell C they don’t even dare touch a fixed price contract and instead want the ratepayers to pay the construction cost in advance hoping it works out.
That is how far nuclear power has fallen.
PPAs between commercial entities of course also adapt to the market. To guarantee the nuclear price at daytime comes with a corresponding discount, because the ones buying the PPA know they can get what they need either way.
Nuclear power also generally does not participate in ancillary markets. Too slow and inflexible with weighting too much on CAPEX. They can get capacity payments but as soon as the true need is defined in terms of how much reliable energy is needed for how long renewables with carbon neutral gas turbine based backups win.
The only market civilian nuclear power wins is the ”I want to have a workforce and industry capable of building nuclear weapons and naval reactors”.
Essentially a military jobs program. That may be worthwhile, but let stop pretending nuclear power actually gives a modern grid anything it need at the current costs.
Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.
> solar is now both cheaper and safer.
apples and oranges
Not at night
From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad!
Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale.
I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.
Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate.
3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.
See my brown bear vs car comparison above/below.
Also, solar causes less deaths, according to your counting method.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Analogy doesn’t work, it’s deaths per TWhour that matter.
Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that:
1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima.
2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here.
3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.
1. I am with you in that nuclear plants should not explode.
2. Yeah, and nuclear plants have a lot of costs which are not accounted, like the already mentioned unaffordable insurance costs that are passed on to the taxpayer in the event of an incident.
3. Land radiation and environmental impact are a far worse story for nuclear in case of an accident.
Yet somehow fossil fuel doesn’t have to pay for all the cancers they cause…
Don't get me wrong, I am not a supporter of burning fossil fuels. I am discussing which technology should be used to generate electricity. And I consider renewables to be the more pragmatic strategy. Mostly not because they are cleaner or cheaper, but because they are more decentralized, can be built quicker and are easier to replace. I am pro nuclear power plants as long as they are built far away from where people live, including the waste disposal.
Edit: to be more clear, my long term earth vision is: everything runs using electricity. No coal, no other fossils are burned. Electricity is mostly generated using wind, water, solar.
Solar & wind are not as decentralized as you think when you consider resource extraction. I think SMNR would meet your criteria for safety and a distributed grid.
Total amount of reactor*years so far is roughly 20000. 3 core meltdowns amounts for 0.015% per reactor per year.
How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.
Isn't that only applicable for Uranium 235 based reactors? Thorium is converted to Uranium 233 and when split the byproducts have an half life of 10s of years, meaning that the radioactivity drops to safe levels in "only" few hundred years.
This is much more manageable.
Anyway, that is to say that nuclear is a spectrum, and the current mainstream tech I believe it is the one that won because of the military applications (and therefore funding) back in the cold-war era.
I remember the anti-nuclear fever went viral in 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I think the correct lesson to be learned from that experience is not to built nuclear power plants in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters...and not to call for all nuclear power plants around the world to be shut down.
Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.
There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima.
Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons.
> Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec.
If you're referring to the Onagawa plant, one engineer (Yanosuke Hirai) pushed for the height of the wall to be increased beyond the original spec:
> A nuclear plant in a neighboring area, meanwhile, had been built to withstand the tsunamis. A solitary civil engineer employed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company knew the story of the massive Jogan tsunami of the year 869, because it had flooded the Shinto shrine in his hometown. In the 1960s, the engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, had insisted that the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station be built farther back from the sea and at higher elevation than initially proposed—ultimately nearly fifty feet above sea level. He argued for a seawall to surpass the original plan of thirty-nine feet. He did not live to see what happened in 2011, when forty-foot waves destroyed much of the fishing town of Onagawa, seventy-five miles north of Fukushima. The nuclear power station—the closest one in Japan to the earthquake’s epicenter—was left intact. Displaced residents even took refuge in the power plant’s gym.
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-design...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanosuke_Hirai
Yes. And in Fukushima, they apparently actually lowered an existing natural barrier.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem...
In addition, they didn't have hydrogen recombinators, which for example are/were standard in all German plants. Those plants also had special requirements for bunkers for the Diesel backup generators so they couldn't be knocked out by water.
The point is not about "someone may not err" but about "someone may err", or more precisely "someone WILL err", coupled with the effects of such mistakes.
Failing to correctly design, build, exploit or maintain a wind turbine or solar panel isn't a big deal. Failing to do so on a nuclear reactor can become a huge and lasting disaster for many.
Wind turbines cause more deaths than nuclear reactors.
Fact.
It depends upon nuclear accident victims' estimation one choses to consider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
Moreover pretending that the words nuclear accident is not more dangerous than the worst wind turbine accident will be difficult.
You are making the very common "mistake" of comparing 1 nuclear accident with 1 wind turbine accident.
And are completely missing that you need a LOT more wind turbines, and these have a lot more accidents.
For example, wind turbine accidents killed 14 people just in one year, 2011. How many people were killed in the UK in nuclear accidents that year? That decade.
Ladder accidents kill ~80 people per year in Germany.
Google "avilability bias"
The various estimations of "victims of nuclear" also neglect victims from such accidents. In 2011 2 workers died while working to build the new EPR in Flamanville, and aren't officially (nor AFAIK anywhere) counted as nuclear victims.
> Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.
You can't build to withstand humans ignorance. You always can argue to do this or that, but if the responsible managers won't approve it, it's all just theory and good hopes. Even worse if the ignorance grows over time; because the last decades it worked out, surely it will work another decade or two...
That's why things like nuclear are so problematic, because small neglections can explode into cataclysmic events.
I read that Germans watched their local nuclear experts explain on TV what was happening while Japanese authorities were still in denial.
They had a stereotype of Japanese hypercompetence and seeing them fuck up and then try to cover it up in the middle of a disaster had an impact even on traditional nuclear supporters.
> in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters.
And places where they can be damaged by human actions as well.
That leaves so many places to build reactors, right ?
I think human actions are easier to predict and prevent than natural disasters. Earthquakes are the biggest deal breakers.
Current Ukraine would beg to differ.
We're living in a reality where nuclear waste was not always properly contained and the repercussions of it are long-lasting. While this particular case is related to the Manhattan Project, it's causing all types of issues to this day:
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/11/long-term-effects-nu...
I'm still against nuclear and this ruling didn't change it. For me it's still externalising many of the negative effects to many future generations. And with much more spent fuel comes more proliferation risks.
Of course this stuff is not up to me but the parties I vote for are in part because they're anti nuclear.
Or why there is a "clean" energy distinction that some authority has control over in the first place. If CO2 is the thing we care about, then tax CO2 and let everything sort itself out. The fact there are subsidies instead of carbon taxes is revealing all on its own.
Well, its wrong though. Its not the cheapest. Thats solar and by a long shot. Nuclear is literally the most expensive energy source. Also take into account the timeframe to build nuclear powerplants. 9 to 12 Years on average built time and delays often happen.
I was all for nuclear when it was the best option to displace fossil fuels. It is no longer, so I'm no longer all for it.
This. The time for new nuclear plants was 20 years ago. Now it's too late, and too expensive, even in purely practical terms without the question of safety.
It's a bit more nuanced than this, no? It's better to reflect on why we let important things like nuclear energy go to the lowest bidder, or private entities that want to maximize short term profit.
> most long lasting
...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason).
Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.
When I referenced long lasting I mean that some nuclear power stations are no forecast to keep going for 120 years.
CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous to stand near for 500 years (without centimetres of concrete), and then dangerous to consume for an further many thousand. It is within our technology to look after the quantities we are talking about indefinitely.
Also, with current plants we could reduce the size of the waste by 30x if we recycled it. Other plant types would burn all the fuel and leave us with very low volumes of radioactive elements.
Wrt Ukraine you choose to focus on the potential for release around Zaporozhzhia Vs the actual destruction occuring from the circumstances of war in the rest of the country?
> CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Yes, we have problem with CO2. The solution is to use Solar + Wind + Hydro + Batteries + long lasting storage. Nuclear causes more problems than it solves unless it used to make nukes also.
See that's the thing, you're trying to argue rationally ;)
But the discussion around nuclear energy stopped being rational decades ago. On one side you have the old guard of the environmentalist movement which got started with anti-nuclear protests in the first place and then had their "I told you so" moment in 1986, and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown, the radiation was actually good for the environment or whatever.
Then I'm seeing that the latest European NPP in Finland was about 15 years late and 3x more expensive than planned (from 3.5 to 11 billion Eu) while wind and solar farms are just popping up everywhere around me without much fanfare, built by whoever has some money and a bit of unused farmland or roof space to spare. And I really can't imagine those same people pooling their money and starting to build nuclear power plants instead ;)
> and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown
You're making it sound like anyone who's not against nuclear, thinks Chernobyl is overblown
I've never heard that sentiment anywhere. (I'm sure you can find examples when looking for it; after all, there's also people who believe vaccines cause bill gates mind control.) Why the strawman argument?
It is actually a very common trope.
The "grassroots"-Jesus, Michael Shellenberger, who dominates the arguments being spread by this movement, doesn't get tired to repeat it. He even had to comment on the TV Show Chernobyl:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06...
There are many more. Just google Shellenbeger and Chernobyl.
Great overview! :)
If we already have to take care of a hole in some mountain for the next few hundred years, why not put 100 times the waste in it?
Nobody would notice the difference.
Storage capacity of high level nuclear waste repositories is limited by heat buildup. I think people would notice when radioactive volcanoes start erupting.
I think Hollywood will remember of something.
The annoying thing is recycling nuclear waste is kind of a solved problem. I've watched this video a while ago but iirc it is just more expensive to build a reactor that can also recycle its own waste. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc
After decades of R&D and numerous lab and prototypes reactors able to do so (mainly fast breeders)... there is not a single industrial model ready to be deployed.
> at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard
Hello, I live in Germany. You can use my backyard free of charge so long as I get a free Geiger counter, thank you!
I'd genuinely be honored to play such an important role in decarbonising Germany's energy supply. Watching the carbon intensity per kWh on electricitymap.com as we creep towards winter is frankly depressing. (I didn't know this site yet last year, so this is the first time I see the dynamics in action.) The coal plant also never turns off, even during negative prices. I presume it takes too long to fire back up and so there's always >100 grams CO2e for every little kWh that 82 million Germans use. The wind turbines / solar panels need to turn off to make space on the grid for the coal plant when there's oversupply. That's what the Germans were made to vote for in fear when electing to shut their nuclear plants earlier than coal. It's like banning airplanes and having everyone drive cars instead due to a national fear of flying, not having considered the safety records of each method. It's so crazy to me as a Dutch immigrant who's new to these people's politics. Anyway, back to storage
I don't see the problem with inert waste under the ground and a good detection system, at least for a few centuries. There's challenges in how to explain the danger to a generation that doesn't speak any of our languages anymore (in 500 years, someone's gonna need to replace the sign), or who lost any translators we've built (imagining some apocalypse, say in 5000 years), but there's research on that as well and it's not an argument why we couldn't find a good storage site for the next century while we deal with this energy transition
> the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason
And yet there are nuclear plants all over Europe! People who mind can already choose not to live near them. Expand capacity at those sites and let's go
But is very centralised. Solar and wind are less centralised, and I think that’s one advantage they have over nuclear.
Probably said somewhere else, but "green" originally means "does not create toxic waste when used". Nuclear is nice and good for the environment, but it does fit in the definition "produce waste", even if this waste can be considered as small or can be somehow treated.
That's blatantly wrong. Hydro stands out in the data as being the cheapest reliable carbon neutral option (wind and solar aren't reliable, and when you factor in storage to make them reliable then they're not cheap).
Hydro requires large sums of capital to get started, destroys entire valleys, is only viable in a limited number of places, has significant risks if not maintained, and isn't energy dense in the slightest. Nevertheless, it's cheap and it's carbon neutral.
Run-of-the-river hydro in all but a handful of sites tends to be quite dependent on rainfall levels. This means production levels can vary quite meaningfully both seasonally and more importantly year-to-year.
It's definitely reliable in the sense that hydro stations can basically last forever if properly maintained (there are plenty of hydro stations operating today which are more than 100 years old) but it's not quite a silver bullet.
You're purposefully and deceptively omitting the lack of safety and perpetual waste risks.
The reason I used to oppose nuclear energy is that its proponents would say nuclear waste isn't a problem, but they would never explain why it isn't a problem. I knew the half-life of uranium was 4 billion years; I didn't see how you could possibly make that safe, and nobody on the pro-nuclear side seemed to have an explanation, so I assumed that no explanation existed.
(Turns out the answer is that you can store nuclear waste deep underground at geologically stable locations where tectonics won't cause it to eventually resurface.)
(Also radioactive waste isn't uranium and the half-life is considerably shorter than 4 billion years, although it's still quite long.)
it’s also true that you get better at using (and reusing) what we would consider waste today over time.
The more energy we are able to use, the more inert the waste material becomes, leading to much lower storage timeframes (though still multiple human lifetimes even in the best case).
I'm not convinced that's true about nuclear power when you look at the full lifecycle costs of uranium mining, maintenance and decommissioning. Also, solar is currently a lot cheaper than nuclear power when you exclude all the various subsidies (which applies to both energy sources). I'm not even convinced that nuclear power is that energy dense when you look at the raw uranium mining - most figures cherry-pick the processed uranium fuel which is indeed a very dense energy source.
I take it you mean well built and well run nuclear plant you.
Also is it most prone to human error?
I am not sure people understand the implications of this.
First, it's not just nuclear, it's also Natural gas.
Second, lots of nations have incentives for "clean" energy. And now magically, all those incentives apply to nuclear and gas.
It's a money grab from nuclear and gas manufacturers. It's not that the courts were involved for nothing.
Still, we should use more nuclear. If only it was less expensive to build...
Nuclear + gas is the climate friendly solution.
What is climate friendly about natural gas?
It's cleaner than coal and oil. If you upgrade a coal plant to a gas plant, that's a step forward against climate change.
Yes, we'd be much better off with wind farms, solar plants, and nuclear reactors, but a step forward is a step forward.
Countries like Poland, running mostly on coal, would get cleaner air and contribute less to global warming if they were to upgrade their power plants to anything non-coal.
Replace them with nuclear generators and they'd also significantly reduce the amount of radiation people would be exposed to.
It's not that gas is that good, it's more that coal is that bad.
Clever use of the adjective “cleaner”. Try replacing it with “less dirty, but still pollutant and toxic” to see an alternative, correct version of what you have written.
You can put absolutist restrictions on things like that but every time you enter a cost-benefit calculus with such restrictions already in place you're going to end up with more cost and less benefit
A methane molecule is one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms. More than half of the energy released by burning it (53% according to [1]) comes from oxidizing the hydrogen to water. So it's roughly half as bad as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and does not have the additional problems of sulfur (acid rain) and soot.
[1] https://people.wou.edu/~courtna/GS361/Energy_From_Fossil_Fue...
So not climate friendly.
With that logic, humans aren't climate friendly and should be transitioned away from
Different shades of grey. We'll always cause pollution as part of being. I don't believe that the person above meant it as a final solution to keep burning fossil fuels
> With that logic, humans aren't climate friendly and should be transitioned away from
Well, that's mostly solved problem by EU and even SEA:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/europe/2024/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/south-eastern-asia/2024/
At that point human life isn't climate friendly... everyone wants to live like the average american with 2 cars and 4 ac units per households, when Asia and Africa come for their fair share, even if they only claim 25% of it, we're fucked, no amount of battery or solar panel will make this consumeristic and "growth forever" mentality sustainable, because by definition it is a boundless quest. Half of the world still live like medieval peasants with less than $7 a day, this is just the beginning
Is it less climate unfriendly than the alternatives. Every form of energy generation releases CO2. Gas also has the benefit that it doesn't need all sorts of extras to make it dispatachable when needed (which also require CO2).
I forgot to say hydro is also great where possible.
> Every form of energy generation releases CO2
…except nuclear, hydro, solar… They are stable once built.
“Natural gas” is a fossil fuel and adds CO2 that was locked away.
So manufacturing hydro and solar releases no CO2? How long until those panels need to be replaced and recycled?
Much better to have CO2 than methane in the atmosphere
Even better to have neither.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good
Thus nuclear and solar. Not perfect. Considerably better.
Both nuclear and solar have conditions where they cannot generate energy. Nuclear is also slow to scale up/down. There is a need for something that has the properties of natural gas
I tried telling that to my brother but he won't quit releasing methane.
Nuclear produces constant amount of energy (while consumption is not stable), Solar and Wind are highly unstable, with peaks not matching consumption. Adding gas (which is fast to adjust/turn on/turn off) for maneuvers makes whole system cheaper and more stable
Except, most regions don't need constant supply, it's actually even harmful for the grid. German grid for example seems to have become significant better since the last nuclear plants were removed.
What ? They just dumped a lot of money into grid safety after the nuclear exit . Your comment doesn't make any sense.
Because of the nuclear exit they had to build Grid stabilization plants e.g in Marbach.
Wasn't gas what killed nuclear in the 80s (in addition to the moral panic)?
Gas isn’t climate friendly just because of its debatable attractiveness vs coal. And nuclear comes with catastrophic risks that require large costs to mitigate. Let’s not pretend it’s some panacea. Renewables are better than both.
Fun fact: The US achieved more for the climate with fracking gas than Germany did with its "Energiewende".
Do you care to explain more, id be interested :)
In 2005, both the US and Germany had specific emissions of around 600g CO₂/kWh.
In 2015, due mostly to fracking gas, the US was down to around 450g CO₂/kWh.
Germany, with its Energiewende, was at around 560g CO₂/kWh.
Because, of course, the Energiewende was not about climate change. It was about shutting down climate-friendly (CO₂ free) nuclear plants.
Both could have done better. France is currently at something like 32g CO₂/kWh and has been at roughly that level for decades.
In 2024, US was at 384 gCO₂/kWh, while Germany was at 344 gCO₂/kWh.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
The US fracking boom lasted until about 2015.
And according to energycharts.de Germany was at 395g CO₂/kWh in 2023.
Again, both pale in compare to France.
Shutting down nuclear was a pretty popular policy. But that aside, what the Energiewende was not about was removing obstacles to building out energy infrastructure rapidly (e.g., the delay on the north-south connections).
Well, populism is no good reason to do something dumb. Maybe laymen should not directly have a say over experts in deeply technical discussions.
Yes, not supporting energy infrastructure construction better was a mistake.
Removing what would be nasty targets in a war perhaps in the current light not so much.
No shutting down cheap, reliable, CO₂ free and already paid for energy infrastructure was.
That's about as idiotic as you can get.
And simply by not destroying this already existing infrastructure you wouldn't even have needed north-south links.
Germany could have decarbonized faster by maintaining its nuclear power, but only to a limited extent because the bulk of the coal (especially lignite, a high CO2 emitter) is burned to generate electricity in the former East German regions, which have been devoid of nuclear power since 1995 (Soviet reactors were shut down due to their unsafety). Therefore, all active reactors were located in West Germany, and there is no adequate high-voltage line capable of transporting their output to the East.
At its peak (in 1999), nuclear power produced only 31% of Germany's electricity, itself less than 25% of the energy consumed (even considering primary energy, it only provided 12.7%), and by 2011 (Fukushima...), it was producing less than 18% of the electricity.
Moreover, in the East, coal-fired power plants have long produced high-pressure steam for district heating (industry and heating many premises), which a remote reactor cannot provide.
To claim that Germany shut down its reactors for no reason (after Fukushima...) or that only a minority of environmentalists decided to do so is misleading as, in Germany, all political parties close reactors, and most reactors were not closed by "Greens".
Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency since it would have replaced part of the huge coal industry, which is very difficult to get rid of.
> Germany could have decarbonized faster by maintaining its nuclear power
Precisely.
> but only to a limited extent because the bulk of the coal (especially lignite, a high CO2 emitter) is burned to generate electricity in the former East German regions,
Huh? Not shutting down the existing nuclear plants is a pure positive and does not prevent you from doing other things. Such as building out renewables and/or nuclear plants in the east.
For the money we wasted on intermittent renewables so far, we could have built at least 50 reactors even at the inflated cost of the EPR prototype at Olkiluoto 3. Or 100 inflation-adjusted Konvois. So way more than enough.
Nuclear power is well-suited for district heating and industrial heat applications, unlike solar and wind.
> To claim that Germany shut down its reactors for no reason
Nobody claimed that. Germany shut down its reactors for idiotic reasons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
All West German reactors would have survived the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami perfectly fine had they been at the site of Fukushima. And we don't have Tsunamis in Germany. How does shutting down those plants make sense again? When answering, consider that Japan is reactivating its nuclear plants.
It's time for Germany to admit its mistake on nuclear energy
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/12/26/world/ger...
> or that only a minority of environmentalists decided to do so is misleading as,
Again, such a good thing that that claim wasn't made in this thread. Or are you misleadingly claiming that it was?
> misleading as, in Germany, all political parties close reactors, and most reactors were not closed by "Greens".
Who "closed" reactors, now that actually is misleading for a change. The law that required nuclear reactors to be closed was passed by the Red/Green coalition in 2002. Germany happens to be a country with the rule of law, so successor governments can't just act on whim, they are bound by the law of the land. Oh, and it was the Greens who made the Atomausstieg the primary condition for their coalition with the SPD.
So while it is correct that all parties are somewhat to blame, to claim that they are equally to blame is ahistorical nonsense and quite misleading.
> Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency
That is also not true.
The money Germany "wasted" on renewables brought down prices a lot, triggering massive investments, which was the plan. My prediction is that even France will scale down nuclear power for fiscal reasons alone - they would need to build new reactors now as a long-term replacement - but it does not look too good.
France keeps talking about the EPR2 program but the government just collapsed because they are underwater in debt and can't agree on any cuts or increases in taxation.
At this moment to go on a massive spending spree for a dead-end nuclear project is not a very sane policy.
Investing in the futur when you have a hard time creating more value than you consume is exactly what you need to do. Reducing investment is precisely the way to reinforce the downward feedback loop. If they want to keep taxing the common man, they need them to create more value otherwise to are just taking larger and larger share of vanishing small value.
France does have money; it's just all concentrated in the boomer generation who is fighting hard to keep control. A large share of the debt is generated to keep this gerontocracy confortable at the expense of the youth and future.
Which means you need a return on the investment for it to work. Creating self sustaining industries that don’t need subsidies.
Tossing an absolutely mindbogglingly large subsidy to the 70 year old nuclear industry which never has delivered competitive products is not a good use of money. It is like saying we create value by going around breaking windows and paying people to fix it.
France’s problem is that if they don’t fix the spending issue on their own the bond market will do it for them. Maintaining the debt will be a larger and larger portion of the budget until the only option is solving the issue.
Cutting spending will lower GDP and push up debt as a percent of GDP. But it wasn’t real income when the debt you took on did not lead to productive outcomes. Just polishing a pig.
Er...nuclear is already self sustaining and has a great ROI for the French (and pretty much everyone else).
Even the most catastrophic nuclear construction project the French ever had, Flamanville 3, will have better ROI than intermittent renewable projects.
What doesn't make sense is throwing more good money after 25 years of subsidies at intermittent renewables that have yet to show a positive ROI.
I’m not sure where to begin. Please stop straight up lying? Nothing in this comment is correct.
In France the battle is over how large the subsidies needs to be to even get started on the EPR2 program. Driven by EDF is too financially weak to take on more projects after the recent boondoggles and that new built nuclear power simply does not deliver electricity at a price the market accepts.
That does not sound very self sustaining.
Regarding Flamanville 3 you are likely citing the report with a discount rate lower than the inflation and a 40 year pay back time, while comparing to the first ever off shore wind farm in France. You know, a prototype as regards to working with French industry and bureaucracy.
For anyone even having a slight economic understanding the writers of that report are shouting from the rooftops that investing in nuclear power is pure lunacy. But shrouded in a language allowing lobbyists and blindingly biased people to cite it.
I also love how the fastest growing energy source in human history, for which subsidies are being phased out as we speak, haven’t shown a positive ROI.
What do I now. All that private money going into renewables are calculated in making a loss.
My comment is exactly correct.
EDF gets subsidies from the state for their renewables projects.
EDF pays nuclear profits to the state. And to the rest of French industry via the ARENH program.
Facts.
That private money going into renewables is great at getting guaranteed state subsidies.
It's the best business model ever.
> It's the best business model ever
In France the Cour of Audit concluded that electricity produced by the EPR must be sold at 138€/MWh (2023 value) in order to obtain a tiny ROI (4%). This is a financial disaster. Proof page 29: https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/publications/la-filiere-epr-une-d...
Renewables, on the other hand... While many reactors were down in France (intermittency, anyone?) they did cope: https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...
Renewables: a modest gain... 7 billions €! Source: official Commission in charge in France, page 4 https://www.cre.fr/fileadmin/Documents/Deliberations/2024/24...
Once again: EDF receives subsidies for their renewables projects.
I just sourced official reports, and for EDF I already answered (in French, sorry, if necessary a software translator does the job): https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/accueil#h....
I love this. Just pretend that no new nuclear power needs to ever be built and it is economical based on the current economics of soon half a century old paid off plants.
Since the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles and the subsidy scheme hasn’t been finalized just pretend that it doesn’t exist!
They are only talking about CFDs, zero interest loans and credit guarantees! Those doesn’t cost money! Not until they start being paid out! Therefore does new built nuclear power does not need any subsidies. QED.
Or the French were talking about it. Until the government collapsed due to being underwater in debt with a spending problem they are unable to reign in.
We all know the one way to solve a spending problem is an unfathomably large handout to the dead-end nuclear industry!
Please. This is getting laughable. Facts be damned, just ignore reality and with a scalpel cherry pick a few disjointed facts.
> The money Germany "wasted" on renewables brought down prices a lot,
It massively increased the price of electricity in Germany. And the same holds true of pretty much every other location that tried it.
And it did remarkably little for CO₂ emissions, massively increased our dependence on cheap Russian Gas thus emboldening Putin, cemented our fossil fuel dependence for reliable base load, entrenched our dependence on China.
On the whole, "wasted" is putting it kindly.
Yes, the prices of the generating equipment have come down from truly astronomical to only "not competitive without massive subsidies".
Had we spend the same money on nuclear power plants, we would have long been done with the decarbonization of our electricity sector, and probably well into the electrification and ensuing decarbonization of the other sectors as well.
Except we would have found it difficult to spend that much on nuclear power plants, because even at the price of the messed up EPR prototypes, the same money would have bought us over 50 reactors. At the price of the first three Konvois, around 100, adjusted for inflation and some increases. But when you build 50-100 reactors of the same kind (that's important: don't make every new one different like we used to do), the cost does go down.
France is increasing its fission fleet again, after repealing a law that made such expansion illegal beyond the then existing generating capacity 63.2 GW.
The goal of a reduction of the nuclear share to below 50% was also repealed. I do believe that the share of nuclear in France will decrease somewhat, because intermittent renewables can let the nuclear plants run at higher efficiencies by taking up some of the variability that is currently handled by the nuclear plants.
Come, please do not repeat all this nonsense from the tabloids. First, you need to specify what prices you talk about. If you talk about household prices, then yes those increased. This, btw, was also intentional. The system was designed in this way to encourage energy conservation. It certainly got too far, but this is largely a political issue. In France prices were kept low artificially (which did not help the nuclear industry!). So these prices do tell you exactly nothing about the merits of the technology, and more about politics.
That reliance on Russian gas was increased is complete BS. Only a very small amount of gas which is imported is used for electricity production (10% or so) and it is certainly not true that this (relatively small) amount increased. In 2024, 80 TWh of electricity were produced from gas. In 2010 it was 90 TWh. In that time frame, renewables increased from 105 TWh to 285 TWh. 1.
CO2 emissions went down with roll-out of renewables exactly as expected2) Coal use for electricity production went down from 263 TWh in 2010 to 107 TWh in 2024. In fact, CO2 emission went down faster than planned which is the reason Germany still managed to meet climate targets despite other sectors (heating and transportation) not meeting their targets. That Co2 emissions for electricity production are still higher compared to some others is that there is still a lot of coal in the system (and electricity from that was already exported a lot until recently). But once coal is pushed out completely then this will be gone. The only real conclusion here is that the energy transition was started to late and is not fast enough. The past, nobody can change, but it would certainly be much slower when building nuclear plants now.
France wants to double down on nuclear for political reasons and my prediction is that they will fail because they can not afford it. They have huge fiscal problems and they did not invest enough to renew their nuclear fleet in the past, sold electricity too cheap (so could not build up reserves), and would now have to invest a lot, but their nuclear industry is in a horrible state and their state dept is out of control already.
1.https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/STR... 2.https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/co2-emissionen-pro-kil...
The "Russian gas" argument is so grotesque also because Germany quickly stopped important gas from Russia after the start of the attack on Ukraine, but neither Europe nor the US has stopped importing nuclear fuel from Russia.
>> The money Germany "wasted" on renewables brought down prices a lot,
> It massively increased the price of electricity in Germany.
We all have to consider the total cost on the long term. I analyzed it for France. I wrote it in French, sorry, but AFAIK software does not distort it: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/accueil#h....
> And it did remarkably little for CO₂ emissions
Nope: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
> massively increased our dependence on cheap Russian Gas thus emboldening Putin
True, sadly, however consider that nuclear didn't save France which is even more dependent (while less industrialized). French ahead: https://sites.google.com/view/avenirdunucleraire/transition-...
> Had we spend the same money on nuclear power plants
France ("Flamanville-3" reactor) and the US (Vogtle, VS Summer) did so, and it failed.
> Except we would have found it difficult to spend that much on nuclear power plants, because even at the price of the messed up EPR prototypes, the same money would have bought us over 50 reactors.
Once more: source? The most serious allegations published state about official investments previsions until 2050, and not only for renewables (grid maintenance is a)
> don't make every new one different like we used to do
... therefore if a potentially dangerous defect is discovered you will have to shut them down all. No more juice, yay! It nearly happened in France recently, and the shock was alleviated by the fact that the fleet is NOT made of identical reactors, and therefore a fair part could produce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis...
> France is increasing its fission fleet again
Not really. The last project (Flamanville-3) started in 2004, work on the field started in 2007, the reactor was to be delivered in 2012 for 3.3 billion € and only started a few months ago (it did not yet reach full power) for at least 23.7 billion €. https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2025/01/14/epr-de-fl...
Even the official report about it states explicitly that this building project was a failure.
There are claimed intentions to build at least 2 new reactors since 2022, nothing else.
> [renewables massively increased electricity prices, not decreased them as claimed]
> We all have to consider the total cost on the long term.
Yes, we do. When you consider long term, it gets even worse for intermittent renewables. Nuclear, on the other hand is a license to print money when you consider the long term.
> I analyzed it for France.
With all due respects to your "analysis", the French auditors came to a different conclusion.
> Nope [to having little effect on CO₂ emissions]
The graph you linked to proves my point: the reduction is laughable. France's specific CO₂ emissions are less than 1/10th of Germany's per kWh. Have been for decades, at a fraction of the cost.
> France ("Flamanville-3" reactor) and the US (Vogtle, VS Summer) did so, and it failed.
Again, the opposite is true. Those projects did not "fail". They all produce reliable power, which intermittent renewables cannot do, at better prices than intermittent renewables.
Of course, compared to other nuclear projects, they were massive failures, but not when compared to intermittent renewables. The standards are just so different.
And your reasoning is also wrong: those projects "failed" (relative to other nuclear projects) precisely because far too little was being built. They are all First of a Kind (FOAK) builds, and built in countries that built little to no new nuclear in the last 20-40 years.
FOAK builds are slow and expensive (and slow is extra expensive, as most of the cost is financing, i.e. interest payments). NOAK builds tend to go much quicker and be a lot cheaper. As an example, China builds much faster and cheaper. People incorrectly claim this is because they skimp on safety, labor, tech etc.
Not true. Their first AP-1000 took 9 years, almost as long as Vogtles, especially when you take into account the COVID years. They are now building their version in 5 years. Essentially the same reactor, certainly the same country. Half the time.
FOAK vs. NOAK is the ticket.
> .. therefore if a potentially dangerous defect is discovered you will have to shut them down all.
France's primary problem was lack of maintenance due to the de-emphasis of nuclear during the Mitterand years and deferred maintenance during COVID.
And you don't build just one kind. Build 2-3 kinds and 10-20 of each.
Oh, and don't build them too quick. These things last for 100 years, so to achieve steady state you can't build out your entire fleet in 10-20 years, because then you industry has nothing to build for the next 80-90 years and withers.
> Even the official report about it states explicitly that this building project was a failure.
No it didn't. Relative to the standards of nuclear power plants it was horrific. But even under fairly negative assumptions for the price of electricity it will have "modest" profitability. Which, once again, is better than the best intermittent renewables projects.
And FV3 is not "the nuclear industry". It is that particular project.
> There are claimed intentions to build at least 2 new reactors since 2022, nothing else.
That is false. The current plan is to build 6 EPR2 and later on to build 8 more. Sites have been selected for the first 6, and engineering contracts for the first 2 have been awarded to the tune of several billion €.
If that's "nothing", then can I have just a bit of that "nothing" from you? Can send you my bank details.
> When you consider long term, it gets even worse for intermittent renewables. Nuclear, on the other hand is a license to print money
Non-backed-up nonsense.
> With all due respects to your "analysis", the French auditors came to a different conclusion.
Once again: source? The reality is that the French Cour of Audit officially declared 5 years ago that there could be no more nuclear project without a financial direct public guarantee. Proof: https://www.challenges.fr/top-news/nucleaire-la-cour-des-com...
Its last report on nuclear, published last January, is TITLED: "DES RISQUES PERSISTANTS" (persistent risks). Proof: https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-01/20250114...
> The graph you linked to proves my point: the reduction is laughable
Nope, 538 geqCO2/KWh (2013) to 344 (2024) with a huge coal industry which cannot be quickly phased out and while shutting down all nuclear reactors is very good.
> France's specific CO₂ emissions are less than 1/10th of Germany's per kWh.
The reasons are well-known (France, during the 1960's, had no other option): https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
> at a fraction of the cost.
Nope (TCO), as already exposed (along with sources): https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/accueil#h....
>> France ("Flamanville-3" reactor) and the US (Vogtle, VS Summer) did so, and it failed.
> Again, the opposite is true
OMG. According to you they are successes, and even official reports conclude that they failed.
> compared to intermittent renewables. The standards are just so different.
That's patently not the trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
> those projects "failed" (relative to other nuclear projects) precisely because far too little was being built.
Nope, this appeal to some strong and persistent benefit induced by batching projects is void, and the industry knows it for quite a while: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
> They are all First of a Kind (FOAK) builds
The EPR is explicitly and officially very similar to existing reactors, it only is an evolution of existing designs and not a new concept. Proof: https://recherche-expertise.asnr.fr/savoir-comprendre/surete...
> and built in countries that built little to no new nuclear in the last 20-40 years.
The projects started 15 to 25 years ago, just a few years after the last reactor built before them. Moreover those nations have active reactors fleets and massive public nuclear R&D budgets, therefore the fable "no-one worked on all this" is ridiculous.
> most of the cost is financing, i.e. interest payments
True, but only because the projects were extremely late.
> China builds
Renewables. Facts (sourced! just try to do so): https://sites.google.com/view/nuclaireenchine/accueil
> They are now building
Very few reactors. Their EPR were officially late and overbudget.
> France's primary problem was lack of maintenance
Source? Not at all. The nuclear authority is very, very picky here.
> due to the de-emphasis of nuclear during the Mitterand years
Nope. Mitterrand heavily helped nuclear, and this is now a well-known fact. M. Boiteux, EDF boss at the time, also did reckon it. French ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rvP1zstk68
> and deferred maintenance during COVID.
Source? Not at all, in practice, as many 'Grand Carénage' subprojects were completed in due time while respecting budgets (this is very rare in this industry and was touted). https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_car%C3%A9nage
> to achieve steady state you can't build out your entire fleet in 10-20 years, because then you industry has nothing to build for the next 80-90 years and withers.
In France the solution was to try to sell reactors to various nations, and
>> Even the official report about it states explicitly that this building project was a failure.
> No it didn't.
Wrong, once more. Proof: "La construction de l’EPR de Flamanville aura accumulé tant de surcoûts et de délais qu’elle ne peut être considérée que comme un échec pour EDF". Source: conclusion of the official report analyzing the EPR at Flamanville, page 31
https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/media/organes-parleme...
> "modest" profitability. Which, once again, is better than the best intermittent renewables projects.
Source?
> And FV3 is not "the nuclear industry". It is that particular project.
Granted. Which project succeeded since year 2000?
>> There are claimed intentions to build at least 2 new reactors since 2022, nothing else.
> The current plan is to build 6 EPR2
Yes: it only is a plan. Nothing more. And "6" is "at least 2". Right now we only know where 2 of them can theoretically be built (at the existing plant at Penly).
> Sites have been selected for the first 6
Which ones? Sources?
> engineering contracts for the first 2 have been awarded
Yes, for preparatory work. There is a long route ahead...
> If that's "nothing"
Compared to renewables? Nothin' indeed! https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
[nuclear license to print money]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
"Jetzt müssen RWE und Co. die ausgedienten Gelddruckmaschinen sicher abwickeln."
But that was the well-known pro nuclear lobby group...greenpeace.
https://www.greenpeace.de/klimaschutz/energiewende/atomausst...
"Atomkraftwerke sind Gelddruckmaschinen."
But that was the well-known pro nuclear lobbyist...Jürgen Trittin
https://www.presseportal.de/pm/57706/1010574
Anyway, you are just regurgitating the same old counter-factual nonsense as before, and the irrelevant "but China is also building renewables".
Once again: nuclear and renewables are only a contradiction in the minds of anti-nuclear advocates. Industrial nations do both.
> Plan to build 6 then 8 more EPR2 → "only a plan"
That is incorrect. As stated before, the approvals are being sought, 3 sites have been selected and multi-billion € contracts have been awarded.
> Sites have been selected for the first 6
https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/bugey-chosen-to-host...
> [engineering contracts] → long road ahead
Newsflash: yes, nuclear power plants are big.
Once again: if multi-billion contracts are "nothing", please give some of that "nothing". I will send you my bank details.
Apologies about pointing at Mitterand, that was incorrect. I meant Hollande.
https://www.ewmagazine.nl/kennis/achtergrond/2022/10/bernard...
Translation: 'Green cabal paralyzes the nuclear industry’
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ePZUamAzNA4IzdR1dlkE2wtl...
You quote assertions. It doesn't proves anything about the nuclear industry. An indictment must specify who did what, when, and with what effect.
> the irrelevant "but China is also building renewables".
No, I state the fact: China is building WAY, WAY MORE renewables than nuclear.
> nuclear and renewables are only a contradiction in the minds of anti-nuclear advocates. Industrial nations do both.
They try to do nuclear (with meager effects) just like many of them do coal: inertia, political pressure...
>> Plan to build 6 then 8 more EPR2 → "only a plan"
> That is incorrect. As stated before, the approvals are being sought, 3 sites have been selected and multi-billion € contracts have been awarded.
Here, also, only acts prove anything. Everything started in 2022 and, 3 years later, only one site preparation project has begun.
>> Sites have been selected for the first 6
> https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/bugey-chosen-to-host...
"Selected" is far from "nuclear-specific work is in order"!
> Apologies about pointing at Mitterand, that was incorrect. I meant Hollande.
Which action of F. Hollande did hurt the nuclear sector? Not a single one! No, not Fessenheim (French ahead, AFAIK a software translator does the job): https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/accueil#h....
> Translation: 'Green cabal paralyzes the nuclear industry’
The interviewee, Bernard Accoyer, does not make any specific accusations; it is a conspiracy theory. He is well-known for this in France.
> Not shutting down the existing nuclear plants is a pure positive
Ask Japan, and especially Fukushima's residents, about this.
> building out renewables and/or nuclear plants in the east.
Germany chose renewables and cannot quickly phase out its huge coal industry.
> For the money we wasted on intermittent renewables so far
Source (with investments' perimeters and maturities)?
> Nuclear power is well-suited for district heating and industrial heat applications
If, and only if, it is designed for it, and with the appropriate networks. France nuclear does nearly 0 district heating and 0 industrial heat.
> Germany shut down its reactors for idiotic reasons:
Reason: "Fukushima"
> All West German reactors would have survived the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake
In Japan until 2011, officially "all reactors will survive..."
> we don't have Tsunamis in Germany
Tsunamis are not the sole cause potentially triggering a nuclear accident.
> How does shutting down those plants make sense again?
Refusing nuclear-induced challenges (risk of major accident, waste, dependency towards uranium, difficult decommissioning, risk of weapon proliferation...) while another approach (renewables) is now technically adequate makes sense.
> Japan is reactivating its nuclear plants.
Some sing this song since 2015. In the real world Japan, just like China, massively invests on... renewables! Surprise! And very few reactors were reactivated: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
>> or that only a minority of environmentalists decided to do so is misleading as,
> Again, such a good thing that that claim wasn't made in this thread
It is nearly always made, in a form or another, in each and every thread about nuclear energy. In this very post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45230099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228712
> Who "closed" reactors
Read on: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
> The law that required nuclear reactors to be closed was passed by the Red/Green coalition in 2002.
Don't omit anything: "The phase-out plan was initially delayed in late 2010, when during the chancellorship of centre-right Angela Merkel, the coalition conservative-liberal government decreed a 12-year delay of the schedule."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Chang...
Then the Fukushima accident changed it all. Exactly what I described.
>> Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency
> That is also not true.
Germany burns its own coal, and by doing so maintains a huge sector. By letting reactors run it would have had to phase coal our more quickly, leading to massive unemployment and dependency towards uranium. This is sad but true.
> Ask Japan, and especially Fukushima's residents, about this.
Yes, let's ask Japan!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-16/japan-see...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/12/26/world/ger...
>> Germany shut down its reactors for idiotic reasons:
> Reason: "Fukushima"
QED.
> > Japan is reactivating its nuclear plants.
>Some sing this song since 2015
And it still happens to be true. And only in the weird minds of anti-nuclear activists are renewables and nuclear power incompatible. Almost the entire industrialized world is investing massively in both nuclear and renewables.
And once again: The law that required nuclear reactors to be closed was passed by the Red/Green coalition in 2002. Governments are bound by the law of the land.
Now other governments should have scrapped those laws, but they didn't. So they bear some responsibility for this disaster, but the main responsibility is still with Red/Green (2002) in general and the Greens in particular, because they were the ones pushing it.
It is also really telling that for some reason everyone wants to ascribe this huge "success" to their political enemies...
Japan: no comment nor "someone sees something" changes anything to the (already stated) facts: since Fukushima (2011) Japan did not restart its nuclear reactors and is quickly building renewables: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
> the entire industrialized world is investing massively in both nuclear and renewables
Nope: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
End of live would have come sooner or later anyway.
But why take the risk of fission reactors becoming targets in a war?
Later.
Reactors in the US, on which the German designs are based, have already received their extensions to 80 years.
Experts see no particular problems in extending that to 100 years or even further.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-pla...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-long-can-a-nuclear-plan...
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
Fission reactors are not very useful targets in war. In Ukraine, their fleet of nuclear reactors are what's keeping the electricity grid running. And they are building new ones. In war time.
Because presumably France for instance would likely view someone blowing up one of their plants the same way as a nuclear attack. Given their nuclear deterrence policies that would end up badly for both sides
Germany doesn't have a nuclear deterrence and in the event of a nuclear war still might want to avoid having particular bad targets. I'd rather put any new money for nuclear into fusion instead of building large fission reactors.
A nuclear plant may be hit by despair, even if it isn't the target, and in any case finding who hit it may be difficult. Right now in Ukraine...
Right now in Ukraine, the nuclear plants are what's keeping the grid alive.
They are extremely tough targets, and fairly easy to defend.
It is not about blackouts but about the risk induced by a nuclear plant in a warzone.
That's what International Atomic Energy Agency's (UN agency in charge of civilian nuclear) boss said about it: "Director General Grossi reiterated his deep concern about the apparent increased use of drones near nuclear power plants since early this year, saying such weaponry posed a clear risk to nuclear safety and security"
"any military attack on a nuclear site – with or without drones – jeopardizes nuclear safety and must stop immediately"
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-303-iae...
> It is not about blackouts but about the risk induced by a nuclear plant in a warzone.
What concrete risks are those?
And of course the IEAE is concerned about nuclear safety. That's their job.
I'm not an expert not pretend to be one.
IMHO your "They are extremely tough targets, and fairly easy to defend" is quite different from what I quoted.
> And nuclear comes with catastrophic risks that require large costs to mitigate
Those are still very low compared to fossil fuels. I mean in hindsight if that was something people cared about 40-50 years ago we'd be in a much better place climate change wise.
The article doesn't really explain what the lawsuit was over. It's about rules for private sector investment fund reporting. What the court ruled on is whether nuclear (and gas) can be classified as "sustainable investments" under the "EU taxonomy" rules[0].
This may mean that more private investment capital will end up in nuclear power, although my guess is that the impact of the EU taxonomy in driving investment decisions on this type of thing is likely quite small (I suspect the few funds which are out there which have hard requirements around EU taxonomy likely wouldn't invest in nuclear anyway).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_taxonomy_for_sustainable_ac...
Not just build, it is expensive to maintain, and insanely expensive and time consuming to dismantle. Still necessary to complement other green energies in the grid
> it's not just nuclear, it's also Natural gas
No, it can be a continental renewable mix + storage, with a "backup" made of green hydrogen turbines.
Well, nuclear energy will also serve a dual-purpose for Europe. Especially when discussing France and its nuclear deterrent.
Nuclear power capital costs should be cheap too.
The incentives of the regulators are not aligned with the public.
Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.
They only care about reducing the risk of an accident however minor happening on their watch while not appearing to completely annihilate the technology because that would open them to political attacks.
So the balance is struck at a point where nuclear power capital costs are absurdly high.
I suspect that trying to make nuclear reactors accident proof has always been the wrong approach. Instead they should have made it so an accident could always be managed - something along the lines of if something happens drown it in concrete and forget about it, because there are 100,000 more reactors. The only safety cost would come from making a meltdown slow enough or happen in a place no one cares about for it to become a balance sheet problem.
> Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.
Of course they do. It's going to feed directly into economic growth in a way that is about as visible as a major accident multiplied by its probability
"An American Nuclear Energy Debacle"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kkgg494Ifc
It had problems well beyond the unsolved 34000 year waste stewardship costs. =3
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants).
Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-s...
> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
If the goal is 100% carbon-free energy, then we simply can't let economics get in the way. Otherwise we will always be stuck building some natural gas peaker plants.
And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically.
Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit.
It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage.
The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal.
I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.
Yeah, I'm just arguing that "baseload" should be understood to be a bad thing in my comment above.
If you want to argue that nuclear is affordable as non-baseload power, because the (non-economic) cost to the environment of the alternatives is otherwise too high.... well I'd disagree because of how far solar/wind/batteries have come in the last couple of years, but prior to that you would have had a point. And you still would as far as continuing to operate existing plants goes of course.
Nuclear power has a massive handicap that most R&D was abandoned back in the 80s because it was uneconomic. And another handicap that the R&D it did get was never that focused on economics, commercial nuclear power were always a side effect of the true goal (Small reactors for nuclear submarines and Breeder reactors for nuclear weapons). And to get the promised low costs, you really need to commit and take advantage of massive economics of scale.
I'm not arguing that when taking environmental damage into account, that nuclear is cheaper than current solar/wind/battery technology for any single power project. They have the advantage of massive R&D over the last 30 years.
What I am arguing is that focusing on solar/wind/battery might not be the best route to 100% carbon free power in the long term. Maybe it is? But we really shouldn't be jumping to that assumption.
And we shouldn't be disregarding Nuclear because of any argument that can be summed up in a hacker news comment.
... voters (or however we want to handwave preference aggregation) are very passive about carbon-free energy (and global warming and sustainability and economics and ...)
they either pick some pet peeves (coral reefs, rainforests, global South inequality, desertification) and usually start buying things (EVs, PV panels, heat pumps)
but when it comes to policy they usually revert to Greenpeace/degrowth/NIMBY cult members
This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price. Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%, which makes it quite flexible in real condition. See https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... as a proof - nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day.
New small modular reactors promise great improvements, as they can be pre-built in factories, require limited maintenance, lower risk, and as a result much lower cost per MW.
https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...
> This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price.
This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all. You have to consider both operating and capital costs. Nuclear plants are cheap to operate once built, but those operations have to pay off the capital costs. If the load factor is low, then each unit of generated power has to bear a higher portion of the capital costs. If your capital costs are very high, then you either need a very high load factor or very high spot prices to bear those costs.
> Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%
Net demand on CAISO can go from about 2 MW to 30 MW in the summer. 20 MW of that ramp occurs over just 3 hours. I'm sure you can build nuclear plants that ramp that fast, but you need a lot more than the range you're mentioning here. Regardless, I'm not making an argument about the physics of nuclear power plants, just the economics. Expensive plants generally need high load factors to pay off the capital costs.
> nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day.
Most of France's nuclear plants are old and thus fully depreciated. The only one built recently (Flamanville Unit 3), is a good example of the bad cost trend in nuclear. While this was a bit cheaper than Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in the US on a dollars per nameplate capacity basis, at 19 billion euro it's still very expensive (and also way over budget).
France also has high rates of curtailment, which is not necessarily a huge problem for them since so much of their generation is already carbon-free, but it does suggest they're already hitting the limits of their ability to ramp production up and down. Whether this is an engineering problem or something to do with the structure of their electricity market is a bit unclear to me
> New small modular reactors promise great improvements, as they can be pre-built in factories, require limited maintenance, lower risk, and as a result much lower cost per MW.
This has been the promise for years, but so far the low costs have yet to materialize and they are estimated to have a higher LCOE than traditional plants. Currently only 2 are actually operational, a demonstration plant in China and a floating power plant using adapted ice-breaker reactors in Russia. There are a few more in the pipeline, but they are all at least a couple years out from actually producing power.
> This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all.
I'm talking about the wholesale market, which works as an auction, where producers give their price for units of capacity, and the clearing price is set by the marginal producer. Typically, nuclear reactors will give their marginal cost, near 0, and let the more expensive producers set the clearing price. Given that capital cost is a sunk cost, it doesn't matter to nuclear plants as long as the market price is above the marginal one. So called "renewables" do this as well, but have to account for the risk that mother nature doesn't provide, and therefore factor in the risk of having to buy coal or gas-produced electricity on the spot.
> Net demand on CAISO can go from about 2 MW to 30 MW in the summer.
Well if this is the case this is not a "nuclear sized" market then and other ways of supplying capacity are better. But remember that it's estimated that blackouts are much,much more costly society-wise than whatever marginal price you could pay for electricity, so having a baseload and some excess capacity is always good. This is also why many electricity producers are nationalized. It's not a market like the others.
> Flamanville
France has the strictest regulator of the world, which adds a lot of costs, and Flamanville required to re-learn many things after losing the expertise from the 70's. For the record, an airliner should be able to fall on Flamanville without any problem, due to regulations.
> Curtailements
Excess electricity is sold in Germany, which lacks a much-needed baseload, especially since they have a big industry. Most people ignore that electricity consumption follows Pareto's law, with around 1k industrial plants consuming around 50% of the electricity (sorry no source for this, my econ teacher said in a class a few years ago!).
> SMR
Yes, still in development, many different designs so costs estimates are difficult to make. I'm citing Wikipedia's[0]. The good thing is that the possibility to build them serially should decrease a lot the costs as demand ramps up.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_SMR
The massive capital costs of the plant have to be paid back in the sale price of energy, that’s what makes it expensive. France’s state built plants don’t have that accounting
But the market price asked by nuclear plant doesn't account for capital costs as the real price will always be higher. What is important is the clearing price not the asking price.
Thank you for this, this along with many other comments have really helped me understand.
This isn’t a simple issue, and I think your basic common sense take now mostly aligns with mine (though correct me if I’m wrong) which is something along the lines of that we don’t have to be anti-nuclear specifically but we do have to be bearish because it has downsides that mean if we are going to use it for some specific use case we’d better be sure that the pros are significant to outweigh the natural cons it brings with it.
Deploying a continental renewable mix (wind, solar...) reduces the effets of 'intermittency' on electricity production.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
It is possible because interconnecting grids at continental-level is The Way for quite a while, even without any renewable, because it enables operators to optimize (preferring less-emitting and cheaper production units) and also to obtain a better service guarantee (less blackouts!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...
It also enables over-produced electricity to power electrolyzers. 'Green hydrogen' thus obtained can power the backup/peakers (producing electricity to load-follow and also when other intermittent equipment cannot produce enough on-the-spot), further reducing 'intermittency' effects. This isn't sci-fi ( https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydroge... ), many can burn a mix (methane, hydrogen...) and some recent models can be retrofitted into burning hydrogen (no major investment nor need to reform existing heavy resources/organization).
Storage will also more and more prominent in electrical systems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182026
Nuclear will be trounced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196328
Patent holes in the most hyped nuclear-favorable approach show that there is no issue on sight for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182003
The trend is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa... (explore many nations/regions)
He will soon be dead, Jim.
As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means.
But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.
It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]
The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.
Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]
1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continu...
2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-gene...
4.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-b...
just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60).
That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".
That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants... https://www.nrdc.org/bio/rachel-fakhry/myth-247365-power-pla...
This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.
And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.
> That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants...
It really doesn't matter what the uptime of individual power plants is. What matters is the uptime for the consumer which is essentially 100% in EU countries.
The report mentions this:
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.
My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.
> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).
I guess, but this article seems misleading to me then. The percentages do seem to mean to constant 1GW supply, not a total supply.
So what’s the total supply?
LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.
I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.
> I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group
I agree it's unlikely you'll just have solar + batteries used just for LV. However, taking a look at the adoption of storage in California and Texas, I think it's safe to assume an upwards trajectory for solar + batteries [1].
I didn't know much about Nevada's electricity generation, but based on current data [1] there are enough alternative sources to support a sizeable increase in solar generation.
Still, I don't know how much solar will be deployed and I hope nuclear does drop in price in order to speed up the energy transistion. It's exciting to see so many great technological leaps in our lifetimes.
Finally, a shout out to geothermal, which looks very promising. I recommend listening to "Catching up with enhanced geothermal " - https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal.
1. https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2025-09-14
2. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2...
The point is that a very mundane setup with small storage is nearly enough to create a flat baseload of electricity.
We both know that neither supply nor demand is that flat.
In reality we can also trivially add wind power, existing hydro, gas turbines ran on carbon neutral fuel etc. to the mix.
How will you force this house that is self-sufficient 97% of the time to buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity to not crater the capacity factor of the nuclear plant?
If we got to 97% and use gas backups or whatever, we have already clearly won.
Because fast to deploy in theory fights quickly with permitting systems and NIMBYism. You need more permits, because a typical solar or wind farm doesn't come close to a nuclear plan's output, so the per-project bureaucracy multiplies. By needing more places, you also have more groups opposing projects for typical NIMBY reasons. You need battery facilities too, and more updates to the grid to deal with having less inertia, and the updates cost money, and the battery facilities themselves face more NIMBYism: Minimum distances to places where people live and such. So when you put it all together, slow bureaucracies just move at glacial paces, and the equipment you would have bought when you sent out the permit is already different than what you want to use when the permitting is approved.
Then we have the tariffs, as Europe puts tariffs on Chinese equipment that change the price quite a bit.
A country that took this very seriously and decided to put renewables as a top priority could go quite fast. But if there's anything one should learn about the last few decades is that modern democracies care too much about vested interest and NIMBY complaints to actually get projects like this done. Just look at charts showing power waiting to go online in most countries: You'll find very long lines, even after dealing with the rest of the the bureaucratic gauntlet.
Quote: The winters in Germany are often colder and the country's climate is generally more continental. The south of France enjoys warmer Mediterranean temperatures and milder winters.
One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters.
First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US.
The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.
I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism
Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you
Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill"
I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself
Isn't that exactly what NIMBY means?
People want the power to stay on but they don't want the power generation built near them.
I think if something is built near you that materially lowers the quality of your life, being angry about it is not NIMBYism
I personally think NIMBYism is more along the lines of "this doesn't negatively impact my day to day life, but I'm worried it will lower my property value"
I think that might be an uncommon definition, but language is fluid so who knows
I went right up to a 2MW windmill once to test this hypothesis and all I could hear were cars on a road (100km/h speed limit) several hundred metres away.
The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.
It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
You need a reliable source for energy. Pumped storage is not. They are mostly good for dealing with the fluctuations of energy supply and demand. It crucially requires water to operate. You can't do much when there's a drought. Also, did some googling. The world’s largest pumped‑hydro storage plant (Fengning, China) stores nearly 40 GWh, delivering 3.6 GW for about 10.8 hours when full. Thats not even a day.
There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.
You're looking for the biggest which isn't all that important. It's like saying you cannot deal with a difference in peak and through in production using a single power plant. For example, Norway has just 78TWh[1] in storage like that. Which is 2000x your example
And yes, I realize how well positioned Norway is for this. But you can put these wherever you have a stream and a big reservoir
1: https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftpr...
Gas doesn't imply natural gas fwiw
> Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
It's also the oldest storage tech and I doubt there's a single place in Europe available to build more.
> Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
The whole EU is in winter weather together.
> The whole EU is in winter weather together
Sure, less sunshine, significantly more wind.
No single source will do it all, no one is arguing that
> The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage.
We already do that. France notably has a lot of hydropower and they pump water up when they don’t want to shutdown a nuclear unit.
The issue is that there is very little places where you could build new dams in Europe and water shortage is becoming a regular occurrence.
Not every dam has to be of the size of the Hoover dam. A single huge battery is also not practical.
Yes water shortage might be a problem if the river you're on runs dry. That's not often a problem though, plenty of major rivers. And a dam doesn't change the total amount that flows, it just changes when. As a result it might even help in lowering some flood risks.
all the easy pumped storage options have already been tapped. would require mega projects to create more. something only china can do these days :(
Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed.
This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.
EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.
I obviously don't know about Norway, but in most developed countries, the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure. While I can't prove it, it seems too convenient that people suddenly care about "nature" right after they've fucked it up for so many other reasons.
> suddenly care about "nature"
Obviously its extremely arbitrary and selective.
https://www.wwf.no/dyr-og-natur/truede-arter/ulv-i-norge/ret...
Moral posturing and virtue signalling is a huge part of Scandinavian culture in general.
> the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure
The surface of both of these things hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.
> The surface of both of these things hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.
Source?
It was also my understanding that large amounts of habitat (e.g. Amazon rainforest) are lost for agriculture in general, and that cows are a particularly large part of that
Road surfaces I don't specifically know in terms of habitat area loss, but they split up habitat areas, and surely we'll have gotten more road surface as we went from ~6 to ~8 billion people on the planet in the last 30 years? How could that have stayed roughly the same?!
I wish more people would think along these lines: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/may/10/windpowe...
There’s a wind farm being built in your backyard? Demand one of them for free to power your village.
> This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.
Really ? They don't mind being one of the top oil exporter in the world though
Oil and gas extraction is "invisible", platforms far, far away on the sea. Nothing to complain about. :)
While that's strictly true, there are a lot of people who wouldnt mind living across the fence from a solar farm. Not so many want to live next to a nuclear power plant. Irrationaly perhaps but still.
> because they want to preserve the nature as it is.
In Norway? Or by nature as it is you mean managed nature "parks" or reindeer herding areas?
Don't Scandinavians generally vehemently support the eradication of native species like wolves (despite much bigger number of them doing just fine in much denser areas like Italy or Poland).
By "nature" i mean e.g., mountains. Not necessarily managed park. IIRC, the people have also protested against high-voltage lines because... dunno, they "ruin the view" across the fjord I guess.
> reindeer herding areas
There was recently a case in the highest court, Sami people vs state where they wanted newly built wind park in Finnmark to be torn down because... reindeer, native land and rights. They (Sami) won. Funnily, some researchers have shown that reindeer got used to the windmills quickly with seemingly no adverse effects. (Truth to be told, Sami are also internally divided on many issues. There's also a bitter (relatively recent) history between Sami and the state where the state had suppressed Sami culture over decades.)
After the verdict, some lower-ranked politicians said that Finnmark is about to become a museum, no development will now be possible there. I jokingly once thought: give the whole area to Russia so Sami can demonstrate in front of Kremlj.
I don't think the windmills will get torn down, and what happens next, I have no idea.
(For reference: the area is about 48000 km2 and population is around 75000 people. Which gives about 1.5 person per square kilometer.)
> eradication of native species like wolves
Not eradication but controlled number reduction. I'm personally opposed to it, but farmers somehow have a strong-hold on the government there. ATTACKS ON THE LIVE-STOCK! I don't know how much financial damage they suffer yearly, but that's the official explanation.
> ATTACKS ON THE LIVE-STOCK!
It's rather interesting how Italy or Poland can fit several times more livestock, people and wolves into significantly less area.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/APRO_MT_LSCAT...
Italy is more densely populated than Denmark for example (and Sweden is an empty wasteland in comparison), yet also somehow has enough space both for wolves and cows/sheep/etc.
"Don't Scandinavians generally vehemently support the eradication of native species like wolves" - Don't know where you got this idea from. Yes, Sweden has started allowing licensed (very regulated) hunting of wolf, but only because the population has increased a lot. There is already tension between livestock farmers and wolfs in places, and I believe allowing wolfes to become much more than what we currently would eventuallt results in _fewer_ wolfs because they would start getting hated.
The greens have long been staunch supportes of wolfs in Sweden, and its the right which is not. Atm we do have a right leaning government so... Im sure it will sway the other way eventually.
> but only because the population has increased a lot
Swedish wolf population is extremely small relative to its geographical size.
There are less than 400 wolves in Sweden. For example there are 1500 wolves in Poland, possibly twice that in Italy. How many times more farmers livestock those countries have? Let alone people. The Baltic states have more than twice as many wolves as Sweden and Norway put together...
Sweden is 50% larger than Italy and six times less people, yet somehow several times less area available for wildlife?
Talking about farmers..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
Sweden has only slightly more cultivated land than Lithuania (and Norway several times less than that), let alone Poland or Italy...
Energy density is unimportant. What matters is cost. A source that has higher energy density but also higher cost is a loser.
The whole energy density meme was propagated by Vaclav Smil. He observed in the past that energy sources had become more energy dense, and then took the irrational leap to proclaim this was some sort of iron law of energy development.
> Sure, it might cost more
I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will).
However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons:
2. It will take longer
3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles
4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well.
Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.
> It will take longer
Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
Nuclear is baseload which is why it always runs. Gas peakers is what you turn on and off.
All around Europe nuclear plants are forced off the markets because the electricity prices are for weeks lower than their wear and tear and fuel costs.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a battery buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity from the grid when they can make their own?
”Baseload” is a title earned by having the lowest marginal costs. There is nothing fundamental about it.
Today renewables have the cheapest marginal cost at 0. They are the new ”baseload”.
This is not true. I assume you are talking about the french nuclear reactors and their abysmal capacity factors?
The reason for the french case is that they were required to reduce output to allow more space for other new energy generation types. Fortunately the French have realised the error of their ways.
I would suggest some curiosity when approaching this topic.
Here's a reactor in Sweden which went offline for ~2 weeks citing market conditions. At the same time as another reactor at the same plant had a 7 month extended outage.
https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/forsmark-2-ur-drift-pa-agarna...
During the infamous Iberian blackout the nuclear output was at ~45%. One reactor was offline for maintenance, the rest had voluntarily reduced their output citing market conditions.
You did not answer my question. Why should someone with rooftop solar and a home battery buy extremely expensive grid based nuclear electricity to prop up the reactors capex when their own installations delivers vastly cheaper electricity?
Sure, if someone wishes to completely disconnect from the grid then they are free to do so. I don't think there is anyone stopping anyone who chooses to do this.
The problem arises when someone wishes to remain connected to the grid so that the grid supports them over the winter/over night/when there's bad weather/when their batteries run out etc etc.
One has to pay for the costs of providing you with power all the time, not just when your solar panels aren't working.
Now the question of why it is economically advantageous to self generate these days over the economies of scale of the normal power industry is a really interesting question. I think the reason for this is ultimately: it is because of a total failure of governments and the energy businesses to provide cheap energy. Something which we know to be possible, but they have failed. I put the blame with governments personally.
Why is it a problem that people rely on the grid when their own distributed resources run out? It seems like you are framing it as a problem because then you know that nuclear power is not the solution.
For those with rooftop solar and a battery the calculation is of course:
- What does creating my own reliability cost
- Can I accept these blackouts? What is an acceptable level of blackouts? The grid is a statistical system so all grids have reliability figure. In Sweden this is currently set at 1 hour of blackout per year.
- What does the grid connection cost?
The grid costs will of course need to be changed to a fixed "connection fee" for maintaining the transmission grid and then the typical per kWh cost, when it is needed as per the market conditions.
The solution for this is of course to add generation optimizing low CAPEX and high OPEX.
Which is.... drum roll. Open cycle gas turbines running on decarbonized fuel. Synfuels, hydrogen or biofuels.
Nuclear power with high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX is literally the worst solution imaginable to create reliability when renewables are inevitably added to a grid.
Take a look at South Australia this past week. Every single day they ran on 100% renewables for a portion of the day. Do you turn off the nuclear plant every single day?
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
Well, the coal plants realized the had no options and were forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
> economically
When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be).
> Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Longer than nuclear to do what? I was replying to the above commenter who said the following:
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables
TTL for individual nuclear is obviously always much longer than for renewables but time to any arbitrary large generation goal is almost certainly shorter for nuclear (barring taboo).
> time to any arbitrary large generation goal
China is proving this to be objective false. Their total energy production (not nameplate power) for wind/solar/hydro is growing substantially faster than their nuclear output.
You're wasting your energy on that user, I suspect.
> No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts
...is commonly a rhetorical pattern meaning "I've predetermined my conclusion, but I want to save face by appearing rational and casting those I disagree with as biased or incompetent in one fell swoop."
It's the "Aren't there any REAL men anymore?" of contentious topics.
No? I’m genuinely curious I just was frustrated by not having my questions answered properly. Most people in this thread have been very helpful.
This isn’t reddit, don’t read so deeply into my motivations here.
If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today.
Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price.
The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.
No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T.
Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
France has 58 reactors with combined power of 60GW. The audit in 2011 (after Fukushima) estimated their cost at 96B euros and the total investment into the nuclear industry since 1950 including research at 228B euros.
And that doesn't include the fact that for all these years electricity prices in Germany were higher than in France which helped to keep renewables afloat.
> But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
That's yet to be seen, doesn't really match the reality I observe so far. They are promised to be cheaper sure, but you end paying more and subsidizing coal power plants in China along the way.
> subsidizing coal power plants in China along the way
~10% of PRC energy is generated from solar now. That's enough to carbon offset every panel they've produced and will produce in perpetuity.
That's unlikely. It takes 2 to 8 years to recover the electricity used to produce a photovoltaics panel, before it can even begin to offset anything.
Given that the majority of these panels was installed very recently, most likely they didn't even offset themselves yet, let alone any of the exports.
That's confirmed by the fact that coal generation in China keeps growing to this day, any of the "offsets" so far are purely imaginary.
Given surplus over lifespan @ 10% of energy generation is more than enough to assume solar is going to be energetically self-sustaining as a sector.
Before 4x expanding solar push in 2023 they hit solar generation/production breakpoint in 2021/2022, as in surplus generation from old panels generated enough to pay back energy production of new panels. So absolute offset not imaginary, new breakpoint for current production rate is going to be 2027/28 unless they 4x again in next 2 years, i.e. 16x production from 2021, it will be functionally completely offset sector in a couple years. Nitpicking about coal or how solar is subsidizing coal with that on the horizon is are imaginary.
What solar+renewables is doing is reduce coal from ~70% to ~50% of energy mix even though absolute coal #s increased due to massive increase in demand/supply. The offset is that 20% shift over decade where generation 2x, hence actual offset to coal expansion by 40%.
Regardless with EPBT of ~3 years (less after breakpoint), and 25-30y lifespace, it's one of those 2nd best time to plant a tree is today situations. There isn't a solid reason not to hammer cheap PRC solar at scale outside of geopolitics.
> Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power.
Germany has just over 250GW of installed capacity. [0] indicates peak power is 75GW. Replicating the Olkiluoto EPR build for 75GW of capacity would have cost perhaps 500B EUR.
[1] speculates about what would have happened if Germany had retained its nuclear power stations and performed a fleet build-out.
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-industry-has-lar...
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
Citing [1] means that you are only here to sow discord citing research you know is factually wrong.
That study is laughably bad. To the point that they double counted all renewable investment.
See: https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/en/blog/2024/kritische-stellun...
And the CO₂ difference for electricity production, so the only part of the energy system where nuclear vs. intermittent renewable is currently applicable, is not 2:1. It is 10:1.
Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures.
And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.
Even with that, renewables are cheaper.
One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).
In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
And we do have detailed weather data for the last 70 years in Europe.
So it should be easy for proponents of renewables plus batteries like you to show that their proposed solutions would have worked all those years.
One can do modeling based on weather data, yes. There's even a web site where you can do that and obtain cost optimized designs (under various cost and technology assumptions): https://model.energy/
Nuclear proponents seem incapable of avoiding the exact same debunked arguments over and over again year after year. Did you know that the sun doesn’t always shine? Checkmate solar power! Bet you never thought of that. I am very clever.
They use the bad arguments because they don't have any good arguments. It's a tell.
No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you.
Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
> Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
Oil and gas and other fossils are finite resources, and we need to replace them anyway sooner or later with pure electrical solutions, better sooner, as we know. And then what I said applies. And, as the only "infinite" resources we have, are the sunlight and the gravity of the moon, it is obvious that we should base global electricity generation on them.
"Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years" https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
You should check out these things called batteries.
You can't manage a winter load with batteries (and no country on earth does it), batteries would need a 100x improvement for that purpose.
Yes, I looked into it. To store a few days worth of electricity I would need maybe 100kWh of battery storage. Right now I think battery storage costs around $100 per kWh. A whole season of electricity would be prohibitively expensive.
Using batteries for long term storage is one of the classic bullshit moves of anti-renewable arguments. There are much cheaper options at scale.
Cheaper solutions which no-one bothered to implement until now. The proof is in the pudding.
If fossil fuels are available and cheap, unburdened by the cost of their negative externalities, of course they will be chosen instead of a more expensive CO2-free alternative. That's what killed the nuclear renaissance in the US ~15 years ago.
What this means is there's low hanging fruit to solve these problems in other ways, once fossil fuels are no longer allowed to pollute without cost. There are already good ideas for solving the long term storage problem, with many of the component technologies already existing for other purposes.
Who the actually cares about cheaper I want better and more reliable
Can we please stop optimizing everything into low quality low reliability garbage for the sake of being cheaper?
Renewables and storage would be cheaper at the same level of reliability.
You are delusional if you think renewables and storage will be the same reliability as base load plants like nuclear, gas, coal
Renewables and storage wouldn't drop gigawatts off the grid in an instant. They'd be massively redundant and distributed. That's how you get reliability.
No way any current place is building that kind of oversupply and redundancy
"No one is doing it therefore it is impossible" is a remarkable argument, especially from someone trying to argue nuclear can replace fossil fuels.
There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables.
Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.
And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.
Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.
There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
This statement is very uninformed. Other sources are intermittent, nuclear energy is not. The problem about many countries not being able to produce fuel rods themselves is true, but the exact same applies to other energy sources. Most nations depend on very few other nations for imports of oil gas etc.
Nuclear power plants only have a high upfront cost, which is compensated by their long lifetime of 60-100 years. Other energy sources also have high upfront production costs + you need to spend additional money on infrastructure for batteries/storage.
I also don't understand your argument on military targets. A NPP is a target the sane way a solar park, wind-park, geothermal facility or whatever would be a target. And to add to that, wile they are of course not indestrctible they are extremely robustly built. You can literally fly an airplane into them and it wouldnt result in a meltdown.. I do agree on your point on decentralization, yes.
There are a few things:
1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).
2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.
3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?
4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)
1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year
1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.
Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.
Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.
Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space.
Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
> Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land
Neither, see gas caverns underground
Nuclear also requires non-infinite resources like uranium.
There's plenty for a few thousand years. We might have solved fusion power by then.
How plenty is the supply that's not in some other countries control, that might make us dependent on them, yet again, like with Germany, gas and Russia.
Wind and solar require non-infinite resources too.
Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system.
What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas.
The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.
Renewables and storage have gotten so cheap that the areas where nuclear might still be competitive have greatly shrunk. Right now, the best remaining places for nuclear are in eastern Europe away from coasts. Even there, nuclear is at best competitive with optimistic assumptions.
This also means that, globally, renewables are much cheaper than nuclear in most places. In a global economy, energy intensive industries will migrate to these renewable-rich regions as fossil fuels are phased out. The relative energy ghetto regions will not save their heavy industries by going nuclear.
Luckily EV mandates have been rolled back nationally (although not in my state yet). That’s a sure way to drive up the cost of storage anyway, when maybe battery storage is better served for this power station purpose instead.
Obviously using used car batteries might be a way to recycle these more effectively than what is currently available.
It's going to have no effect on the global cost trajectory of battery storage. The US is not in the storage driver's seat, China is.
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have.
I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).
Germany sits on storage capacity more than 247 TWh
What is the 247 TWh number referring too?
Germany uses a little over 500 TWh of electricity per year.
Germany has a little more than 20 GWh of grid storage.
It's referring to the possible storage capacity, probably the potential to store hydrogen in underground solution mined salt caverns.
I've heard much higher figures, in the PWh for Europe as a whole.
Storage of energy as heat at 600 C has much larger potential storage capacity; see standardthermal.com
I don’t think it would cost more.
The real problem with nuclear energy is, and always has been the cost. It always seems to turn into a boondoggle.
Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.
Someone pointed out in another comment that Iowa, USA has installed an incredible amount of wind turbines in the last 25 years. There is a whole Wiki page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa
Also, Texas has done very similar.
The answer to this is just "intermittent" : the higher the share of renewables, the higher the share that you have to make up for when you're at night without wind. This can be done through batteries, water storage, or interconnection, but that's the real cost of renewables.
Or gas (produced using renewable energy) storage
In theory, you can replace nuclear with a massive buildout of renewables and storage and grid upgrades and overcapacity to handle intermittency. The challenge is that doing all of that fast enough
Is it faster or slower than building nuclear plants?
> Sure, it might cost more
That.
There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost
Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election
If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.
This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors.
For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
In France they aren't, Germany neither
Wrong on both counts.
The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons.
It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians.
But that's a political problem.
Finland just built a site for around €1 billion.
No, about the Onkalo nuclear storage facility.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finla...
it is not wrong, both countries subsidized nuclear power
Nuclear waste is a problem caused by activists preventing disposal sites like yucca mountain from being built
Yep, the "nuclear waste problem" is 90% political, not technical
That doesn't change its cost in the slightest, unless you have a solution for some part of the population not agreeing with you
No. It’s as simple as:
A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough
…and…
B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times)
You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear.
Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box.
Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.
But you're wrong. Batteries are now fine for diurnal storage, which is their intended use. Batteries are not fine for seasonal storage, but there are alternatives for that when it is needed.
China is installing vastly more renewables than nuclear. Their nuclear builds appear to be just a holding action to preserve their capability to build NPPs; that can't last forever.
Yes the alternatives for the seasonal storage problem are...fossil fuels. So obviously if we can't solve the seasonal problem yet with batteries, current battery tech isn't capable enough to make clean energy a reality without Nuclear.
Also, China's energy mix is irrelevant for Europe, the two regions have vastly different climates, population distributions, and government.
Europe has much bigger seasonal gaps in the winter for things like solar; Hydro is huge in China due to massive river systems like the Yangtze, but basically tapped out in Europe; Wind is a huge opportunity in China but only works Offshore in Europe; Europe can't run cross-continent UHV grid systems like China due to beaurocratic impossibility; etc. etc.
That's an alternative for the seasonal storage problem, and currently the cheapest one. That doesn't mean other alternatives don't exist, just that those alternatives are not currently competitive with fossil fuels.
One should not use this situation that those alternatives can't exist or be reasonably expected to exist, or that a system using them would be more expensive than a system using nuclear. If that were a valid argument, one could equally argue that because new nuclear cannot compete with natural gas combined cycle for baseload, new nuclear is not an option.
Different energy product. And it doesn't preclude renewable energy from being deployed alongside.
This pitting of renewables vs nuclear is not helpful for renewables or nuclear. They both work well together.
They don’t actually. Renewables on the grid make nukes uneconomical.
No actually they don't. Not sure which market your talking about but I can assure you that re-investing in nuclear power is the right choice for long term energy capability for humans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
That, as well as intermittency being difficult to manage.
Nuclear+gas is the cleanest solution.
I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear.
People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?
Solar and wind are extremely simple machines and are thus much more amenable to manufacturing economies of scale than fundamentally complicated nuke plants. I very much doubt we’d get to 10x , 100x seems impossible.
A 10x reduction is very doable. Consider this: the Vogtle units 3-4 cost about $37 BN [1]. The similar size Karachi units 2-3 cost about $10 BN [2]. The difference is that the Karachi units were built by China. The design used at Karachi is called Hualong One [3], and since China built the 2 Karachi units, it has built 5 more, and has 15 more under construction and 9 more approved for construction. The cost of the reactors that China builds for itself is not known, but it's very likely lower than the ones that China built for Pakistan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear.
For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal.
There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...)
You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-ene...
Yes, this is the real answer. Nuclear, which is currently dropping as a percentage of global electricity demand and is now under 10% needs a miracle to reverse that and maybe reach 15% if everything goes well for it.
Meanwhile renewables are surging and every relevant expert suggests they'll dominate the future.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-is-gettin...
The graph without the relatively flat hydro is even more stark.
The stuff people say about nuclear on this forum is on the level of flat earthism and they seem totally unashamed of this.
Would point to the law of economics which says only renewables can get cheaper with investments? And which law of physics makes renewables work in places, which have little wind and solar?
It's typically called Wright's Law:
https://quickonomics.com/terms/wrights-law/
But it's not a law that applies to all technologies, and it will likely end at some point, but there's at least 1-2 decades of cost decrease left.
There is no law of physics that makes renewables work where there are poor renewable resources, except through transmission, which is usually engineered using several of Maxwell's laws.
I asked which economic law makes ONLY renewables getting cheaper with time. Why couldn't nuclear also get cheaper? Maxwell laws can't help with geopolitics though.
Aha, that meaning wasn't clear to me in your original sentence.
The best research I have seen on why different technologies get their learning rates is from the interviewees of this podcast:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/which-technologies-get-cheaper-over
Some people think that SMRs are a way for nuclear to get on a learning curve, but there's just as many skeptical people as enthusiastic people about that, in my experience.
Natural energy resources are a huge source of geopolitical turmoil since the start of the industrial age. Renewables have the potential to significantly lessen these conflicts compared to what's happened with fossil fuels.
Thanks for the podcast.
>>Renewables have the potential to significantly lessen these conflicts compared to what's happened with fossil fuels.
I'm not too optimistic about it. As usual, on one side you have countries with big renewable sources, the producers and on the other side, you have countries with strong industry, which requires a lot energy, the consumers.
Nearly all countries will be able to power themselves quite well with renewables, and if not that they can pay the high price for nuclear power.. But in any case, renewable energy provides much more independence than feasible with fossil fuel based industry. Fossil fuels require a continuous stream of transfer to operate. When you buy 5GW of solar panels from a country, you have 30+ years of energy before you need to think about repowering the facility, and even if there's a shortage after 30 years they are still working at merely reduced production power.
Those countries without the option for local renewables are no worse off for independence than before. The option of renewables only adds independence, it doesn't take it away. Thus our renewable future will be far more stable.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine gives a ton of insight about these dynamics, IMHO. Ukraine's energy system was vulnerable because large thermal generators pose easy targets that can be taken out with minimal tonnage of bombs. Taking out a solar field or wind field is not as easy. And Ukraine's nuclear facilities have been actively used against them during the war by Russia. In particular, Russia has used executions/torture/coercion of nuclear reactor staff and explosions around nuclear reactors to threaten melt downs, etc. Plus, it's barely been covered anywhere, but Russia in this year used drones to damage the new brand new sarcophagus that was supposed to last 100 years, with very few paths to repair:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protec...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW4BEqDS_wM
And the war has also illustrated the dependence of so many countries on Russia's fossil fuels, enough to kick off inflation across the entire world. Fossil fuels are a global market, so it doesn't matter where the disruption happens, it affects prices the world over. Even though the US is supposedly energy independent when it comes to oil and natural gas, we still suffer the consequences because of that global market.
A power system bulid on local production via renewables does not suffer these massive disruptions from the actions of single nation states. The inflaction Reduction Act was very aptly named, though few people today understand why, it seems. Future generations will curse us for delaying our true energy independence, which is only possible when we get off fossil fuels.
What percentage of the earth's surface have little wind and solar? What percentage of the human population live there?
They have solar farms in Alaska and the Antarctic because it's cheaper than shipping in diesel for 6 months of the year.
And the law of economics making modular renewables cheaper is Wright's Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect
>>What percentage of the earth's surface have little wind and solar? What percentage of the human population live there?
Large parts of USA, Canada, non Mediterranean Europe and northern half of Asia. A lot of people live there.
>> And the law of economics making modular renewables cheaper is Wright's Law:
I asked which economic law makes ONLY renewables getting cheaper with time. Why couldn't nuclear get cheaper in time?
If you read the definition of wrights law it's fairly obvious.
> Wright's law, also known as the experience curve effect, states that as the cumulative production of a product doubles, the labor time or cost per unit declines by a fixed percentage
We're up to about 8 billion solar panels produced ever, maybe 2 billion or so a year now.
That's a lot of doublings.
There's been about 700 nuclear plants. Not a lot of doublings.
>> We're up to about 8 billion solar panels produced ever, maybe 2 billion or so a year now.
You need a lot of panels to match one nuclear power plant though, and they were/are heavily subsidized.
>> There's been about 700 nuclear plants. Not a lot of doublings.
Obviously, because there was/is a lot pressure against building them. I think China demonstrates, that they can be built rather quickly and cheaper and cheaper, if the obstacles are removed.
It's not really a fair competition when something heavily subsidized and the other thing is almost banned.
> projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear
Does that mean you’re expert-er?
I expect that if I had to put numbers on things, I would be subject to the same biases as everyone else.
Or perhaps not, sometimes not being an "expert" in the traditional sense can remove the biases of an industry. Sci-fi author Ramez Naam had some of the most accurate forecasts in the past by doing the simplest thing possible: looking at the past curve and extending it. That is probably the simple type of projection I would make!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23185166
The IEA and EIA are two very respectable organizations that make comically bad projections, just absolutely awful. I know I could beat their projections!
Jenny Chase is a highly prominent solar analyst that has some great anecdotes about how wrong solar estimates always are, and she challenges that new analysts face, but I'm having trouble finding the podcast right now... in any case always read the Jenny Chase megathreads on the state of solar or her interviews in order to get some really great insights into what's going on.
In any case the rate of learning in solar tech far exceeds the expectations of most "energy" experts, and also usually exceeds the expectations of even the solar experts.
> Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers
Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter.
Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.
It sounds like you're making the usual idiot argument that batteries are the only storage technology and would be used for seasonal storage.
That's not how it would work. There are far better -- orders of magnitude better -- storage options over timescales of many months.
Which is entering emergency reserve territory. Nuclear power CAPEX to build an emergency reserve would seem to be utterly insane.
The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels.
Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run the grid without help for 14 days.
As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
I'm not sure I get your comment, France has 2 years worth of uranium ready to use + 5 years of uranium not enriched.
I don't think there's any other form of energy in the country which has a 7 years emergency reserve.
> As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.
The uranium reserves does not help when a winter storm rolls through and grid usage spikes. That is "emergency reserves" or the completely black and white "must work 100% or completely unusable" statement you led with.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
> BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.
I don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.
Everyone I know with a BEV and an hourly contract times their charging to perfection to reduce costs.
They are of course willing to pay a premium to charge now if their schedule demands it, but that is a tiny tiny subset of the household BEV fleet.
> Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
That's the opposite, France is exporting in winter and imports in summer whenever the Germany overproduces solar and doesn't know what to do with it.
So for now it's France which helps to stabilize the grid of its neighbors.
There's even price caps against that because France would bleed other countries in winter otherwise.
> don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.
No they can't, you have to understand how the EU consumption works, surplus are in summer and max demand is in winter. Nobody is going to store electricity in summer in their car to use it in winter, this is nonsense.
Here's a random selection when the French grid would collapse without 35 GW of their own and neighbors fossil based electricity:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
You need to differentiate beteween exporting when the grid is strained and facing a grid collapse when a cold spell hits.
Click around the weeks and you will find enormous exports happening the week before. Those are the averages you mention. But as we can now both see the French nuclear grid is incredible inflexible when dealing with the demand curve.
> No they can't, you have to understand how the EU consumption works, surplus are in summer and max demand is in winter. Nobody is going to store electricity in summer in their car to use it in winter, this is nonsense.
Please, this is getting ridiculous. I presume you are smarter than thinking that when I put forth people with hourly contracts for their BEVs I am doing it suggesting seasonal storage.
Have you heard of this thing called wind power? Have you heard of the demand curve not being flat throughout the day?
You know, delay the full charge of the car by a day, two or five if you didn't need to go anywhere and simply worked at home this week.
It seems you are pointing to the 2022 incident which is the only time it happened in 40 years (so clearly not random!). At the time the nuclear plants had unplanned maintenance, the wind power didn't produce much (bad luck) and the solar production wasn't producing (winter). The combination of all these factors made it an exceptional outlier.
Any other time it's France which supported it's neighboring grids.
> Have you heard of this thing called wind power? Have you heard of the demand curve not being flat throughout the day?
Nobody cares about the daily demand curve, it's a solved problem, even my parents had a hourly contract since the 80s (!).
The current problem in the EU is the winter load.
You should look closer rather than attempting a shallow dismissal. I specifically chose to not include dates in 2023 and 2024 due to the maintenance crisis. I also included 2021 numbers.
Looking at the 2022 numbers nuclear power supplied almost 47-49 GW compared to hovering around 52-54 GW last winter.
It does not change the outlook of France and its neighbors relying on 35 GW of fossil based power to manage nuclear inflexibility.
> Nobody cares about the daily demand curve, it's a solved problem, even my parents had a hourly contract since the 80s (!).
So now when you apparently couldn't backtrack more no one cares about meeting a varying demand?
Please. Come with curiosity instead of digging the hole you are in ever deeper.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France...
This is the reality of the grid, France is a net exporter of electricity in the EU and has been for the longest time. The only outlier is 2022.
You have to understand that the debate in France for a long time in the 2000s was that building capacity was not needed because there's already too much of it (!).
The country also pushed to electric heating to use some of this extra capacity making France one of the highest electric heating share at around 40% (Germany has less than 5%).
> So now when you apparently couldn't backtrack more no one cares about meeting a varying demand?
The varying demand always meant the seasonal demand! You are in europe here and not a tropical country. The problem has always been meeting the winter load.
You are again looking at yearly figures instead of instants. I already included data from 2021. It follows a similar trend in 2020, 2019 and earlier.
Here's a few examples:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
Let me break it down for you:
Is a cold spell a yearly happening or an instant? It is an instant.
What does French neighbors do? They have large amounts of fossil capacity because they know they can't rely on French exports when a cold spell hits.
They need to both supply their own grid and supply France.
Who cares if France is exporting enormous amounts of electricity all around Europe during early autumn when temperatures are mild and no one cares?
When the grid is strained France relies on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production since the nuclear electricity is so incredible inflexible that it can't be utilized to match a grid load.
What would happen if you had two French grids next to each other both trying to export massive electricity when no one needed it while not being able to supply itself when a cold spell hits?
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
Yes in theory, the problem is when you try to apply theory to practice: I don’t want to make a disservice to this discussion and as I don’t have the figures at hand anymore but there have been thought experiments around this and one was to hypothetically have two dams that would pump 2 meters of water out of the sea between France and UK and then release it. If my memory serves well this would only cover 1 week of France’s energy consumption.
Okay, appart from the fact that you would require far more space in term of infrastructure for renewables, the most interesting issue with renewable energies for me is that they are not controllable (I don’t know if this is the correct term in English): basically you cannot command WHEN you produce energy, you are dependent on weather (sun/wind) or water current (tidal power).
What that means is that you cannot aling production with supply and you end up in some cases with acute mismatch: for instance in France, the peak of energy consumption is during winter, a time where there is very few sun, while Japans peak is in summer which could be more convenient.
The Rule when dealing with energy production is that you can’t produce less than demand nor more than demand otherwise you end up with a blackout and potential damages.
To mitigate both the rule of energy production and the non controllable aspects of renewable there are strategies. The two most common ones are buying/selling your energy and storing/unloading it. Those work but they do have their own pitfalls. Buying/selling for instance does work for adjustments but not for peaks because usually during peaks your neighbours are also peaking and thus also looking for selling.
Storing/unloading is its whole set of problems making it hard. You will find a lot of documentation on the subject but here is the gist of it: fist of all it is inefficient meaning you need to produce far more energy than you store and are able to unload in the end. Storing in batteries takes a lot (like really a lot) of place and we are talking nation wide production. Storing using a dam (pumped storage power plants) which is quite a nice way of doing it requires to have places to build them, meaning the correct geographical circumstances. In France for instance we already have quite a large dam network and couldn’t really build more (added to the fact that you usually need to flood a valley which gerenally is not well taken by the inhabitants of the place).
So here you are with your whole lot of space used up to produce renewable energy but you are still confronted to the issue of its non controllable nature. Sure you can store/unload a bit, you can buy/sell another bit, but in the end you still have to face the fact that it is not controllable. So how do you solve the issue ?
Here comes your friend, the controllable energy. A solution to your issue, and the one which is basically always applied is to have a mix of energies, meaning adding a controllable one along your non controllable ones to make up for the highs and lows of the latest. And the king of eco-friendly controllable energies is a nuclear power plant, not only because of the ecological factor but also because of the ratio space/energy produced.
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.
> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.
Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.
That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies.
It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.
> Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.
You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
> You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.
Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.
But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries.
So yeah. Regulation.
Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)
So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.
It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.
I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.
And then there's coal. The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills fewer people than coal kills as part of its normal expected operation.
The great thing is that coal is not the alternative in 2025.
Renewables are forcing enormous amounts of coals and fossil gas off grids around the world as we speak.
>The great thing is that coal is not the alternative in 2025.
Unfortunately, there is a country that shut down nuclear power plants while they still have operating coal plants. Over time, coal use is declining in Germany, but that isn't the story so far in 2025:
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...
Shutting nuclear power plants down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable... I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
Personally I would of course prefer to phase out fossil fuels before nuclear power. But we are where we are in 2025 and there is no point crying over spilled milk.
We can only look forward and make sure we spend our money wisely. We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end, it is only the beginning of our decarbonization journey.
The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.
>...But we are where we are in 2025 and there is no point crying over spilled milk.
It would be one thing if Germany's bad mistakes in this area only affected Germany. Unfortunately people downwind of Germany die because it is still burning coal. Unfortunately climate change will affect everyone.
>...We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end,
Many of the changes needed to decarbonize those industries will rely on using electricity, so the grid is critical.
>...The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.
We will see if Germany is still burning coal and natural gas when countries like Finland are not.
Is your suggestion that Germany instead of building renewables quickly displacing said coal instead invests their money in nuclear power?
That would mean they get a fraction of the capacity (in TWh) online and the people downwind of Germany would have to live with the emissions as they stand today without any abatement until the mid 2040s.
Does that sound reasonable?
Unfortunately Germany dug itself into a big hole and the choices aren’t that great. (Yes, continue to build more solar and wind. Though that is what has been happening in 2025, and coal use has increased this year due to the variability of renewable sources.) To move away from coal in a more reasonable timeframe, other approaches could also be done. Like I mentioned in a previous comment, I am sure Germany will decarbonize before Poland, but that is kind of a low bar. Some ideas:
- Restart the nuclear power plants that are feasible to restart. The last 3 plants were only shut down in 2023 - it isn't like all the plants were shut down in 2011. It may very well be that Germany doesn’t feel it has the expertise to run nuclear power plants in the long term, so once the power isn’t needed or can be replaced by clean energy (either produced in Germany or imported), feel free to shut down the nuclear plants.
- Work with Denmark and France to import more of their power that is not coal based.
- Reward conservation more.
- Move the big industrial users of electricity out of Germany.
Some of these alternatives are likely not palatable, but like I said, Germany dug itself into a hole. Any of these alternatives sounds better than essentially deciding instead to murder people by burning coal when you have other options.
This comment shows that you don’t really grasp how the German grid works.
The German grid is currently constrained north-south due to limited transmission capacity. Over production of renewables in the north and over consumption in the south.
The reactors the pro-nuclear lobby in Germany identified as ”most easily restartable” are in the north.
Therefore restarting them is a pure waste of money. It does not solve any problems Germany has with its grid.
Then it comes down to the cost question. You can maintain a piece of infrastructure forever but at some point the costs does not justify the gain. Better spend the money on renewables and storage instead.
An example of such stupidity is Diablo Canyon in California requiring a $12B subsidy on top of regular income for selling electricity to run 5 extra years from 2025 to 2030.
You do know that France is on a downward trend of nuclear power as well? Reactors are entering end of life and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
>Over production of renewables in the north and over consumption in the south.
Well I guess it is impossible to upgrade the grid in any kind of reasonable timeframe in Germany. There are still other options that could be done to hasten the end of burning coal - I pointed out a few, there are likely others.
>Then it comes down to the cost question. You can maintain a piece of infrastructure forever but at some point the costs does not justify the gain. Better spend the money on renewables and storage instead.
Yes it is a question. Unfortunately you have given no evidence of the actual costs.
>...You do know that France is on a downward trend of nuclear power as well?
In 2014 France set a goal to reduce nuclear's share of electricity generation to 50% by 2025. This target was delayed in 2019 to 2035, before being abandoned in 2023. (I am sure France is also trying to increase renewables and storage.)
>An example of such stupidity is Diablo Canyon in California requiring a $12B subsidy on top of regular income for selling electricity to run 5 extra years from 2025 to 2030.
This comment shows you don't really grasp the issue of power in CA. The 12 billion dollar estimate included costs unrelated to Diablo Canyon according to PG&E. Their estimate is closer to 8B, of which the majority will be covered by selling the electricity. They have a 1.1 billion dollar grant to help with some of the rest, though unclear how much the state will have to subsidize things in the end. The issue is that Diablo Canyon provides about 1/4 of the clean power in CA and can provide it when renewables can't - like every other place, CA currently has a tiny amount of grid storage. Without Diablo Canyon, CA will likely have to buy power from coal plants in other states. So CA is willing to pay extra to avoid having to burn coal. That is different than Germany that decided it would rather burn coal than use nuclear.
We will see when Germany actually stops during fossil fuels. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.
Upgrades are on the way but you were trying to frame it as a desperate issue to solve immediately, without realizing your solution didn’t solve anything.
For evidence have a read:
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2024/06/pge-quietly-s...
Just keep hiking the rates in a monopolized system. All good!
You do know that California in recent years has cut fossil gas usage by 40% due to storage? Many evenings batteries are the largest producer in the Californian grid for hours on end. Happened yesterday for example.
But batteries are of course insignificant. Just delivering the equivalent to 8 nuclear reactors pretty much removing the duck curve.
I suggest you update your worldview to 2025.
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
> coal is not the alternative in 2025.
Except in uncle Donald’s kingdom with “America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry” (yes, seriously):
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
Lets come back if that leads to an increase of coal usage instead of being posturing like most else they do.
Coal has been uncompetitive since the advent of the CCGT plant and was stagnating long before the fracking boom.
Yes, and in terms of overall deaths per terawatt-hour, nuclear is similar to renewables.
The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills as many people right here and makes as much land uninhabitable right here as coal does in our enemy countries within its normal expected operation.
Meltdowns aren't physically possible if we're building newer types of plants, so there can't be a new Chernobyl or even Fukushima if we're using modern types of passively cooled plants.
There’s generally significant costs and asterisks around such claims.
You’re much better off paying attention to site placement than trying to design something to safety handle getting covered in several meters of volcanic ash Pompeii style.
Except for Russia, where else have deaths + land issues happened?
Not a commercial reactor but US lost 3 people trying to hand operate a small reactor with minimal safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
“On Tuesday, January 3, 1961, SL-1 was being prepared for restart after a shutdown of 11 days over the holidays. Maintenance procedures required that rods be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect each one to its drive mechanism. At 9:01 pm MST, Rod 9 was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize.”
The industry didn’t just randomly get so risk averse there where a lot of meltdowns and other issues over time.
Do stupid things and stupid things will happen. There are plenty of similarly stupid accidents on stupidly run construction sites and chemical plants all the time. Also lots of accidents with trains, lots of accidents with temperamental chemicals.
Take this stupid accident, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic#2007_Scaled_Co...
> In July 2007, three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured at the Mojave spaceport while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. An explosion occurred during a cold fire test, which involved nitrous oxide flowing through fuel injectors. The procedure had been expected to be safe.
N2O is very good oxidizer + it's a molecule that can fall apart (and turn into N2 and O2) in a very exothermic way if you look at it wrong.
Oops.
Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.
> The effort to minimize the size of the core gave an abnormally-large reactivity worth to Rod 9, the center control rod.
> One of the required maintenance procedures called for Rod 9 to be manually withdrawn about four inches (10 cm) in order to attach it to the automated control mechanism from which it had been disconnected. Post-accident calculations, as well as examination of scratches on Rod 9, estimate that it had actually been withdrawn about twenty inches (51 cm), causing the reactor to go prompt critical and triggering the steam explosion.
and:
> At SL-1, control rods would sometimes get stuck in the control rod channel. Numerous procedures were conducted to evaluate control rods to ensure they were operating properly. There were rod drop tests and scram tests of each rod, in addition to periodic rod exercising and rod withdrawals for normal operation. From February 1959 to November 18, 1960, there were 40 cases of a stuck control rod for scram and rod drop tests and about a 2.5% failure rate. From November 18 to December 23, 1960, there was a dramatic increase in stuck rods, with 23 in that time period and a 13.0% failure rate. Besides these test failures, there were an additional 21 rod-sticking incidents from February 1959 to December 1960; four of these had occurred in the last month of operation during routine rod withdrawal. Rod 9 had the best operational performance record even though it was operated more frequently than any of the other rods.
That is insane.
> Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.
What's the relevance of this?
> That is insane.
Hindsight plus other people doing the analysis always makes things seem more obvious.
The people designing this system were not trying to kill the operators. They made tradeoffs that seemed reasonable at the time and then things failed badly because something unexpected happened. The only way to avoid that is to be extremely cautious which then feeds back to nuclear being expensive.
Risk aversion gets expensive, but so does taking risks. That’s the nuclear dilemma. It seems reasonable to say just take more risks, but that’s how you get accidents that people look back on and think how could they be so dumb.
Our enemy countries are West Virginia and Pennsylvania?
I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all.
So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.
The costs of cleaning up Fukushima, including the wider effects on the Japanese economy, are estimated to exceed US$200 billion. That makes it a pretty EPIC disaster in economic terms alone.
Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.
How much of those wider costs are from them shutting off nuclear plants?
None
It’s worth considering, but not in that context.
and how much is from cleaning up things that weren't dirty in the first place?
Fukushima was partly an issue of flawed risk assessment. The tsunami that took down the plant was believed to be an incredibly rare even, expected to happen once every ten thousand years.
However, that was a result of faulty assumptions made when the plant was initially planned. With better data and methods, the event would have seemed a lot more likely.
It was perfectly fine because the operators stole the batteries from all the cars in the parking lot to run the control room. Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.
> Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.
Was New York City really at risk? Citation needed.
> Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima)
Don't put the emergency diesel generators in the basement where they are certain to be flooded if the tsunami wall is too low. Also, don't build too low tsunami walls.
> So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
No. Hydropower has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
> which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal
Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments on fuel matter.
> You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems, loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
> Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway. It’s also impractical for a bunch of other reasons.
> But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
No nuclear power plants has ever actually been required to carry a policy with that kind of a payout. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
However, the lesser risk of losing the reactor is still quite substantial. You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
> Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power.
But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems
These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.
> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.
> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.
> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.
Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?
> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?
> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.
> You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
Nuclear is inherently vastly more complicated requiring more maintenance, manpower, etc per KW of capacity and thus has more operational costs. A 50+ year lifespan means keeping 50+ year old designs in operation which plays a significant role in costs here.
> 5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant.
A cooling tower isn’t dealing with any radioactivity and it’s not a safety critical system yet it’s still difficult to build and thus way more expensive per cubic foot of concrete than a typical surface road. When road projects get complicated they can quickly get really expensive just look at bridges or tunnels.
> You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day.
Hydroelectric dams have directly saved more lives than they have cost due to flood control. The electricity bit isn’t even needed in many cases as people build dams because they are inherently useful. Society is willing to carry those risks in large part because they get a direct benefit.
Wind turbines are closer and do sometimes fail early, but they just don’t cost nearly as much so the public doesn’t need to subsidize insurance here.
Both of your posts contain very little self-doubt and curiosity. Many points don't seem convincing, and you're consistently not steelmanning the arguments you are replying to.
> it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source
This isn't how radiation works. Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source. Contamination refers to radioactive emitters being somewhere they don't belong.
> Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source
There is this thing called neutron activation.
But the elephant in the room is of course that coal plants emitted way more radioactivity than nuclear ones even taking into account every disaster on even non-power generation plants.
That’s not an economic problem for people operating the power plant.
Nuclear power plants need shielding to avoid their workforce being killed off very quickly. Obviously safety standards are much higher than that, but significant shielding is inherently necessary.
Yes it is. Look up Tokamak radiation shields.
Oh come on.
I consider myself reasonably pro nuclear, but this is just like some developer going:
“Oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard, I could probably implement that in a weekend”
Fact: hard complicated things are expensive.
There is no “just it’s just some concrete…”.
That is, translated “I do not know what Im talking about”.
Hard things, which require constant, high level, technical maintenance…
Are very expensive.
Theyre expensive to build. Theyre expensive to operate. Theyre expensive to decommission.
Theres no magic wand to fix this.
You can drive down the unit cost sometimes by doing things at scale, but Im not sure that like 100 units, or even say 1000 units can do that meaningfully.
…and how how are we planning on having the 100000s of reactors that you would need for that?
Micro reactors? Im not convinced.
Certainly, right now, the costs are not artificial; if you think they are, I would argue you havent done your due diligence in research.
Heres the point:
Making complicated things cheaper doesnt just magically happen by removing regulations. Thats naive.
You need a concrete plan to either a) massively simplify the technology or b) massively scale the production.
Which one? (a) and (b) both seem totally out of reach to me, without massive state sponsored funding.
…which, apparently no one likes either.
Its this frustrating dilemma where idiots (eg. former Australian government) claim they can somehow magically deliver things (multiple reactors) super cheaply.
…but there is no reality to this promise; its just morons trying to buy regional votes and preserve the status quo with coal.
Real nuclear progress needs realistic plans, not hopes and dreams.
Nuclear power is better; but it is more expensive than many other options, and probably, will continue to be if all we do is hope it somehow becomes easy and cheap by doing basically nothing.
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.
See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.
I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.
When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm.
A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
Well, no, that's more down to nuclear fans constantly using the worst possible comparisons, and creating false dichotomies. The better comparison are renewables or natural gas, not an ancient technology literally everybody (outside of it's investors) agrees is bad and should go.
Nuclear sits just between wind (slightly more dangerous) and solar (slightly less dangerous) per unit of electricity production, all of them being much safer than hydro; and ridiculously safer than gas, oil and coal. It's a really, really safe option.
Note that these number are a bit old and since then, installation of consumer solar has increased significantly. Installation of solar panels on consumer roofs is much more dangerous than installation of solar panels in solar plants, so death rate for solar are significantly underestimated. Meanwhile accident rates of plant construction (nuclear, solar or otherwise) keep dropping.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
So, for safety, turn off coal first, then turn off nuclear.
For safety, the order to turn things off is coal, oil, biomass, natural gas, hydropower, wind, then nuclear.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
The trouble with liability is that if your nuclear plant has an accident and the cancer rate in the area doesn't detectably change, everybody in the area who gets cancer will sue you anyway.
That law says more about the reliability of US courts than about the safety of nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...
The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
And then you have bad faith actors.
No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?
No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?
No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?
Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?
None of that has never ever happened, right?
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
> This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years.
But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power.
Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated
Except for Chernobyl clean up workers, no one lost their lives taking a deliberate risk in any other nuclear incident. And Chernobyl clean up workers didn't die within months either - in fact the story of their health outcomes is quite nuanced, but yes they most definitely took high risks.
In fact Chernobyl is incredibly badly remembered, because the firefighters who died responding to the initial blaze died of sepsis related to beta radiation burns from spending hours wearing their firefighting coats covered in radioactive dust.
Had they been removed promptly and hosed down, those people would've survived because they would not have received essentially a third degree burn over their entire body. And that's the point: they died of sepsis related complications, not any type of unique radiation damage and the Soviet doctors who treated them did get better at it once the protocols were established.
Life of hundreds of millions were/are/will be affected by Chornobyl. Nobody can calculate real death toll of Chornobyl accident because it's impossible to control radiation. Moreover, nobody wants to pay for those deaths or partially lost health.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
Millions, sure. Hundreds of millions? Probably not. And don't forget that a LOT went wrong in Chernobyl, it's literally impossible for another disaster of this magnitude to happen again.
Multiple millions by thousands of years. Probably yes.
> Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.
Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.
Mostly, yes, but also consider that both were exceptional circumstances that happened to outdated reactors.
IIRC Fukushima didn't actually leak enough radiation out to cause any significant environmental harm - quite possibly, most of the evacuations weren't even necessary, and the total toll among responders was only 25, with only 1 death.
Chernobyl was much worse, but other than responders and the high incidence rates of thyroid cancer in young children close to the disaster area, the total casualties were also lower than people assume. A lot of the early estimates were massively inflated.
Honestly it's quite possible that in both cases, we could have done much less relocation and evacuation, especially the fukushima response was largely driven by Japan's fear of nuclear technology.
Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.
This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.
Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
> yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
Next to you and your family, then, since you’re happy trading with their risks.
I don't know why people think this is a "gotcha"?
I would happily live next to a nuclear power plant, the reason not to is mostly to do with "it's still an industrial site". But like, lakeside land where I'm up or down stream from it but can clearly see it nearby? Sure.
It's one of the rare forms of industry where if I was ever worried about contamination a cheap portable device will warn me remotely. Unlike say, Asbestos and heavy metals...one of which there's a bunch in my current backyard.
If being next to a nuclear plant meant id NOT be next to a coal plant, and therefore have better air and better health, I’d gladly take that trade.
Climate change is planet wide. No nuclear incident has ever had such a widespread effect.
Have you heard about low-background steel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
It became scarce because of some very widespread effect.
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.
I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.
My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.
I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off.
> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
it would be unwise to put all of ones eggs in someone else's basket.
having as much wind solar and nuclear as possible will ensure humanity has a bright future. 18% seems like a good number. how much storage are they investing in?
> "They're installing 1GW per month of pumped hydro storage," Mr Buckley said.
Fun fact, pumped hydro was actually developed for nuclear originally in the 70s, since nuclear is a large source of power that is hard to ramp down during low demand periods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
Err, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlewood_Lake was completed in 1928 (for electrical demand regulation.) Much older than nuclear...
My bad. It's still notable that the sixth largest one in the world was still developed for nuclear plants.
Which is kind of funny as they where storing energy from a hydroelectric power plant, so building a larger dam would have been way more energy efficient.
Connecticut isn’t very elevated so a dam at a higher level may not have been very practical.
You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change.
And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.
There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.
Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.
>A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions
This is not true. You are using the lawyers definition of damage from Chernobyl, but the doctor's definition for fossil fuels. Chernobyl was much worse than you believe, but I don't expect to change your mind on that point here.
But why are you arguing as if it's either nuclear power or global warming?
China has added the equivalent of 25 nuclear power plants worth of solar generation yearly for the past couple of years. Not even China is able to build nuclear plants faster than in 5-6 years or so - it takes too many workers, too much resources. It's too little and too slow to make a difference.
Efen if you believe it is safe, Nuclear is clearly a roadblock, or a detour. We should instead build storage and solar, which can add orders of magnitude more power in shorter time.
(But even then we'll have to deal with global warming).
No, I'm not. Pick whatever estimate of deaths from Chernobyl you like. Take the highest, most unreasonable estimate. It's still true. And yes, _now_ we have other options. In 1960 we didn't. We have nearly a century of carbon emissions and particulate deaths that were unnecessary. There are literally _millions_ of premature deaths every year as a result of fossil fuel particulate emissions.
Nuclear may not be the best option anymore (I'm skeptical that an ideal power generation mix doesn't include more nuclear than we currently have, but agree that it probably shouldn't be the primary source anymore), that doesn't change the fact that not using it for past 80+ years as our primary energy generation source was a huge civilizational blunder.
>No, I'm not. Pick whatever estimate of deaths from Chernobyl you like.
That's the lawyer definition though - because some 50 people sacrificed their lives and because we spent 600 billion euros on remedies during the first 30 years, nobody can prove how bad it might have been.
But scientists will tell you how much caesium and iodine was released per day of that fire burning, the force of the steam explosion that might have been, how close it was to the contaminate the ground water supply and so on.
Then doctors will tell you how that would affect the people living in the fallout areas, and for how long the ground and food supply would be affected.
So if you let go of the lawyer definition, estimates are easily in the double-digit million dead.
Which we risked for a grand total of 28 TWh of electricity produced from Chernobyl.
And that's the bigger point here - even if the risks were way less than they actually are, the payoff is not worth it. Electricity generation causes less than 1/4 of the co2 emissions in the US - road transportation alone is a larger source.
Nuclear is not and never was a solution to global warming. Best case it helps of course, but only until something happens like Fukushima or Chernobyl. The billions spent on those two incidents alone would have had a bigger effect if they were spent subsidizing electric cars, solar panels, battey production and such.
If you did what nuclear fans did and tried to cover most/all of the load with nuclear, you would necessarily need to build more nuclear power plants, which esp. in Europe would automatically put them closer to population. That would automatically increase the lives lost from catastrophies.
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
And that might work if there is a linear relationship between apparently unnecessary engineering work and deaths. My argument is that such a relationship does not exist, or is not something we can model.
As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.
I get your point and would be much more inclined to agree if we were talking about trying to hit a 3x risk increase. But we are talking about huge risk margins here, many OOMs.
My problem with your argument is that as framed it’s a fully generic argument against doing anything; there is always a risk of bad outcomes for any action. What we must do in practice is look at risk/reward and try our best to estimate each.
Data breaches are a bad analogy because you are presenting this as “I get to make a bit more money by lowering security”. A better analogy would be something like colonoscopy; some people will die from cancer if you advise nobody has this procedure. Some people will die from complications if people do get this procedure. How do we as a society choose how many people should die and from what? This is a trolley problem, there is no choice where people don’t die as a result of the decision. The answer is that we must do our best to estimate the risks and minimize them.
This is not what we are doing with nuclear right now. We are simply trying to reduce the risk of nuclear, without making any attempt to model the harms that are being introduced.
Climate has never stopped changing since the day the earth was formed, that's why we are here. Keep it "under control" is a wild target.
"All wooden boats always leak a little, so stopping people from drilling holes through the hull is a wild target."
It's a strawman to pretend that 10,000 year slow changes are qualitatively the same as what's been going on in the last hundred.
I’d like to apologize. Realized that the wording in my comment wasn’t appropriate.
This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.
Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.
People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
If one tries to quantify the value of those deaths, using the "statistical value of a human life" (somewhere around $12M/death), one finds in the case of both wind/solar and nuclear, using those numbers, the value of those lives contributes negligibly to the cost of energy. This is unlike with coal.
This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).
Aye, but with the amount of coal plants still running, I think the choice is between solar+nuclear or solar+coal
I don't think anyone is arguing nuclear instead of solar. It's both. We need both.
No, I don't think we need both. In particular, building new nuclear plants would be worse than just putting all that money into renewables + storage. The latter displaces fossil fuels more quickly and more cheaply.
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.
You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel.
https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836...
That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.
You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.
> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.
Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1].
For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year.
I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution.
On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins.
[0] https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
[2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
> For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year,
... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.
Recycled down to ten grams per person per year.
Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.
To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?
All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.
Did you continue reading and see how that's 200mg of long lived waste? France has 66.7 million people. For long lived waste that's 13k tons total. That's a bit shy of the trade waste per capita. So about 67 million times more. Or let's go back to full. For power reactor they only produce 60% of that 2kg, 1.2kg. So that's 80k tons of waste, total, per year.Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate
You forgot to include the decommissioned reactor and waste water.
Reminds me of:
https://xkcd.com/1162/
Would have been even funnier if they included sunlight, that’s 100% E=MC^2 baby.
>> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
>It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days
Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...
That’s fair, but everything else is outcompeting coal these days.
So even if we can drop prices down to what China pays, nuclear still loses in China.
> "It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate."
Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1].
Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...
> cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste
The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.
The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022:
~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.
~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100
~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100
~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.
It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".
Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Etc etc.
Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.
As an expert remarked way back in a time when the nukes were conveniently making plutonium, and kids got free comic books promoting them, and the plans for handling waste seemed sound :
"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."
— C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951.
(Hanford today, sitting on 56M gallons of leaking wastewater, is debating whether that newly-constructed vitrification plant should be allowed to operate, since it'll emit dangerous levels of toxic acetonitrile.)
I think if you regulated coal on a linear no threshold risk model, you'd find the costs to be somewhat closer.
Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production.
Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.
Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.
Regulation still plays a role in the final cost. Sure it has to be safe. But we need to draw the line. Nuclear is arguably way too safe currently (zero death for a long time). Some regulations could be relaxed to speed up the construction, and make the operations cheaper.
We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.
This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output.
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.
> Total death count from nuclear
Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.
Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Refining gets rid of even more uranium before it gets to the reactor. CANDU tried to get around that by using unenriched uranium, but ran into other issues.
And that’s what pro nuclear people seem to miss, really smart people have been trying to solve this issue for decades there’s no easy solutions with well understood downsides. Let’s quickly build some new design isn’t a solution it’s a big part of why nuclear construction costs are so high.
> Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.
Paying out lawsuits is an economic cost. Regardless, disposing of low level radioactive components of the reactor had to happen at some point, and the cases where it's not offset by decades of recouping on that investment is are incredibly rare. Regardless, this is mostly moot in new designs because they are considerably safer, as I said. What's left is really the regulatory burden. In France and China, they build reactors in less than a decade. Can't happen here in America.
> Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons.
Which is besides the point, as I said, you get a lot more energy per gram of fuel with modern designs or fast reactors, which mostly mitigates the objection about fuel cost, regardless of what stage the highest cost to obtain fuel is incurred.
Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk, which leaves the modern designs on the table where this risk is even lower than LWR.
> energy per gram of fuel
That just not a metric that matters.
Fuel is north of 1c/kWh for nuclear reactors, +/- if you count various things as fuel costs, that’s inherently a big deal if you’re trying to compete with 2c/kWh solar.
> Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk
They also just have higher costs per kWh.
> That just not a metric that matters.
So you said that fuel costs dominate the cost of energy delivered, I'm saying that you can deliver the same energy while purchasing less fuel, but now you're saying that that's not a metric that matters for the cost of energy delivered. Err, wut?
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250908384960/en/Dee...
You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99?
The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture.
I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated. Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?
The comment you reply to talk about regulatory costs but you choose to talk about cost in general. No one thinks its cost is 0.
Bottom line: nuclear will never be "cheap and easy," but I think there is headroom to reduce costs meaningfully
Regarding fuel:
https://xkcd.com/1162/
IMO it would have been funnier if he added sunlight on that graph.
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc
Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
> A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
France built 40 in a decade:
* https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...
More recently, Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, but Unit 4 cost 30% less (though still not cheap).
Global rollout of wind and solar are accelerating past nuclear's records:
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear...
Exactly. What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise, where the engineering effort is concentrated in building economies of scale. To me it's clear that nuclear energy's pros largely outweigh the cons, and that it is a perfect complement to solar and wind power generation.
We can't blow up nuclear reactors to learn how they failed like spaceX does with rockets.
Sure we can, just not out in the open with a bunch of spectators.
... Sooooo... time to fire back up the old range at Bikini Atoll?
> What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise
I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/spacex-worker-injury-rates...
Injury rate is 6x other space vehicle manufacturers. If you were to slow them down by 6x they would pretty close to the 20 years it’s already taken to get SLS/constellation to do a test launch.
Super heavy is on year 4.
Betcha their worker injuries per kg to LEO are lower than most companies.
I really don't want a SpaceX-like attitude to radioactive material.
A nuclear Musk would be interesting.
We’ve been trying to build ”SMR”s since the 1950s and a bunch has been built throughout the decades.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...
The problem is: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?
It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.
Total non starter.
Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation.
To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade.
They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power.
Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out.
The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility company cannot, because for the Navy it's about having a necessary capability. There's no economic break even to consider.
I thought I'd mention that ship supplied short power has been a thing for ages. USS Daniel Webster even trained for this for new years eve apocalypse nothingburger. And its almost always been used for only powering something critical. Today's subs are <10MW. Nothing for utility scale. I can't imagine the economics are ever good. More of a: we've already got this boat.
https://thenaptimeauthor.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/the-uss-le...
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/11/26/A-nuclear-submarine-...
There are some floating PWRs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_pow...
Secrecy isn't the obstacle here. Naval reactors are optimized for combat performance, costs be damned. They aren't economically efficient for commercial power generation.
At least Russia is doing fine with SMRs, thought the fuel enrichment level is around 20%. They are building new reactors all the time and they seem pretty efficient. E.g. they have even floating nuclear plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
The problem is economics. Just because the Us built a fleet does not mean that they are economical once put in a non-military application.
I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.
And the technology is incredibly mature, submarine reactors were some of the first reactors, period.
And they are heavily guarded.
In the current political climate I prefer energy sources that don’t cause severe damage if sabotaged.
Did you hear the worries in Ukraine that Russia could hit a wind turbine with a rocket?
What's the danger in hitting a micro nuclear reactor with a rocket ? A shitty dirty bomb detonated near the powerplant ?
Nuclear meltdown, evacuation of nearby cities.
Don’t you need to create a specific kind of chemical reaction and just bomb is not enough for that?
Submarine reactors run on super high enriched fuel instantly one could instantly repurpose into a bomb. Lots of gen 4 and 5 reactor designs that combine low cost, compact footprint, and running on less expensive and carefully controlled fuel.
French have some LEU submarines. They seem to be pretty good on paper. Needs refueling every ten years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffren-class_submarine
France also built full-sized commercial plants rather than batteries of small reactors. That's because scale matters for efficient production.
That is rapidly changing.
https://onu-vienne.delegfrance.org/Nuclear-power-and-SMR-are...
https://regulation-oversight.asnr.fr/oversight/small-modular...
Cool! Thanks
The DoD is not exactly known for great efficiency and getting the most value for money
> If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale
You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times
There are some companies that are trying to get SMRs up and running.
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-02-05/article-6744/new-swedish...
We’ll see how it goes.
A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.
Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward
I'm talking about capital costs, not operating costs. $3B/GW for a coal plant is about 5X as much as natgas.
Does that calculation include the cost of storing the nuclear waste after use? I'd be curious to see a reference for your claim.
Dry casting on site is fairly cheap.
The true cost of nuclear is the massive construction cost. We don't know how to solve that.
You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.
It's not the volume of the waste that's the challenge - it's handling and storage that remain mostly unsolved.
By unsolved I mean - not convincingly solved, and certainly not yet tested over the expected duration that material needs to be safely contained.
"mostly unsolved"? It's cheap, low-maintenance, and essentially risk-free barring potential terrorism.
Even if the storage got somehow compromised(extremely unlikely), the disposal sites are distant enough from civilization and the amounts small enough that the environmental harms would still be far below tons of other manmade events.
What more do you want?
'Apart from terrorism ... or war, seismic activity, etc.'
I'm not sure where you're getting cheap from, or low-maintenance.
The above-ground stuff is locking future generations in for on-going maintenance for several centuries, perhaps longer. There's been think-tanks trying to work out how you just signpost such a place, given storage may exceed the expected lifetime of languages, and we'd want to be polite and at least contend with societal collapse.
It is hubris to observe that the many locations chosen now will remain 'distant from civilisation' for many centuries.
The casts are made to withstand a collision with a locomotive.
We have lot of nuclear waste. Can you take it?
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.
I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...
I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.
If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
Maybe this article?
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-hold...
The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction...
A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh
> It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.
And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.
> I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.
And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.
I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.
I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned
We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.
Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]
Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.
[1] https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ [2] https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/...
This is bullshit.
Radioactivity is exponential. If something is very active at start, it will fade quickly. If it is not, it is not dangerous to begin with.
So whatever they do spend, they need to optimize instead of hiding from cost-cutting behind this.
Which are the fake costs from regulation?
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
> I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
> Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
> The lack of regulatory clarity
Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.
Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):
> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.
I'd say it's a call for more appropriate regulation. Regulations are not a bad thing, they can be a great enabler when used well. Well defined thresholds beyond which your ass is covered are necessary for any complex project to proceed. Obviously anyone building a nuclear powerplant better budget enough to make it a safe one.
The issue is when the goal posts are ill defined or just straight up moved. Things need to be overbuilt to satisfy demands the regulators may not even have, and still you might get caught up on something that you didn't think could possibly be an issue. There is excessive conservatism because you have at least some track record of regulator decisions, even if it's an imperfect indicator of their future requirements.
Overzealous but well defined regulations, like you need 3 backup diesel generators, obviously add cost, but this can be easily priced in at the beginning of the project. Typically, the more regulations you have, the more likely some of them will be vague, so keeping the number of regulations manageable is often a good thing, but is not strictly necessary. Where you really run into problems is when there is an unreasonable fear which draws strong support for "something" to be done, but there really isn't an appropriate action to take given the severity of the risk and the cost of eliminating it - that's how you wind up with bullshit like ALARA.
And safety regulations are just one facet. Environmental regulations, particularly NEPA requirements, are a major driver of construction costs for big projects and especially nuclear plants. If nuclear plants were primarily facing only the same issues as general construction, you'd expect the labor productivity to be similar to comparable scale projects. The fact that labor productivity is an order of magnitude lower indicates something specific to nuclear plants is lowering labor productivity. While many potential things could be causing that reduction in labor productivity, it's hard to think of any that don't stem from or are made substantially worse by the regulatory environment.
Its multifold.
1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital. 2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab. 3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.
China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe.
Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles.
Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper:
> We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.
> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution.
That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.
That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.
Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.
If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.
However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)
That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.
Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
> ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.
Yeah. Due to armies of highly paid experts spending almost a decade of their life arguing if the design is up to the regulations. And also when because of these uncertainties you start building before full approval and then requirements change.
It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.
Which regulations?
What would change in the construction process?
China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?
I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."
It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.
I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
Perhaps the are talking about Unions and the regulations around minimum pay and working conditions.
I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
> What is different?
All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.
We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer.
Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns.
I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
The recent US builds were not tied up by "NIMBY roadblocks".
It's interesting that in China, which you assert lacks roadblocks, renewables are being installed to a much greater extent than nuclear.
Nuclear regulations are no worse than aviation regulation. Yet planes manage to be cost competitive.
Cutting regulations isn't necessary the win people think. If safety regulations are cut, it risks accidents in future.
Nuclear needs to move from bespoke builds to serial production.
Thats not the full picture. Aviation exploded in growth -- you can easily expand operations and work to smaller margins. The US shut down the nuclear industry intentionally from the 80s until the last 5 years from regulations.
It's a bogus talking point that the nuclear industry in the US was shut down due to increase in regulation.
The actual situation was that relentless 7%/year demand growth for electrical energy suddenly stalled, while at the same time a large amount of new capacity from cogeneration, made possible by the passage of PURPA in 1978, suddenly started to come on line. In this environment, and with the cost overruns and delays of the earlier nuclear builds, utilities could not make a case for new nuclear construction. High interest rates also didn't help.
But what are the specific regulations you would cut, dude?
I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.
This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.
Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.
A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing.
Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.
Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.
The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate.
However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.
We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China.
I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.
I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.
Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.
That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?
Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.
I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!
As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.
If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.
Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.
Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
> At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.
If we had renewables everywhere, wouldn't a lot of that potentially disappear?
It depends how much competition there would be if for-profit company owns them.
If there is just one source nearby, isn’t that another monopoly risk? The price starts to balance with high distance tranmission cost monopoly vs monopoly of nearby energy source.
If we find many small renewable sources that are cheap to build, maybe that balances it out.
At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees
Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.
The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.
Why not not both?
Sure, but one comes first.
And it's going to end up being price.
I don’t follow. If nuclear initially costs more than coal, then the first effect as it decreases is displacement when the prices cross over. Then if it falls further you will notice consumer price drops.
Or you know, build renewables and storage which has in recent years reduced Californias fossil gas dependency by 40%.
“All of the above” seems a good approach. If this is an existential crisis, why would we not hedge our bets?
(Not everywhere has good sun for solar.)
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
The places with worse sun conditions tend to have amazing wind resources. Or be such a tiny niche that caring about them is irrelevant, like the few people living in the wind kill of the arctic high north of the polar circle.
Solar is not the only alternative. Tidal, river flow, reservoir, wind, thermal come to mind in terms of renewables.
Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action:
> and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.
It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."
No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
Yeah it seems like having State control is not a silver bullet
Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
> Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.
It is not like nth of a kind Hinkley Point C, EPR reactor number 5 and 6, at $32.5B per reactor is going any better?
Also do note that no one knows the true cost of Olkiluoto 3. The $11B figure is from a settlement many years before it was completed as interest and construction costs kept accumulating.
It is probably infuriating to many that costs are that significant and that important. France should be the model for nuclear, but mismanaged EDF which now has €54.3 billion debt and is years behind in maintenance. (2022 debt was €64.5 billion). And the public and politicians pitch a fit if the PM proposes a balanced budget with cuts. Nuclear doesn't make the cut when there are multiple competing interests of nitwits.
Your rates aren't doing insane shit because you don't have nuclear energy. Renewables are way way way cheaper.
How much of that rate is because China is flooding the market with wind turbine blades and solar panels?
How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?
> How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?
Buy them while they're selling cheap. They're good for at least 20 years. Plenty of time to stand up domestic manufacturing if they cut you off.
What's the evidence that there's "flooding the market" going on? It seems to me wind turbine prices have followed a plausible looking downwards hill and there's no sign of dumping excess inventory or otherwise unsustainably low prices.
To use wind turbines as an example, more than 50% of the various bits are manufactured here in the US. For turbines destined US wind farms, at least.
Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK).
E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.
I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
Maybe roll back regulation to when France rolled out the Messmer plan?
They spent 1/4th of what we do today.
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.
This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.
In other words: nuclear is not viable unless the risks are offloaded to the public. Privatize profits, socialize risks.
Its the same with any massive infrastructure investment - only governments have the balance sheet to build them.
It is not that way with other similar types of power production.
Or, you know, socialize risks, socialise profits. I don't know why we would have to put up with this abuse and corruption any longer.
It's precious that you think a socialized system wouldn't be rife with corruption.
You only really have two options there:
- a system of lords and peasants, where the lords are held accountable and kept in check by the peasants, as the social contract obliges, or - a system of lords and peasants, with no checks and balances
Obviously, corruption can creep in any system, but the one that states "let's give it all to the lords with nothing in return" seems asinine to me.
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy.
This is not true. It might be nice to drive down the cost, but there's no need to do it. Adequate, even preferable, alternatives exist.
Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US.
China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it.
The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.
$50M is obscene, but not really a needle mover for rate payers. You could pay the whole executive team $0 and it would save the average residential ratepayer a few bucks per month, probably less than $5 per month.
Do they pay him that amount because he is really good at keeping end user prices down?
Or do they pay him that much because he's good at extracting as much money from the situation as possible?
When given an option that would double costs and profits or halves costs and profits which is he incentivized to do?
Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.
It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.
The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.
A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
I see. So Nevada and the 46 other states with electricity cheaper than California[1] all have stricter regulation than California then? That's why their electricity is so much cheaper?
[1]: https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
Unless by "taxes" you mean "delivery charges" this is simply untrue.
The generation is cheap. The delivery, the grid cost, is 3x-5x the cost of the generation.
It's all PG&E and the regulators's fault, for not containing costs more.
You're going to have to be more specific about cost control.
A big part of the cost is financing the project. It is capital intensive, and even few interest points more impact a lot the cost over time.
Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.
I can see a future where everyone can have free access to nuclear power.
I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station".
Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.
Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.
It's regulation holding back nuclear power...in every country?
SoCal Edison was as low as .06usd/kwh when the nuclear plants were operating. As soon as they started shutting them down it shot up to ~.25-30usd/kWh.
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx...
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
Regulations on nuclear power protect us from nuclear waste and meltdowns. Meltdowns are rare but catastrophic when they occur.
Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.
The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
[1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state
Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.
>SVP vs PG&E
This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...
True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure.
[1] - https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=...
My napkin math is that the $2.5B in profits accounts for about $0.14/kWH.
This is based on total electrical energy production of 17,301 GWh, since PG&E doesn't seem to publish their total distributed energy.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%242.5+billion+%2F+17%2C301+...
https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA#tabs-1
Great idea to napkin math it, but I think you're off by a very large margin. CA energy commission shows PG&E's energy consumption to be over 70,000 GWh.
$2,500,000,000 profit/70,000,000,000 kWh consumed is ~$0.035 per kWh.
So not exactly the smoking gun that CA ratepayers are looking for.
site: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
Another big reason for the high costs is the lack of experience building the plants.
What about long term environmental cost? I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.
> if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard
What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.
Thanks for the downvote and not being able to distinguish hyperbole from strawman. I guess the former is the price for getting the amusement of the latter.
> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation
Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"
Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs
No, we don't really need it though
A lot of the cost isn't the tech, it's the years of delays, endless permitting, and political whiplash
People like you believe uranium is growing on trees. Have you actually looked up how it's retrieved? The costs are insane and the ecological damage unrepairable.
>Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant.
Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
Chernobyl melted down and exploded.
Three Mile Island melted down and the regulatorily mandated containment vessel protected the public.
I wouldn't call that a fake cost.
More people die every single year from the radiation parts of coal power (excluding accidents), than have died from radiation of nuclear power's entire decades long history, including accidents.
Yes, they should be made safe, but we need some perspective here.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.
And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.
> The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge.
Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time.
We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.
You should fix your model of governance, because by that measure, any hope for progress is futile. The simple fact that we were better a few decades ago should be comforting. Enough of the shirt term profiteering sociopaths running the show, we can certainly cautiously swing back towards more technocracy and careful strategic planning.
> You should fix your model of governance,
What model of governance, of language, of human culture is going to last longer than the elephants foot will be dangerous to human beings?
This page and organization, WePlanet, is a rebrand of RePlanet. They advertise as a grassroots movement, but are funded by a hedge fund with a significant investment in fossil fuels [1].
I think their whole schtick is prolonging the current situation and betting on slow and expensive nuclear is a good strategy to prevent real change.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/30/climate-...
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
Germany doesn't need to participate in the next. They need to participate in something though. They are too small to do everything alone. Even the US depends on a lot of other countries to make things work.
If we’re looking at the car and energy industries, I think China has already won.
Could you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
The German car companies are struggling intensely against Chinese competition, everywhere outside of the US, and especially in China. The Chinese electric cars sell for 3 times less than the German ones in EU. The Chinese also invested heavily in e tech. The Germans? Not so much.
Ah yeah, now that you mention it I’ve heard BYD is doing well in most markets (plus others, I assume). Even ignoring current tariffs, I’m not sure an overtly Chinese car would catch on in the US, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been wrong before.
I believe that if allowed in, they would be competitive and that is why they are not allowed. And because of security claims.
Heh, it was bought by BMW in ‘94.
Sure, talk to your grid operators about that! :)
It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
I'm not sure how tidal and geothermal fare in Germany
It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
I was under the impression tidal was mostly tapped out because any half-decent location has already been turned into a power plant.
My baseline expectation is some opposition to any new energy infrastructure.
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.
Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.
It'd be way easier to build a few nuclear plants than it would be to build an equivalent constant energy source from solar+wind and batteries. The nuclear plants would also consume far less land area.
Damn, so we’re left with nothing, because nuclear is by far the most viable moving forward.
You need solar and batteries for peak loads, not just solar
In many places in the world, peak load does not occur during daylight hours, especially during winter
And yes, further north the days are longer but the solar capture efficiency is also much lower
True. I'm biased by living in a place where the peak load does happen during daylight hours (because that's when you need to run the A/C) and where heating usually happens via gas. Electric heating would indeed shift that dynamic (though municipal water heating would shift it the other way).
This right here. It's not one or the other, its a diverse combination of all of them that makes for the best results.
Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
Why would fusion reactors magically appear when the entire field of nuclear energy production is, in this scenario, essentially dead??
Not sure why pursuing fusion needs building fission reactors for energy production.
Because nuclear engineers, plant operators, radioactive mining facilities, and other types of workers that will be needed across both, need to be employed from today until fusion reactors are made.
Because the reactor will still run 20 years after that while the solar and storage will need to be replaced by then
Reactors need ongoing maintenance, repairs, replacement.
Not with a tech that needs 15 years to be build
If AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)
There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.
Check out:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
And leveraging fusion research to rethink how drilling is done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8sjdOjNxIE
Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
> baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes
That is unlike any definition of baseload generation I have ever heard.
If demand spikes nuclear power plants aren’t fast enough
They are when the power spikes for the day, in a typically predictable fashion. I’m not sure of anything more available that isn’t really dirty.
You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops.
Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025
US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
Cool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
The already use it and are not impressed.
AI wears out quickly if you have special demands.
Given how fast compute needs replacing, it's not much of a fall behind.
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.
https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage
> Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims shared another chart, saying: “The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months alone.” Man, are they optimistic. Mims linked to an article by Paul Kedrosky, who offers another perspective [1] on the AI bubble, as a percentage of GDP. Kedrosky, in turn, quoted Chinese President Xi Jinping, who warned of overinvesting in AI-focused datacenters. When Xi Jinping and Wall Street traders are on the same page, you know it’s bad. [2]
[1] https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/
[2] https://open.substack.com/pub/thealgorithmicbridge/p/im-an-a...
They can’t even use the products as a result of their obsession with government regulation. For example, Apple released a universal translator, literally right out of Star Trek, but the EU won’t be getting it either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45215548
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217477
A country is not forced to have AI farms running in it. Building giant powerplant for the AI tech (possible) bubble not seems wise.
The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point.
SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.
> who knows what demands AI will have at that point
This is true for any investment pretty much.
Well, not really. Investing in heating homes or powering light bulbs is, outside of extremely extreme situations, always a good investment, because people will always want to do that.
AI is also just super young, has apparently zero mote, requires insane amounts of hardware that basically becomes useless after a couple of years, and has promised, over and over, the AI revolution is just around the corner multiple times without ever delivering.
This is shortsighted. China routinely experiences large overcapacity in their electricity grid just to deal with the unknown unknowns of outages and other new demands. Suppose that the AI bubble burst and AI energy use is negligible, the extra capacity could be used for something else: retire your traditional coal fired furnaces for steel making and replacing them with electric arc furnaces; produce more aluminum; build more EV chargers.
The wait until after the AI bubble and buy the cheap surplus of energy.
AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither.
I willing to wager that the AI bubble will burst before you could even begin to build power plants for them.
I'm sure the bubble will burst. However we have already found a few uses for AI and those uses will continue after the burst (if they are economical)
Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell.
Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?
The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
> if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
So basically, be the only energy source not subsidized? There are plenty of decent reasons to be against nuclear, and there's a discussion to be had on its price, but pointing out subsidies in the energy sector is like casting stones from your glass house.
and a municipality willing to have the German finale nuclear waste storage in their backyard.
the Söder Challenge is Legend:-)
Let's not pretend that the companies running those plants are being hindered by the government. They themselves have said turning them back on is a stupid idea.
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
The data does not back up this narrative: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas.
The devil is in the details. The easy part is now done, and further significant increases in solar/wind in Germany are not going to happen.
Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times.
Your graph also ignores energy used for heating and for industrial processes. Their electrification is now stalled by high energy prices.
> not going to happen … nothing on the horizon for other times
Batteries and storage.
> heating and for industrial
That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
> Batteries and storage.
Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.
> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.
The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.
Germany is also quietly reassuring investors that it's safe to build natural gas by extending the subsidies: https://www.energyconnects.com/news/renewables/2025/january/...
As usual, actions speak louder than words.
If you're willing, we can place long-term bets on that. I'd be delighted to lose, but I don't expect it.
> absolutely relevant
It is not. We’re discussing what coal is being replaced with for electricity generation. But let’s talk about it.
> high electricity prices
Let’s ask the obvious question: are high prices caused by wind/solar? No, they’re caused by the extremely volatile prices of fossil fuels: “high fossil fuel prices were the main reason for upward pressure on global electricity prices, accounting for 90% of the rise in the average costs of electricity generation worldwide (natural gas alone for more than 50%).” [0]
So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
> heat pump sales
From your own link: the lengthy and public political debate about the legal framework and subsidies for heating buildings has caused people to lose confidence”
None of that has to do with electricity.
[0]: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-global-energy-crisis-pu...
> It is not. We’re discussing what coal is being replaced with for electricity generation. But let’s talk about it.
Let's. DW has a nice overview article: https://www.dw.com/en/how-germany-seeks-to-cut-electricity-c...
A third of the total cost is grid charges, and another third is taxes. Both go towards subsidizing the renewables.
BTW, the US average for all consumers is 14 cents: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
> So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
So Germany is _deepening_ its dependency on natural gas prices by building more plants because it's... more volatile?
Just imagine if there was some other reliable form of energy that doesn't require fossil fuels.
> None of that has to do with electricity.
It has everything to do with electricity. The government understands that the grid can't handle additional load from heating, so the subsidies are not pursued vigorously.
Again, let me repeat, actions speak louder than words. Like this one: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-coalition-agrees... Or just from today: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/eu-countries-dela...
electricity is only one power source - you not gonna use it for e.g. heating because its expensive. When you look at graph with energy consumption by source german situation is bad and solar provides less than 6% and wind less than 11% [1]. Now go compare with france where nuclear provides 37% of energy.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.
Yeah. It's so great that Germany has to directly pay for gas power plants.
I mean, yeah. Much cleaner than coal and much more flexible than nuclear.
Yeah, but we're Germans. We don't stop when it's reasonable, not when we want to follow an idea.
Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start.
Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.
I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy. There must have been stronger political reasons behind it than simply « not liking nuclear ». I’d be curious to read something deeper on the subject and understand the reasoning behind those strategies since the Fukushima accident.
Nuclear is really unpopular with a significant part of the German electorate especially on the left. So, yes, it’s entirely political.
I guess sabotaging France by preventing it for exploiting the advantage its great strategy in energy should have afforded it is just cherry on the cake.
Germany doesn't need to sabotage France on nuclear energy; France has done a fine job of sabotaging themselves.
The historical data shows that France didn't have upwards trend in nuclear generation since early 2000s.[1] I wouldn't bet on it to change regardless of political climate.
1: https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/generation/nucle...
France is sabotaging France on nuclear.
Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
The EU is fining France because they don’t have enough clean energy in their mix despite France having the cleanest energy in Europe because nuclear used to not count. They are also forcing the French national energy company to resell their electricity at a loss to competitor moving money which should be used to invest into the pocket of private investors. And let’s not talk about the utter stupidity of the current discussion on the dams.
Then you realise that a significant part of France new debts was due to them shielding their population for the soaring prices of electricity despite France producing cheap energy, said prices being due to Germany brain dead strategy leading to a dependence on Russian gas and the obligation to go through the European market, and you start to see the double whammy.
Well, at least, the energy market is not as bad as the ECB rules.
You do know that a large portion of the energy crisis was caused by half the French nuclear fleet being online when it was for once truly absolutely needed?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
I also note that you didn’t have anything to say about the EPR2 program and the absolutely insanely bonkers large subsidies needed to get it off the ground.
It was a nuclear + a renewable crisis. When the nuclear production dropped to 65% in France because of the offline plants, the wind production was hovering at 9% (bad luck) and the solar production at 5% (because it was winter).
That event was actually the final nail in the coffin for the all renewable policies of France, seeing that when the nuclear plants had a problem, the renewables failed even harder than the nuclear plants made it hard to make a case for all renewable policies
How so? Why is that a nail in the renewable coffin, but not the nuclear one? Nuclear is constantly sold as a miracle base load cure, but it can't even manage that.
Why isn't that instead a call for more storage, in general?
Because while the failure of the nuclear plants could be solved by sending more workers, the renewable failure couldn't (and it was even more severe).
Nobody could say "you had to build more renewables" at the time because they produced even less than the nuclear plants.
> Why isn't that instead a call for more storage, in general?
There's nothing which is appropriate for a winter load yet.
As a result of this incident, France pushed for more nuclear investments and dropped the mandatory renewables share.
> As a result of this incident, France pushed for more nuclear investments and dropped the mandatory renewables share.
Which has not materialized. This is where the thread started:
> The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
> Currently the French can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
> Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
> A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
I mean, if the renewable policies didn't fail that hard, the French state wouldn't have to revive the nuclear program in 2022
Sure now it will take some time to be effective but that's what happen when you give the keys to politicians and not engineers.
German people mostly just listen to what their leaders tell them. If their leaders change their mind then the German people will step in line and believe they changed their mind out of their own free will too.
That's a shame.
You know what, let’s turn popular city parks to windmill and solarparks. NY central park for example. Copenhagen has a few beloved open green places we could clean out and replace with solarcells, so does Berlin.
Im unscientifically guessing support for nc energy would rise very quickly and wed have a whole bunch of them within a decade.
Source, I live near a windmill, they are loud as f*k. I drive by solaparks nearly every day.
They remind me of those horrible deforested areas in Sweden called kalhygge. Nothing green about those atrocities.
I don't doubt your experience but this is not at all mine. I live by, cycle by, and work by windmills and there is no notable noise from any of them, even the older ones don't make a noise that I'd hear through a wall.
And the argument you make against PV is absurd, no one suggests that that's the way to use PV. Where I live everyone has PV on their roofs to produce mostly for own consumption. There are also many concepts to use it on otherwise unused spaces more at scale (office buildings and train stations for example, but also in combination with greenhouses, as roof for farm areas, ...
Yes you can do both of them badly but nuclear takes a huge space and makes it unusable for generations, and in addition requires vast infrastructure to actually get the energy safely into the grid. I'm a fan of nuclear power, but the arguments you make renewables are neither actual arguments pro nuclear nor do they seem to me to hold much water.
Newer wind turbines don't have a gearbox and are almost completely silent. When standing next to one, the loudest components are the electrical inverters/transformers.
Wings are loud
We have wind turbines in the north of Germany, close to cities, it’s a non-issue
Yeah have seen them. Down south of EU, in Portugal, they are buying land used for agriculture for these huge solar farms. And it is as sad as it is here. Surely, food is more important no? If they were placed in some deserts like in Spain... maybe they make sense, but these are very arable lands.
Wind is yeah... a whole other beast, although I do like what they have done in the Baltic and North seas.
Seems like an economics problem? Is farmland cheaper than buying some otherwise less usable land? Or is there now much land available and a huge unmet energy need? And there are also models to use solar that still allow some farming below (e.g. strawberry, beans, greenhouses, ... But maybe not cost effective in this case, or the incentives don't align well.
Have you looked into why this model is chosen?
Agrivoltaics (dual use of land for solar energy and agriculture) is gaining ground in many nations. This is heavy industry, the pace is slower than in most sectors (IT...).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
Why would you turn green space into solar farms when there are hideous and heat island creating parking lots right there?
It's funny how you're proposing this in bad faith as a terrible idea having tried to think of the worst place you could possibly put these things.
And yet we've done it, and everyone around it likes it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExPlace_Wind_Turbine#/media/Fi...
It's not particularly practical of course, because the real estate is expensive and the tall things in a city all fuck with the airflow... but then that's why this is a publicity stunt and not where we usually put them.
Oil is so green. Oil spills are so beautiful.
Yes, its sarcasm.
You are sarcastic, but seriously I sometimes have an impression that people are so invested in the slogan of green energy that they would be fine with cutting down last tree on this planet to put a solar panel in its place, while believing they save the planet and environment.
> We still need to overturn national nuclear bans, unlock more funding, and push democratic countries to support clean energy development abroad: especially where it is most needed to compete with Russia’s growing influence.
We also need to figure out how to build reactors in months to years instead of years to decades to failure.
And to build reactors at a cost less than $10 to $20 million per megawatt capacity.
Misleading title. The controversial part is that they ruled both nuclear energy AND natural gas plants as clean energy.
That's because nuclear + gas is the climate friendly solution.
As sh~. Here we go again.
France, heavily invested in nuclear, now has to shut down their reactors each summer as, due to climate change, the cooling water from rivers cant be used any more to cool the reactors. So much about being future proof. And let's not even get into the argument why no private company ever financed a nuclear reactor, but only build them with huge subsidies from states. Hint: it is because they are completely uneconomically. (and dont come with the argument of experimental small scale reactors, they are all just experimental and none proven)
> the cooling water from rivers cant be used any more to cool the reactors. So much about being future proof.
There are more reactor types than water-cooled reactors, and modern energy plants should use cooling towers even if some water reservoir is available, nuclear or not.
> it is because they are completely uneconomically
This is why private sector cannot provide infrastructure. State is not a company.
Not all need a river to cool but every single nuclear power plant needs a consistent water source 1) to actually generate the energy (steam!), 2) to cool, 3) as emergency safeguard when things go wrong. If you followed the news about Russia's attack on Ukraine and the risks to Zaporizia much of it was about fear of an incident, among others due to water sources or the energy to bring water to the plant being at risk
> 1) to actually generate the energy (steam!)
Secondary loop can be made closed system. This reduces efficiency, but this could be acceptable considering water scarcity. Of course there would be some leaks etc. so water needs to be resupplied, but in much lesser amounts.
> 2) to cool
Not necessarily true, because primary loop doesn't need to have water (HTG, MSR, LMR reactors). HTG reactor actually doesn't need water at all and can power gas turbine directly. LMR, depending on chosen coolant, can do this as well, though it requires heat exchanger.
There are nuclear plants in much warmer places than France. And well.. in hindsight climate change probably wouldn't be as bad as it is if nuclear continued growing at the same pace as in the 60s and 70s.
> Hint: it is because they are completely uneconomically
Yes, natural gas and fossil fuels were cheaper than nuclear too. That and the irrational panic is what killed it. At this point its probably too late (and renewables are more feasible option unless there are some significant technological advancements), but if you add up all the long-term costs and externalities nuclear would have turned out to be much cheaper in the 80s and 90s than it seemed on paper.
Just coal alone used to kill (probably still does worldwide) more people every year than Chernobyl ever did... What is the cost of that?
The water can still be used to cool down the reactors. But the water injected back into the river would then be too hot for the river's ecosystem.
Nuclear power is clean but VERY EXPENSIVE.
Dispatble solar and wind are about 1/5 the price of new nuclear.
It is expensive because we choose to make it expensive. It is regulation pushing safety levels far beyond other industries, and far beyond science (radiation is far less harmful than regulatory models suggest)
You do NOT get to constantly taut the low mortality rates of nuclear AND call for less regulation at the same time.
But even from a very matter of fact point of view, I'd rather have 1000 people die every year for 20 years, than have 20.000 people die on a single bad day/week. The economic and social impact is far, far bigger when it can't be "spread out" over multiple years.
Yes, you do. Especially given the outstanding new levels of nuclear tech and safety. The economic and social impacts are hugely positive. You will see this in the next decade as new facilities come online.
Do you even know anything about the relative death rates historically? You should look it up.
That's faulty logic, it's like claiming nuclear bombs were safe until Hiroshima.
We know nuclear reactor accidents could potentially kill millions of humans, even it hasn't done so yet.
Even in survivors of nuclear blasts only 3% died because of the effects of radiation
Your comment is just disinformation at this point. If nuclear was very expensive China wouldn't have built 30 in the last 10 years despite massive opposition.
In reality when you take all the costs into account there is no cheaper form of energy generation and there likely never will be, outside of cost decreases in Fission based nuclear itself.
It is hard for humans to work with exponential curves. Solar went from 15 cents per kwh to 5 cents per kwh over the last 10 years.
Anticipating such a rapid decline is hard and a lot of people still are stuck on outdated data.
Sure China commissioned these plants in the past and will plan more, but it won't be due to cost.
But you don't need to work with exponential curves to know that you can use solar only for like half a day and even less during winter. Those solar installation now are big part of overall cost. And with majority of EU population living in flats where you gonna install them?
> If nuclear was very expensive
you have to start paying interest on loan from first day 1 even if construction starts on 100th day and if safety committee rules some part of approved design needs to change to improve safety it's own to demolish, clean and rebuild the new parts.
The problem is not design regulations but how much difficult on purpose goverment has made it in the west to construct one.
Whatever. No one wants to invest into it anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
Well yeah, if you regulate it so it's costly the no one will invest... Unless you deregulated it?
LCOE does not account for the full (system) costs. Nuclear power plants have capacity factors over 90%, while PV/Wind have less than 25%. LCOE does not account for the added costs, such as increased transmission and storage/backup costs.
It does not account for a lot of things, for example insurance.
Quote from https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761... (Google translated):
Berlin – According to a study, comprehensive insurance against the risks of nuclear power would cause electricity prices to explode. According to calculations by actuaries, the premiums to be paid could cause electricity prices to rise more than forty-fold.
"Nuclear energy is ultimately uninsurable," said insurance expert Markus Rosenbaum on Wednesday in Berlin. If an insurance company wanted to build up sufficient premiums for a nuclear power plant within 50 years, for example, the remaining operating life of a reactor, it would have to charge 72 billion euros per year for liability insurance.
The German Renewable Energy Association (BEE) commissioned the "Leipzig Insurance Forums" to conduct the calculations even before the Fukushima reactor disaster. "The true costs of nuclear power are ignored and, in the event of a serious accident, are passed on to the public," said BEE Managing Director Björn Klusmann.
Now you know the true reason why we Germans abandoned Nuclear energy :-D
LCOE refers to the price in MWh (produced electricity), so it takes capacity factor into account. Whatever electricity you produce and sell depends on your installed capacity multiplied with the capacity factor.
Similarly, you pay for the electricity you receive and this is priced as say 40$ per MWh. Obviously when you receive nothing the price is 0, you don't pay them to idle, they either produce or not. Thus when storage costs kick in you don't add the costs of both together. You either pay one or the other, not both.
You might average them out taking into consideration what their output is, but you don't stack the costs on top of each other which I often see people do.
I wonder what this chart would look like if wind and solar were required to provide storage in order to handle 24/7 delivery
Funny how all the nuclear chills forget the plethora of issues that come with that tech.
- who has access to nuclear power? - what happens to nuclear reactors during war? - where does the Uranium come from? - how long does it take to build a reactor? - how many long term solutions have been developed in the more than 60 years of this technology’s existence?
Not saying nuclear doesn’t have a place, but let’s not be blind to the long list of complications that come with it.
You suggest people forget that without considering that perhaps you don't know:
- We killed nuclear power in countries that can be trusted so that is not relevant.
- Nuclear accidents are not as harmful as people imagine.
- We have plenty of access to uranium resources in the west.
- the time to build a reactor is often in large parts regulatory burdens. France built out 10% of its electricity generation needs in a year, for a number of years. That is what is possible.
- Part of the reason there is no innovation in this sector is because regulation has strangled it. There are many innovative ideas in nuclear.
You mean western sources like the USA, that suddenly starts waving it's dick around when the wrong dipshit is elected? The USA that made a nuclear deal with Iran and then scrapped it for no fucking reason?
Is that a joke? You are conflating US meddling in international politics vs. protecting themselves and the world from Nuclear catastrophe by not fighting the likes of Iran, who openly admits wanting to nuke other countries, namely Israel (and by extension radiate Gaza, Jordan, Egypt, the nearby oceans, etc, as well) and the US. Iran who hid their nuclear enrichment facilities underground, which were known to enrich Uranium beyond what's needed for energy production.
If I lived within range of the No. 1 rogue aggressor state (Israel), I'd also want some nuclear weapons.
The EU may have a geopolitical interest in taking another look at nuclear. The dependance on Russian natural gas and expensive imported US natural gas is not good for their economic outlook long term. Honestly I am surprised Germany has not fired back up a couple of its plants considering its difficulties with Industrial output and competing in a world market.
The cheapest form of energy is firing up a recently closed nuclear power plant. What they are doing is beyond reason.
This is just utterly and completely wrong. EVEN THE COMPANIES THEMSELVES say it would be stupid to reopen those plants.
And, of course, the idea that "dependence" on Russia is bad, but replacing it with dependence on other states AND with building a bunch of nuclear bombs in my backyard that are PRIME targets to literally take out my entire grid, is laughably bad.
Except many nuclear plants around the world are doing this..
In case you are in (or IP-geolocated to) the EU: https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/115068-000-A/nuclear-putin-s-d...
We have plenty of uranium in Europe. Australia also has plenty. Lots of countries have plenty, both friendly and not so friendly (that we still buy lots of stuff from anyway). We absolutely don't need Russian uranium. Uranium is also easy to store long-term (years).
There is zero risk of a new stupid energy dependence on Russia.
I read a lot of comments talking about „getting down the operational costs“ but i am missing someone talking about the costs of depositing the nuclear waste until it has no more risks. Am i missing something?!
Yes the cost of depositing nuclear waste is trivial, it takes a small number of large concrete structures underground in well picked locations.
The US produces about 1250 cubic meters of waste per year. For comparison the empire state building has a floor area of 208000 square meters, assuming a 3 meter floor height you could fit about 500 years worth of spent fuel inside it.
Yes. This. Nuclear waste storage is extremely cheap.
Also, we only "use" 3% of the fuel in current nuclear power station designs so we could just reprocess the fuel and vastly reduce the volume of waste too.
For anyone interested in the history of Sellafield and its role in reprocessing, "Britain's Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield" on BBC 4 at the moment is worth a watch. Presented by Jim Al-Khalili.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b065x080
> Germany, long a symbol of anti-nuclear politics, is beginning to shift.
err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
but no: there is no Endlager (permanent spent nuclear fuel waste site) in sight, the costs of dismantling used plants are outrageous and if it were not for nimbyism, we'd be essentially self sustaining on wind and solar within a decade.
matter of fact fossil and nuclear sponsored fud on wind and solar is the single biggest issue we face in Germany.
Atomkraft? nein, danke.
> but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight
The Problem in Germany is that by law the state has to build a repository, while the operators have to pay for it. The operators did pay (~24 bln EUR), but politically either NIMBY parties (such as CDU/CSU/SPD) block it, or the Greens (under Habeck) block progress so they can continue to shout "what about the waste???"
In Finland the operators can build their own repository and they did it cheap and relatively fast.
Also from an even more anti-nuclear country (austria): Kernenergie? Ja bitte!
I propose we store it in your basement. It's really not a flame war, but people that consider themselves rational argue it's no big deal, so they should be prepared to store it in their immediate vicinity. I support renewables and don't have a problem with solar panels on my roof or even a windmill in my backyard.
Finland is the world's first and only such facility so far.
the law to build it is pretty universal, the world has essentially agreed to not export nuclear waste.
associating the progressive innovative green party with blocking progress is an interesting turn, there was no progress in the topic for decades, and the reason is rather that nuclear waste is like toddler art: first no one wants to take it, trying to toss it is met with loud and hefty protest, and at the end nobody knows where to take it.
don't the alps have lovely granite areas for the Finnish model?
State level NIMBYism is what's happening with nuclear. The state decides we won't have that in our back yard in the case of Germany.
Fear uncertainty and doubt is the only thing blocking nuclear power.
The irony is that the fud has been spread by "environmentalists" and has only managed to keep fossil fuels around for the last 20 years greatly exacerbating our climate change predicament.
Nuclear is more expensive and more geopolitically dangerous than renewables. For a short time, Germany was even leading in PV technology, it could've been our new sector we dominate in. But, as always, greedy investors and corrupt right wing politicians starved out any possibility of positive change.
And I find it horrendously hilarious that you believe the same people that work tirelessly against renewables would actually EVER build nuclear. It's about milking the status quo for cash as long as possible and then fucking off into retirment with that stolen money.
Btw, what's the german energy companies opinion on building nuclear? RWE a big fan? (They aren't!)
> err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
Is the lobby trying? Last I checked the head of RWE himself said that going back to nuclear in Germany was infeasible. It seems to be conservative politicians who had been keen on it before winning the election and before the industry pointed out that it's a bad idea actually.
RWE is not the oil or coal lobby. they pay for coal and gas. never would they ever finance a nuclear power plant. to them .02€/kWh (wind/solar) is _super_ sexy/profitable.
the fossil fuel lobby is in Texas, Middle East, Russia,and likewise uranium. add Siemens and their nuclear shares in other companies, for the plants.
RWE does not manufacture plants or dig coal.
Ruling nuclear as green is something I can understand (though I still vastly prefer solar), but I've read elsewhere that natural gas has also been ruled green, and that just makes no sense.
Personally I see gas and nuclear as transition technologies until we can go fully renewable, and I can tolerate gas staying around for a bit longer as long as we phase our coal and oil as soon as possible, but that doesn't make it green. Gas is still a CO2 producing fossil fuel.
Whether you're pro-nuclear or not, this ruling feels like a turning point. For decades, nuclear has been stuck in a weird limbo. Fascinating how youth climate activists are now some of the strongest voices for nuclear. That would've been unthinkable 10 years ago
It makes perfect sense, they are mostly uninformed about the risks and consequences of nuclear but have heard about global warming all their lives.
Asking because I don't know. How is enrichment governed? Say for instance if a country is only using it for energy vs defense/offense. And are there elements that can be specifically used for energy vs otherwise? Last I remember, having access to enriched uranium was grounds for a country to bomb another one.
The only way to ensure that a civil uranium enrichment program remains strictly civil is via transparency and monitoring. A country that has mastered uranium enrichment technology for fueling civil power reactors could use the same technology to produce bomb-grade uranium. It actually takes more work to enrich natural uranium into fuel for power reactors than it takes to further enrich power reactor fuel into bomb material:
https://scipython.com/blog/uranium-enrichment-and-the-separa...
This is scary. so the extra effort to move from, say, 20% to 85% is relatively small compared with the effort to get up to 20% in the first place. Might as well build a feature into the reactor so that it only works with <=20%
> Might as well build a feature into the reactor so that it only works with <=20%
How would this help? Nuclear power plant and enrichment facility are separate entities.
I think two reasons. If reactors can't function above 20%, a country having access to >20% enriched payload is a certain violation. Vs "60% enrichment is still for clean energy, my reactor works with it". 2. If you are only buying the payload and not enriching it yourself, you can't do anything with >20% . More like mixing methyl alcohol in lab available ethyl alcohol, to deter lab techs from mixing water and having a rager.
You should read the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as it addresses several of those issues. Possession of highly enriched uranium isn't necessarily an act of war by itself.
https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...
Natural uranium on earth is currently about 0.7% U-235; civilian power reactors typically need low-enriched uranium which is 3% to 5% U-235.
The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).
Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
> Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
Which, as I understand it, is because at 20% enrichment you've already done about 70% of the work needed to get to 85%.
Modern weapons use plutonium not uranium, uranium weapons can be constructed.
All it takes is the enrichment to produce the fissile material for a weapon.
As far as I know countries have agreed to not build weapons, with the exception of those that already have them, there is an international body that monitors enrichment sites, but checks are voluntary a country can choose to not accept inspections and/or build additional secret enrichment sites.
The fissile material is not sufficient for a weapon though, as I understand there is quite a bit of science that goes into making a bomb.
Additionally, first generation weapons are large and unwieldy, i.e it takes a bomber to deploy a single weapon with a very small yield.
Miniaturization, building a weapon small and light enough to put on a missile is a significant problem that took the current powers years to get over.
But that's about it, if you can figure out how to make a small bomb of variable yield, you can make bombs small enough to fit a large backpack, and thermonuclear weapons that fit in a ballistic missile as well.
IAEA inspections verify your claimed inventory and enrichment facilities. They are trying to detect if any nuclear materials are being skimmed/diverted. As for weapons, nuclear fuel is very low enrichment (usually under 5%). Iran surpassed 60%, which has no peaceful use, so that is why it was said they were perusing weapons.
You don't actually need enriched uranium for nuclear power. The design is easier if you enrich it, but there are reactors that would work on unenriched uranium.
The solution to these issues is just to manage the enrichment supply chain. If a country wants nuclear power but can't be trusted, supply then with at cost uranium.
Imo that's a pretty complicated topic. On one side if you just build LWRs you just don't need very highly enriched uranium or plutonium so posession of those is a red flag. On the other side fast breeder reactors are the ones which are able to produce the least harmful waste. But fast breeders and closed fuel cycles produce and handle plutonium which in turn can be used for bad things.
Energy needs like 5% enrichment while weaponizing needs much higher and much more difficult to obtain 85% enrichment
This is the actual judgement: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...
One of the reasons they judged this way is the lack of feasible low-carbon alternatives. Which is hilarious because we're talking about EU taxpayer money here. Money that can be spend only once. If you spend it on a nuclear reactor which may or may not be build within 10 years, you can't spend it on those "feasible low-carbon alternatives" which we already have and which would have produced a lot of energy in that construction time.
The court however said also, that the strict regulations, which are often the main argument of nuclear fans, are not to be lowered. Therefore there is no outcome for nuclear where it will get cheaper. The French, which have never stopped building nuclear all over the world, still didn't manage to get it cheaper. There are always cost explosions which cause the energy price to rise over time.
Which brings us back to why we're even talking about this:
France has a fleet which needs more and more maintenance. It is costly and the state already supports every Watt of nuclear energy through their tarif bleu. They desperately need this EU money to support this show. Without it, they'd be forced to innovate and expand on renewables, like the rest of the planet.
...but just like the Germans with their fossil fuel cars, they'll try to keep it alive as long as possible, even though the market comes apart around them.
Price per Wh plays no role in the coming decades. Solid fuels can become x10 or x100 more expensive as they deplete. So the now extensive nuclear can become relatively cheap.
The globe must change its behavior NOW: electricity prices at night, under shade or without wind must become very extensive because they need extensive tech (batteries, nuclear, fuels).
If I were a regulator for a day I would strive making fossil fuels and night elecricity x10 more expensive and leave the market regulate by itself. In ten years I would make them x10 once more.
Clean, but not insurable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
It is not beyond insurance.
https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/nuke_...
Insurance already insures extremely complicated industries.
The person who wrote that has a conflict of interest, because he developed a nuclear reactor:
"In 2011, Devanney shifted his attention to nuclear power. He formed a small team to develop a design that combined a high temperature, low pressure, liquid fuel reactor with his background in ship production. This became known as the ThorCon project. Devanney continues to serve as ThorCon's Chairman although the day to day operations of ThorCon have been turned over to younger, more capable hands."
https://gordianknotbook.com/author/
Or he knows what he's talking about. Could be either but you've chosen the reason that supports your perspective. I appreciate that he may be conflicted.
Finally, France will be happy after years of being pushed back on this with the drive for solar and wind turbines, which sadly all got supplemented via gas on the back that nuclear was bad.
Sadly, with electricity becoming more reliant on gas and other fossil fuels when it is not so sunny in winter, or on those cloudy days with no wind, means fossil fuel usage ends up higher than if they had stayed and expanded nuclear - instead they closed many plants(Germany a prime example, in favour of....gas).
Then the whole over-dependence on Russian gas and oil really did whammy the energy price market, not just for Europe, but with a knock-on effect across the world. One we still pay for today.
The problem with all kinds of "green" movements and such is that they only _demand_ solutions without being involved. That also means they might have very little idea if their premise is even valid, they just put all their energy towards organization, making signs n stuff and are very emotion-driven.
People thinking fission reactors might randomly explode like nuclear bombs Simpsons-style and so many green parties in Europe being anti-nuclear has held progress back too much. Minimal climate activism isn't bad, but they really bit hard in to the fork on this one.
Phew, thankfully I did not need the EU court to know nuclear is clean energy. In any case, any pros of it being considered clean in an official capacity?
Oh well then the Oligarchs have spoken,let the world be green, glowing green. I'm not anti nuclear but the technologies used to date have been seriously flawed. But It is the Idea that people who really have no technical knowledge of this technology its supply chain issues or its real impact on long term health are so arrogant that they believe they alone can dictate to the world, that I find offensive. We look at immediate effect but a study by a Japanese researcher after Fukushima shows the effect of irradiation may not show for multiple generations after exposure.
Clean, mostly. With future? No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not.
Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source.
Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding].
And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in storing. Except for costly disasters in how not to intermediately store it, here in Germany.
If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful, why not make future generations happy by preserving it for them, and for now, limiting its use until we learned how to add to the initial price the full cost of long term storage, with further disasters as a learning experience for that?
Saving lives and being cost-effective in the short run might work, but every energy expert says in 50 years, nuclear will have to be phased out anyway. And fusion could provide clean, but also primary heat inducing energy. So even that will not save us.
Primary heat on this scale isn't nessisarially a bad thing. It has a very small impact on the global power balance with respect to the effect global warming.
There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.
I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.
>If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful
It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.
> No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not
Luckily we do need lots of heat. District heating, process heat, thermochemical H2 production, ...
Well, good thing that we have no reason to build these reactors as far away from population centers as possible, right?
We already have enough heat for that, from industries. Distribution is the biggest factor, and in that, distance. It's really cool, but it's stupidly expensive up front. Not to mention, you need to require EVERYONE in the area to buy in and stay in to have any hopes of being worth it in the long run. NIMBYism strikes again.
And the EU are correct. Stop crying about it. Nuclear is the future of human energy on Earth.
No other source provides energy as dense safe and reliable.
Hacker news people believe it’s not the cheapest. But with accounting for environmental and human impact and freeing from unnecessary restrictive regulations it can and will be.
Does EU still buy fissile fuel from Russia?
Yes it does, even trans-Ukrainian Druzhba still works.
Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage
We need to do what we can right now to avoid people saying this exact same thing 20 years from now.
The oilcorp-funded thinktanks don't like this answer, though.
That renewable and storage is more bang for buck?
20 years ago renewable+storage was orders of magntiude more than nuclear. Today it's not.
It's so clean that you can swim in the reactor water. You can even drink it after running it through a water filter. No waste disposal required. It's that clean.
All the smart people of my generation have spent their time working on burning energy. For AI, crypto, etc. Imagine if they worked as hard on making energy instead.
Rotating some cranks?
Like Conan.
The fact that:
- the French won this
- the Germans won no chat control
Is the best of both worlds!
Everything good Greenpeace may have ever done is probably overshadowed by the death and planetary destruction caused by their opposition to nuclear power.
EU is not so bad at all, in fact, it's really cool.
They had been pushing back the nuclear energy for quite a few years before they came out with this
Uranium mining isn't clean at all. Between Greenpeace (full of business school hacks) and lobby pressured EU courts, there's a middle ground.
Why mine uranium? Only about 4% of nuclear fuel is actually used before the fuel rods need replacement, which makes uranium highly recyclable. Given all of the “spent” fuel rods in storage, mining operations for additional uranium are unnecessary. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for millennia, provided we are willing to begin a recycling program.
Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use isotopes from it. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.
Sure, now show us how to recycle spent fuel rods (and become a billionaire).
What do you mean? Modern in situ uranium mining is one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have. It's not perfectly clean, but it's pretty darn good.
>What do you mean?
I mean it's not clean
>one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have
Not the point. It's not clean, it shouldn't be called clean end of the story.
Ok, well by this definition, all human development activity is unclean. This is a perfectly valid point of view but is pretty distinct from the modern definition of clean.
> all human development activity is unclean
of course
> modern definition of clean
clean is clean. no need to lie or modernize word definitions to fit your agenda of promoting nuclear energy all day every day for a decade
The problem in my mind with a "clean is clean" litmus test is that it eliminates the word "clean"'s ability to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable human development.
Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.
OK, but then by that logic, solar and and wind shouldn't be categorized as clean energy either. Clearly it's a matter of degrees and meant as a useful segmentation for taxation, etc.
Even doing nothing is not "clean" by that philosophy, since you'd did and your rotting corpse would taint the soil, making it unclean by default.
Nuclear power uses around 1/10th the resources of intermittent renewables per kWh of electricity produced.
So if nuclear isn't clean, renewables are downright filthy.
Citation needed.
I will save you the trouble because I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago. These numbers have been thoroughly debunked [1]. They are simply wrong, likely out of laziness more than malice.
But the people that spread this around do it out of malice to dupe people and influence opinions. You've been duped.
[1] https://xcancel.com/simonahac/status/1318711842907123712
> I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago.
That turns out not to be the case.
Even if it were the case: an official study by the DOE was "thoroughly debunked", in your esteemed opinion, because some random Australian twitter user claims to have talked to a friend.
Right.
He claims no such things. Instead he goes deep down the rabbit hole, brings back receipts and takes no prisoners.
Citation still needed. Real one will not come as it's nonsense.
> He claims no such things.
Literally: "i asked a solar developer."
https://x.com/simonahac/status/1318711817502302209
> Citation still needed. Real one will not come as it's nonsense.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
Then what is clean? By that definition Solar and Wind aren't because copper and iron mines aren't clean.
Are you saying it's less clean than mining for the materials that make up solar panels and wind turbines?
Do you think rare earth minerals for batteries and photovoltaics grow on trees?
Photovoltaics don't use rare earth minerals (and Li-ion batteries only use yttrium in one particular variety of LFP cells.)
Who talked about those? Not the fucking point. Nuclear isn't clean.
What source of energy is clean then?
No point, old mate just can't deal with anything but perfection. No energy source is clean, so let's not bother.
> Uranium mining isn't clean at all.
Nor is mining for coal!
Of course it is. Atomic energy is one of the cleanest energy sources we have. But not the cheapest.
Sudden outbreak of common sense.
Why would a court decide this vs. an actual team of scientists?
Did you even read the article?
>The European Court of Justice has now fully dismissed Austria’s lawsuit.
I read the title, and you indirectly answered my question.
I personally believe that nuclear energy is clean energy
I'm totally fine with people attempting to build new fission plants. More power to them!
I just don't see it happening. They cost too much and take too long. Not holding my breath here.
By some weird accident they stop being that expensive and long to build when you cross the border into China.
Maybe Western nations will allow Chinese companies to come build their nuclear plants. That would be something.
Or South Korea. Or just take a short trip to the recent past in your time machine.
Russia is running out of money to pay anti-nuclear activists in Europe, it seems. "Atomkraft? Nein Danke!" should be viewed as what it really is.
It is. And that's great news!
Well, compared to carbon, it is.
well would being good if they specifically say thorium nuclear energy is clean energy!
Seems like the Chinese are picking up where US left off:
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/thorium-molten-salt-r...
Maybe the EU can pick that up too.
In context of that really makes one think if Nazis was on to something other than toothpaste?
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/thorium-toothpaste-als...
Clean but not safe
This is clean, until something goes catastrophically wrong.
(Which eventually it will. The more reactors, the more chances for it to happen.)
Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Data reported by Forbes put the death rates for nuclear power in the US below all other sources of energy including solar:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
The death rates are wildly different than the ones at the site you linked. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy.
The death rates might be a difference in units; the Forbes article is using deaths per trillion kWh, the other might be deaths per thousand/million kWh.
The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.
E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.
These are death rates with the current saturation of plants. If we wanted to cover all of Europe, a much more densely populated area, with nuclear, the deaths (and other negative consequences) would be far greater, no?
The thing about nuclear is that the land area consumed per unit of energy is, like the deaths per unit of energy, extremely low. You can “cover all of Europe” without needing to put very many people (if any) in the potential exclusion zone.
Even with that being said, those safety numbers have held even with China building large numbers of reactors in relatively dense areas. I'd be surprised if European reactors turned out to pose much of a higher risk.
Sure, in deaths per unit energy. But the real risk of nuclear is financial. The tail risk is huge for any producer on their own, which makes insurance extremely expensive, and which means that usually only nations bear the full financial risk of nuclear.
Meanwhile lignite mines (which Germany are re-opening) actively affect the health of everyone nearby, even when everything goes perfectly alright.
The nuclear industry did say that this would happen but the reality was the exact opposite:
>According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.
https://theprogressplaybook.com/2025/02/19/german-state-of-b...
You are incorrect fortunately.
Western designs are safe, most Soviet-era ones are/were not. It's unfortunate that nuclear power still has this stigma, as it's like saying "all cars are unsafe" while comparing the crash test ratings of a modern sedan to a 1960's chevy bel aire.
Then why did Fukushima happen?
That tsunami killed 20.000+ people, and spilled massive amounts of chemicals and toxic junk to the ocean.
Yet people keep fixating over the radioactive pollution, including evicting people from their homes for truly minor amounts of radiation.
Turns out the "worst case scenario" of nuclear accidents is jackpot for nature. By clearing Fukushima from humans, nature is thriving: https://www.sciencealert.com/animals-aren-t-just-surviving-i...
To put a number on it, linear no threshold models predict ~130 deaths as a result of the radiation (and are known to over-estimate lethalities at low doses).
Around 50 people a year die while clearing snow in Japan, so it's ~ twice as dangerous as shoveling snow in worst-case predictions.
LNT is not known to over-estimate lethalities at low doses. The actual situation is that the predicted deaths at low doses occur at such a low rate that the signal cannot be detected above the noise. That doesn't mean the prediction was wrong, just that it cannot be verified. It's possible (as in, consistent with evidence) that LNT under-predicts deaths at low doses.
Even if LNT would under-predict it is still a rounding error in the big picture of the tsunami disaster.
And, let's put it straight: LNT is scaremongering fiction. People who live in Ramsay, Iran, are exposed to higher level of background radiation that n what is allowed for nuclear workers. Yet, there is no elevated levels of cancer or birth defects, not is there a shorter lifespan for people living there either.
The dose makes the poison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
Epidemiology is a very blunt instrument. The data you mention there cannot be used to reach the conclusion you are trying to reach, since confounding effects cannot be excluded (and because the doses they receive can only be estimated, not actually measured). Yes, radiation biologists know all about those people and have judged that evidence as part of a larger picture.
The main reason is a combination of negligence by the owner of the plant and not enough enforcement of standards. The fukushima powerplant was known to have sea wall lower then required and as such was vulnerable to a tsunami (this was known for quite a long time) Combined with backup power in the basement (also against standards)
For an example of what happens to a reactor build according to safety requirements see the onagawa nuclear powerplant
It also had a design flaw that has not been present in most nuclear reactors since the late 70s.
"Modern" designs have the ability to self cool in case of emergency by using an ice containment condenser or similar solutions.
Japan is very in the east, they said western designs. The reactor knows where it is, by knowing where it is not.
Just kidding.
Old, bad design - from the 1960s, in fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor states that the 1960 reactors are most used, today. In the west. Contradicting that western reactors are safe, while eastern designs are not.
The Chernobyl plant had known construction defects that could impair safety. These things would prevent a western plant from starting operation, but did not stop the Soviet plant from beginning operation:
https://inspectapedia.com/structure/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Disast...
They did not even have any automated safeties in place, because their philosophy was “faith in the worker” while the western philosophy is “humans are fallible”:
https://www.eit.edu.au/engineering-failures-chernobyl-disast...
They then ignored their own safety procedures when operating the plant, which ultimately is what caused the disaster.
Saying that Soviet designs being in the same generation as western designs makes them equally safe/unsafe is quite wrong when you look at the details. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one mistake after another.
That said, the plant was designed by a country that shot down a civilian airliner that had strayed into their airspace due to a navigational error, when they knew it was a civilian airliner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
They had no regard for human life, so of course, they built things that are incredibly unsafe. There is no end of examples of them simply not caring about human life.
Pebble-bed reactors are incapable of catastrophic failure, and molten-salt reactors have negative feedback loops with increasing pressure. Nuclear doesn't have to mean the same designs that were used in the 60s.
Both those design types were operational in the 1960s in the US but have been shut down due to lack of performance and industrial interest. New interest has started today, but let's not claim the new ones are some kind of new improved tech that evolved out of our workhorse water cooled/moderated plants.
What is a bit scary is that we cannot easily deal with the consequence of something really wrong... We have to real with it.
I'd say a reactor in inland Europe is far from the craziest place to put one. God forbid someone were to put one in the Pacific ring of fire... oh, wait...
Why? Are you concerned that, like Lex Luthor in that worst-of-all Superman movies, someone will use nuclear reactors to somehow cause damage to continental plates? Actually, that's more of a stretch than the movie took.
So funny. After the whole bullshit and hysteria post Fukushima and the German bullshit. But now it's the good narrative because of the war with Russia.
It's so funny to see the shifts of peace or war with eastasia. So obviously propagandistic and so obviously supported by all the psychophants...
Today we're on the right side until it's inconvenient again and then we'll burn the witch of anyone who dares go against the narrative.
$oklo $ura
Well duh. Now we must wait and see what next feat of self-defeat Germany invents to prevent itself using it.
“EU court rules sky blue”
[flagged]
I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence.
However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.
I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.
The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.
For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.
A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.
The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.
By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.
I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?
The Spainout was caused by having too little rotating mass in the grid that stabilizes the frequency.
There was a trigger in some of the PV systems, but that wasn't the underlying cause.
Yes, interconnectedness is critical if you want reliability.
Spain has far too little transnational capacities. That was a significant contributing factor in the grid outage.
If you want to change the topic of this conversation to distribution resiliency instead of production resiliency then sure.
I had both of these as a single concept in my head, thus the confusion.
How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?
> limitless clean energy source
Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.
How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.
There are hard limits on wind and solar.
“Limitless” in that context means “it still happens in a cloudy week with no wind”
That is what storage and long distance transmission are for. It’s very hard to take these tired arguments seriously.
With our current rate of storage and spending, storage would last hours at most.
Long distance transmission on the scale where we would not get short of power is a project as big, if not bigger, than nuclear reactors.
Both of these are not feasible solutions for industrial economies.
I'd like to see a prior for that use of that word, otherwise you're just making stuff up. Please use words to say things.
Ok
Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.
> Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive
I’m laughing in $0.11/kWh nuclear energy while Germany’s “cheaper” green energy is uh... quite a bit more expensive.
Retail or production price, where are you based?
In the US, the price I’m metered at.
Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.
Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable.
Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
> extra steps.
Those extra steps are crucial, as they massively dilute the output and make it weather/daylight and seasonally dependent.
Intermittent renewables produce at least an order of magnitude more waste than nuclear reactors, be they fusion or fission.
> Those extra steps are crucial, as they massively dilute the output and make it weather/daylight and seasonally dependent
and leave the waste on a far away star
How are you defining waste here?
Nuclear reactors can’t adjust production rapidly and require peaker plants. I don’t have to squint to see how this is also solved by grid scale storage.
> Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.
This observation seems entirely useless and pointless. What implication are you saying we should draw from this?
For something that is supposed to be clean it sure keeps making places unhabitable.
There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.
Why not? Grid scale batteries will allow using solar/wind throughout the day and not only peak times, eliminating the duck curve problem. This is already only a few years away.
This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.
> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.
None of this happens to be true.
A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.
And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.
What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?
Here the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
https://yle.fi/a/74-20136905
Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.
> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.
> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.
True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.
> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment
Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.
> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.
The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.
> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
> It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant
This, again, is not true. The average is currently at 6.5 years and dropping slightly, the time has been fairly consistent over the last decades.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
The main factor determining build times appears to be "how much do you want to?". France built 50+ reactors in a total of 15 years, the fastest build times are Japan, South Korea, China and Germany.
Secondary factors are "is this a FOAK build or NOAK", and "how much experience is there building nuclear plants". When Japan was good it built in under 4 years, and had plans to go below 3. And no, that's not detrimental to safety.
> and use just isn't that important of a factor.
It is when land is expensive.
> With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
Typical dodge into the qualitative: the additional grad capacity required to ship power across the country from where it is produced to where it is needed is a multiple of that required to strengthen it for additional consumers. Never mind the whole "smart grid" madness.
> Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself.
That's also false. These costs are almost always included and have little impact on the total cost of power. For example, the Gösgen plant in Switzerland produces for 4,34 Rappen / kWh, including all costs and including a profit.
> At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize
That's also not true. When subsidies for off-shore wind were reduced, Germany, Denmark and the UK had zero bids for wind-parks, and immediately the discussion was "new subsidy models". Intermittent renewables in Germany currently get €20 billion in direct subsidies, never mind the advantage of having feed-in priority and being able to burden other producers with cost of intermittency.
> The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables
That's also not true. There was a trigger (in PV production) that led to a substation having problems. But that was just the trigger, not the cause. Grids have to be able to deal with faults like that from time to time. The grid in Spain wasn't, because there were too many intermittent renewables in the grid, and too few rotating masses that stabilize the grid.
> Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
Are these grid scale batteries sufficient to power an entire industrialized nation for a week or more in the room with us now? How much are they?
Solar and battery have had immense investment to bring down that LCOE. Where can we get if we invest similarly in nuclear.
lol at wind though. that's not real.
And even then it's not competitive. And LCOE is only a small part of the cost with intermittent renewables.
That's only true because both solar panels and batteries are produced in China off cheap coal power.
LCOE is not a fundamental metric. EROI is and it's pretty bad for photovoltaics.
And even then it's not actually true.
First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).
Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.
Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.
Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany). Thus, a comparison isn't that easy to make.
System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.
> Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized.
That is also not true. For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all. Even Greenpeace and the Green's chief anti-nuclear Lobbyist, Jürgen Trittin, called nuclear power plants "money printing machines".
> Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France)
Those are minute compared to subsidies intermittent renewables get in Germany. In particular as there is the ARENH program, which is effectively a negative subsidy (it takes money away from the nuclear company EDF), and of course EDF is profitable and gives money to the government.
When you add it all up, France has a negative subsidy of € 0.1 - 7 billion yearly, whereas Germany subsidizes intermittent renewables to the tune of around €20 billion a year.
> System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend
That is also not true. System costs are actually rising, because yields are dropping, the share of renewables has risen and the (fairly cheap) coal backup is to be eliminated. Total costs are now estimated at several trillion euros. For comparison, France's nuclear program cost a total of €228 billion through 2011.
Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany. [1]
EDF was nationalized in 2022, doesn't have to build money reserves for decommissioning (which would be tens of billions), is about 50 billion in debt and just got a 5 billion government loan to keep some old reactors running and another government loan to build new plants. These are not minute interventions, both France and Germany heavily subsidize their sectors (in different ways). With the ARENH program ending in 2025, a more fair comparison will be possible.
I have to read up on the system costs though, that may be ai fair point.
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88... (last page)
> Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany.
That's not true. That report is based on a completely ridiculous paper by the FÖS, the "Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft". Calling the numbers it uses "completely made up" is putting it kindly.
One of the many debunking is here:
https://kernd.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Artikel_atw_D_20...
Summary:
"The disregard for scientific methodology, for basic knowledge of economics and business administration, environmental economics, energy economics, and nuclear technology, the biased selection of sources, even the use of newspaper articles as supposedly scientific sources, and the denial of the positive effects of nuclear energy, which far outweigh its social costs, are unworthy of the FÖS. Either they are a sign of insufficient economic expertise at the institute, as well as a lack of knowledge of scientific methodology, or the FÖS is deliberately misleading readers with the aim of being able to cite the highest possible fictitious costs for nuclear energy on behalf of its NGO clients. Both discredit the study and its client."
The debt that EDF carries is completely normal for a company this size, especially one that does infrastructure. It would be unusual for a company not to use the capital markets to finance such projects. EDF has been highly profitable for decades, recently while being used to subsidize other parts of the economy via ARENH as well as being used to buffer the effects of the energy crisis, not just via ARENH, but through massive expansion of ARENH.
ARENH is not "ending", it is being replaced by a comparable scheme that is structured slightly differently.
EDF was not "nationalized" in 2022. It was always a state company, with the state never holding less than 85%. The period where the state held less than 100% was relatively short, from 2005 to 2022. The state bought out the minority shareholders in order to streamline the planned nuclear expansion.
The "subsidies" for EDF (cheaper loans etc.) amount to around € 2.7 - 3 billion a year. By itself, that's obviously not "minute". However, these sums are dwarfed by the ARENH program and the profits that EDF pays to the state, which turn the subsidies into "negative subsidies" in sum. That is, the state gets more money from EDF than it gives it, by a good amount.
Even if that weren't the case, the sums are dwarfed by the German subsidies for renewable, which are an order of magnitude higher than the gross subsidies in France (and infinitely higher than the net-negative subsidies).
> For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all.
Except financing research and development, guaranteeing loans to reduce default risk and interest rates, capping liabilities to enable insureability at lower rates by guaranteeing to fix damages in case of critical failures with public money, financing and organizing emergency civil protection measures, as well as waste disposal, granting massive tax cuts, doing the diplomatic leg work to import uranium and protecting its transport with the police, all and all summing up public spending on making nuclear energy in germany to 169,4 billion euros according to the scientific service of the Bundestag (Document Number WD 5 - 3000 - 090/21), with the more green leaning FOES calculating 304 billion. And on top of that it is estimated that another 100 billion in public money will be needed to fix up long term waste disposal sites morsleben and asse.
... well except from those few hundred billion euros they barely ever subsidize it at all.
The FÖS "paper" that gets circle-cited everywhere in anti-nuclear advocacy is complete bollocks. This is obvious from even a cursory reading, but many have also done it in detail.
https://kernd.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Artikel_atw_D_20...
i only cited it as a side note for the upper bound. the more conservative estimate of the scientific service of the Bundestag still shows that your claim of zero subsidies is made up and unsubstantiated. Discrediting the radical other position and ignoring the center positions does not make your own radical claims true. I can give another source: "Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945-1975" by historian Prof. Dr. Joachim Radkau. However that one you have to get from a library, it describes in detail how the nuclear industry in germany was build and what role and subsidies the government provided.
Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.
There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
I'd agree with that in the context of an individual or a small local group or something.
For a well-established organization like Greenpeace, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe it's a matter of them collectively having an emotional reaction. They have the resources to look at the evidence, and have indeed almost surely done so; when it comes to explaining their refusal to accept that evidence, ”their jobs depend on rejecting it” is a much simpler explanation IMO than “they are experiencing a collectively-identical ideological quirk that their organizational bureaucracy somehow has yet to iron out”.
e.g. PETA
>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure.
It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.
Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
The more I observe a lot of activists the more I suspect, a lot of organizations and movements are cold war era Soviet psyOps that outlived their handlers.
Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
(E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).
Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented.
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...
The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:
>…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US $70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...
Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.
In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.
If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
>Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid?
I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Germany is merely transitioning the fastest and doing it without the overpriced and risky albatross that is nuclear power.
>shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable
It's unbelievable that the country some people are most furious at is the one that has decarbonized at the fastest rate.
Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
It's bizarre.
>I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades.
Maybe you didn't intend too, but your words certainly implied it:
>>...it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
Since you reference Germany later, the implication above was that Germany did prove you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Which might be true someday in the future, but Germany certainly hasn't decarbonized their grid yet. The one thing that Germany did "prove conclusively" is that thousands of lives were needlessly lost over the last 15 years because of bad policy.
>Germany is merely transitioning the fastest
Germany will certainly not be carbon neutral the fastest. I guess it will beat Poland though.
>Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
You have a point - it is the responsibility of every country to decarbonize. I guess a big issue here is simply money - Poland GDP is much smaller than Germany and they have less available options. Though besides your claim, I've never heard anyone actually lauding Poland's efforts or thinking it was a good thing they are using coal.
>...They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
Like I said, I find that those who actually want to decarbonize the grid, don't particularly care what clean technology is used and different countries will have a different mix of technologies they use. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.
You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or think you are. This comment breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry. I'll tone it down going forward.
These are orchestrated by Russia. They want to destabilise European energy sector and economies and they are sponsoring various organisations to spread such misinformation.
The West is losing information war with Russia - see the downvotes. Sites are infested with Russian bots and useful idiots helping the genocidal regime.
Greenpeace is both halves of the name.
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
"Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes."
Not an expert, but isn't all you basically need to do is running the centrifuges a bit longer?
Breeding plutonium is a different process than enriching uranium, sure, but with enough enriched uran you will have a nuclear bomb.
And a dirty bomb is bad enough and simple to construct as well.
You need more centrifuges, several times more, but not orders of magnitude more.
And you need nuclear reactors to make plutonium. The weapons you can make with plutonium are qualitatively different from the ones you can make with uranium.
Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb.
Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.
If you're going for the enriched uranium route to a bomb, nobody is going to start with used nuclear fuel, because dealing with the highly radioactive spent fuel is such a huge PITA.
If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.
That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.
Not everyone has a U mine or pre-existing bomb industry. The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is "yes", bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a "PITA") if you have a reactor core handy to start with.
> That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.
Oh, interesting! If so, can you provide an example of anyone producing HEU starting from spent fuel?
That's... not the way the burden of proof works here. You don't do non-proliferation analysis by only worrying about it after someone has proliferated. I think if you want to announce that reactors are useless for building bombs you need to provide a cite. Certainly nuclear non-proliferation work by real professionals does include the existence of a domestic nuclear industry.
> That's... not the way the burden of proof works here. You don't do non-proliferation analysis by only worrying about it after someone has proliferated.
Well, let's put it this way. If you want to create HEU you can either start from natural uranium, which is significantly easier to come by and isn't horribly radioactive. Or then you start from spent fuel, which is under IAEA safeguards (for other reasons), is very radioactive and thus very cumbersome, expensive and slow to deal with. Now which is more likely?
Not saying creating HEU from spent fuel is impossible, it's just a stupid way of going about it, and spent fuel already being covered by IAEA safeguards for other reasons so it's probably also going to be easier to detect such a hypothetical clandestine nuclear program.
> I think if you want to announce that reactors are useless for building bombs you need to provide a cite.
If you read my original response I explicitly mentioned that you need a reactor if you want to create a U233 or Pu based bomb. So I have no idea where you get such a notion from.
> Certainly nuclear non-proliferation work by real professionals does include the existence of a domestic nuclear industry.
True, but again not a point I have argued against.
There's a fun game you can play with countries that build nuclear power plants: "guess the existential threat".
In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.
In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.
I've heard and think I've read multiple times that Greenpeace was fueled by Soviet monies to prevent Western energy independence and economic takeoff.
I don't have sources and would appreciate if anyone has anything to offer on this.
I doubt it was for any particular energy policy objective, if they were Soviet funded. The soviets (or whatever name you want to give them now) are masters of finding fracture points in relatively stable western societies and exploiting them to make unstable western societies that are less effective at combating Soviet policy. See: almost the entirety of the modern political discourse.
given how the united states starved them of foreign currency and then introduced economic shock therapy that reduced life expectancy of the population by 10 yrs particularly for men one might say the western imperialists were better at that
This comment is entirely orthogonal to my discussion, to the point that it's confusing.
Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.
Are you considering a world in which nuclear weapons do not exist at all?
I don't know how you are going to disarm the current stable-state of mutually assured destruction.
No but every nuclear power plant requires local military defenses, and every country that expands nuclear power requires this state power even if they don’t have nuclear weapons.
This is true. I have no counterpoint.
[flagged]
Please don't post sneering, unsubstantive comments like this on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I see your point but it's not really that simple in this particular case. Nuclear energy production is clean under assumption:
1. You can operate the facility with a zero critical accident over the whole lifespan of the power plant.
2. You know what to do with a nuclear waste (like keep it safely deeply buried for 10'000 years).
However, point 2) is almost irrelevant now because we already have enough depleted nuclear fuel to deal with it.
1. Only six reactors have had meltdowns, partial meltdowns, serious core damage, or fatalities.
Gen 4 reactors have gravity driven control rods, passive cooling systems, core catchers, safer fuel, and moderators.
If humans were raptured, they couldn't melt down.
2. The entire planets worth of spent nuclear fuel would fit into 15 Olympic swimming pools.
Fast breeder reactors can use almost all of the existing waste and on top of that reduce it's lifespan from 100k+ years to a few hundred.
You'd get more radiation exposure from living in Denver than you would sleeping on a cask in Miami
I'm not arguing about whether we should or shouldn't use nuclear energy. We should.
> 1. Only six reactors have had meltdowns, partial meltdowns, serious core damage, or fatalities.
If we assume that everything above INES[0] level 4 is already serious enough, then there were 11 accidents [1] and around 4484 fatalities (mostly 4000 indirect from Chernobyl but still).
> Gen 4 reactors have gravity driven control rods, passive cooling systems, core catchers, safer fuel, and moderators.
And yet, 100% safety is not achievable. But the risk is probably quite acceptable now.
[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_and_Radi...>
[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...>
Both of these assumptions are true. Obviously these are not trivial problems, and take a lot of work, but they are extremely tractable.
I had the same response. History has shown that the high-priests of government are the least reliable, least consistent of all we’ve allowed to be the arbiters of truth.
Multiple US states have ruled that natural gas is green energy. I'm sure that's just as obvious and stating a fact.
The white house in all but name, because calling it green is woke, declared that coal is green energy.
Glad that the Russian funded Greens were finally defeated. In the end, the green party may have doomed us with this 50 year delay.
I think the Russians probably realized, "We don't even need to fund them - they will glue themselves to the roads for free."