I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Are you serious when putting France in this list? Nuclear is such a cash cow here that EDF manage to make profits even while being forced by the regulator to sell a big fraction of its nuclear capacity below the operating cost and buying it back to them at market price! (We're talking about a multi-billon subsidies scheme, look for ARENH).
And that is despite (rather legitimate IMHO) regulatory constraints that have no equivalent in any other industry.
France is in that list (hello i'm from france too) because construction is heavily subsidized and decommission is overall not happening, not planned, and more or less not even approaching the planning stage. The few decommissions that are taking place are decades late and billions over budget.
It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have. Does that mean it's a bad investment? Not necessarily. If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth. Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.
And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive. TBH, i haven't followed developments in the last years in regards to french neocolonialism collapsing in sub-saharan africa, but here's a small article from 6 years ago: https://infokiosques.net/IMG/pdf/uranium_de_la_francafrique-...
> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.
Why would an ecologist have to be against more energy consumption? For climate change, what matters is energy from the sun hitting the earth vs. energy being radiated back into space. More energy consumption also doesn't necessarily cause more pollution of any kind.
You're redefining environmentalism with a very narrow and technical view. Goodhart's law does not only apply to computer science, but to ecology as well, and says that CO2 emission alone is not a good metrics.
I'm not saying energy consumption overall is a perfect metrics, but the degrowth movement is a philosophy / science that's not aligned on a specific metrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
I think to most people, environmentalism is mostly about climate change and pollution. You're free to widen the definition of course, but note that even that Wikipedia article basically calls it a fringe ideology (in different words).
Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption as opposed to specific energy sources or downstream effects like pollution, which is avoidable?
The degrowth movement is very fringe indeed. But its ideas are not, some have even been assimilated by the green-washing apparatus such as "reduce, reuse, recycle". I agree with your definition because it includes pollution, which is deciding factor for reducing production overall.
> Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption
The question is good but not the framing. How is pollution avoidable? Energy consumption is not the problem but it's the means by which the auxiliary problems arise, and therefore a correct proxy to measure them. One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.
It's like in software development when people consider CPU/RAM is unlimited and don't provide any optimization. That may be fine in hypothetical settings, but in the real world resources are finite. (the analogy stops because using too much CPU/RAM does not "pollute" the rest of the machine and create memory corruption or whatever)
> One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.
Yes, but my entire point is not only is this solvable without throwing the energy baby out with the dubious quality goods bathwater, it's easier to solve with more and cheaper energy.
If the consumption of abundant energy has negative externalities, then those need to be appropriately priced. At that point, buying pollution causing junk will become more expensive than buying clean junk, but we'll still be able to afford the clean junk we want.
We are using that energy no matter how produced to terraform the planet into a less hospitable one for nearly everyone. Some get hung up on the resource extraction and associated pollution for renewable energy. But ultimately you can't fix "wanting the wrong thing" with technology. Our way of life and expected conveniences are not sustainable, they can't last 100k years, probably not even 100.
The issue is not only climate change. More consumption means more consumer goods, more resource extraction, more transport, more waste
We have huge environmental problems ranging from ecosystem simplification, microplastics, etc. The answer is not to keep consuming as we are. We really have to stop the neoliberal system that's based on ever increasing growth and externalisation of environmental impact.
There is a possible future where none of these things are a problem and yet energy consumption is greater than it is currently. I think it's actually the most likely future.
The ship may have sailed on climate change, but plastic pollution is not solved by consuming less, it's solved by consuming differently.
I get being critical of mindless consumerism, but degrowth doesn't seem to be about "order less junk on amazon/temu", but fundamentally reducing economic activity and energy consumption, which is civilisational suicide.
Well that deserves some actual argument. This abundant future has been promised to us for generations and has served as a justification for precisely fucking everything up in the name of the brighter future. Yet now we have, to my knowledge, no indicator of things getting better, but all indicators going way worse than we thought.
> I get being critical of mindless consumerism, but degrowth doesn't seem to be about "order less junk on amazon/temu"
Yes it is. It's about mindful production of useful products and services. Which is very much the same as reducing economic activity and energy consumption.
> Yet now we have, to my knowledge, no indicator of things getting better, but all indicators going way worse than we thought.
Several forms of pollution are now much better than they were decades ago. Chlorofluorocarbons, lead in gasoline, rivers and lakes around the world, catalytic converters, slash-and-burn agriculture etc. etc.
Electricity generation is also headed the right way.
The solution is usually better technology and political action, not abstinence. We still have fridges, just not with CFCs.
I'm not saying we'll fix climate change in time, by the way. That is uncertain. But if we do fix it, it won't be with degrowth.
> Yes it is. It's about mindful production of useful products and services. Which is very much the same as reducing economic activity and energy consumption.
Why do you think that wanting less cheap temu junk means overall economic activity will decrease? Why can't that economic activity be redirected to a sustainable future with abundance instead? I still want to eat food grown elsewhere in the world, just not sold in plastic packaging and transported with fossil fuels.
> We really have to stop the neoliberal system that's based on ever increasing growth and externalisation of environmental impact.
Like, I too would like a pony, but we gotta live in the real world. Ultimately we need more energy of basically every carbon neutral form.
I agree that the ideology of growth at all costs is problematic, but it's how our society is structured right now, so we need to fix our current energy problems rather than bet on transforming society.
To be fair, the declining fertility rate will probably solve a bunch of environmental issues over the next few generations.
> I agree that the ideology of growth at all costs is problematic, but it's how our society is structured right now
With this mindset, nothing ever changes. No social problem was ever solved without looking at it from a social/political perspective. If you agree that growth ideology is problematic, then that's what you need to dismantle.
> To be fair, the declining fertility rate will probably solve a bunch of environmental issues
I think this is just wrong. The problem is the lifestyle: the throwaway culture and abundant consumption of throwaway goods. We could be just as many billions living OK in our environment, but you could have just 100 million average middle-class westerners continuing to fuck up nature (just slightly slower).
> With this mindset, nothing ever changes. No social problem was ever solved without looking at it from a social/political perspective. If you agree that growth ideology is problematic, then that's what you need to dismantle.
OK great, what's the plan then?
Where do we start?
What small problem can we fix to make this better?
If you don't know the answers to the above, then this discussion is entirely pointless, and I would remind you that although I would love a pony, that doesn't mean that I'll get one.
Any "solution" that relies on changing the entirety of how society is structured isn't going to work, absent an incredibly good plan (against which one can make incremental progress).
To ask probably the most important question, in a world of zero growth, how do we pay back all the consumer debt we owe? Thinking specifically of mortgages here, as they're the largest amount of debt held by the populace.
Well it's just American society that really has this so deeply ingrained that it's deemed irreversible.
Europe only turned neoliberal a few decades ago and only some countries are deeply into it like the Netherlands. Before the 90s we were much more socialist and can go back that way.
China also isn't neoliberal. They're good at playing the capitalist game but they're not afraid to pull the handbrake where needed and they are going good things for green energy.
> Europe only turned neoliberal a few decades ago and only some countries are deeply into it like the Netherlands. Before the 90s we were much more socialist and can go back that way.
We all have the same financial system. Like, if you have interest bearing loans, then some amount of growth is required to pay back the principal + interest.
I think calling it neo-liberal isn't really correct, it's fundamental to the economic system we call capitalism.
Neoliberalism is strongly tied to capitalism, but it is more than that, it's a strong belief that capitalism is the only possible way and that it works best with no restrictions on it.
What we need to do is restrict capitalism. Some capitalism is ok, I'm not advocating for a pure communist system, but there needs to be a balance between both. Since the fall of the soviet union, the balance has swayed wayy too much in favour of the unlimited capitalism option, whatever you call it.
And no the system isn't really the same, or at least it wasn't. Interest-free loans were pretty common and when I studied the government even provided them as student loans. Unfortunately they don't anymore.
> What we need to do is restrict capitalism. Some capitalism is ok, I'm not advocating for a pure communist system, but there needs to be a balance between both. Since the fall of the soviet union, the balance has swayed wayy too much in favour of the unlimited capitalism option, whatever you call it.
I don't disagree with this at all, I'm all for red in tooth and claw capitalism, once every person has food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education.
> And no the system isn't really the same, or at least it wasn't. Interest-free loans were pretty common and when I studied the government even provided them as student loans. Unfortunately they don't anymore.
I think that many people are missing my point here. Fundamentally, "capitalism" is structured (today, at least) around people with money giving it to others and getting the interest payments as the reward.
In a world with zero growth, where does the money for interest come from? (hopefully this is also a world with zero inflation, or we're all in trouble).
Again, philosophically I agree with a lot of this (our society is very rich, and yet millions of people starve and die from avoidable illness), but my core question is how we get there.
Preferably in small, incremental steps as that's the safest way for us in general.
No. Temperature increases until balance is restored. Temperature is currently increasing, which means the planet is not radiating away as much energy as it is receiving.
I think we're talking at cross purposes. There's a clear equilibrium state which is both higher temperature and notably bad whilst completely balanced from an energy perspective. Climate change is not bad because the temperature is increasing, its bad because it has increased and is going to increase more. The fact we still have baked in warming is additional bad.
Yes, at equilibrium the temperature stays constant. I'm talking about the average temperature of the entire Earth over time. We are currently not at equilibrium because we're pumping unfathomable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, so the average temperature is skyrocketing. If we were to stop emitting CO2 today then in a few decades or so the planet would reach equilibrium and the temperature would stay constant at that new normal.
This is of course simplified, but roughly correct as I understand it.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. This is the first law of thermodynamics and as far as I'm aware nobody has managed to refute it.
Finding better ways of controlling where energy comes from and where it goes, and doing it in a controlled way that has minimal impact on the surroundings is good (from an ecological perspective)- it is the most pure good an ecologist can hope for.
"Reduce, Reuse" has its place, but that place has to be in-line with also finding a way to balance our human needs with the environment.
I don't think reducing our energy consumption is realistic, many things that have a long-tail reduction in energy consumption have a huge up front cost.
For example, electric vehicles are a bitch to manufacture but are less impactful for the environment over a long term; and this is amplified if the energy that is produced to be used in the electric car has a minimal impact on the environment (Solar, Wind, Nuclear) - but nuclear plants have a huge up-front energy cost too.
I'll be forthcoming and say that I have a concern that over-reliance on solar and wind may have negative consequences on the environment too- harvesting wind energy from the atmosphere that animals may rely on, will likely impact the environment in ways we haven't thought about. However it's significantly better than coal and gas, and that's the marker we're going for: not perfect.. better.
Everything is bad at a certain scale after all, we just haven't hit that scale with our renewables- and because of this, on a baseline, I agree with you.
For France investment in nuclear is a big benefit, as you can see in the amounts of coal and gas burned to generate electricity in neighboring Germany in the last two decades, and still burning today.
Try to present the idea of "degrowth", to China, India, Indonesia, Brazil. They all on path of growth.
I agree that France, should be paying more to Françafrique countries, but raw uranium cost is only 50% of the finished nuclear reactor fuel. And nuclear reactor fuel is 5% to 10% of the operating costs of a nuclear power plant.
Heinrich Böll Foundation and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, both funded from Germany, published many documents criticizing uranium mining in Africa:
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Addressing uranium-producing countries in particular, whom it seems to want to stop or at least reduce their activities, the report also focuses on the health hazards associated with extraction and the neo-colonial aspect of exploiting the resource. Particularly virulent regarding France, which is the subject of three articles and cited in several others, the Atlas targets head-on Paris's relationship with one of its main suppliers: Niger.
The Atlas likens the uranium mining model to a vestige of Françafrique and accuses the French government of enriching itself on Niger's behalf while orchestrating an ecological, human and social catastrophe in the country. The French company Orano - formerly Areva - which mines and produces uranium in Niger for French power plants, is a particular target."
Thank you for this post. It is informative and nuanced about a complex topic.
> Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.
I was born and raised in several countries that are a part of the NATO alliance. Without getting too preachy here, I want to say that I deeply value the nuclear deterrence that France proudly and effectively provides the alliance. Plus, personal here, I like the "je ne sais quoi/don't fuck with me" attitude of the French forces. I welcome the wildcard that keeps our adversaries on their toes!
> If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.
I am not French, nor deeply familiar with the arrangements here, but what happens if the uranium price is 2x or 5x? I am guessing it has little impact on the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant. Also: There are lots of alternatives. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Namibia control nearly three-quarters of the entire global uranium market. To be clear: I am not doubting that the existing purchasing agreements between France and its former African colonies are fair.
History behind the French decision to build it's own independent nuclear deterrence was interesting:
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De Gaulle asked asked Kennedy: “Would you trade New York for Paris?” His point was that if he wasn't convinced, would the Russians be? So it's not just about numbers of warheads. It's about the defensive posture overall.
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De Gaulle, like most of the French political elite at that time, also got a wake up call during the Suez Crisis: if you don't have the bomb you can't intervene to protect your own interests anywhere in the world, because one of the great power could block you without shooting a single bullet and the other won't come to your rescue.
It's not subsidized, quite the opposite EDF is subsidizing its competitors through ARENH.
> It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have.
It's not. It only appears expensive compared to other decarbonized means because the calculations never take the opportunity cost of intermittency. Wind and solar are only cheap because you never count the price of the back-up plan in the cost (and also because magnets and solar panels are bought for cheap from China). If you count the price of running an actual grid all year long then it suddenly becomes the most efficient option after hydro and that's why France has among the cheapest electricity in Europe. The German Energiewende is the canonical example of what the theoretical calculations leave out. It should have been cheaper and less carbon-heavy in the end, but instead hundreds of billions have been spent to get only expensive and high-emission electricity in the end.
>And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.
> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.
What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.
No, it's not a suicide pact. If it was just a suicide pact, they'd get it over with and leave the rest of us alone. It's a homicide pact, a genocide pact for the entire human race.
And we have tried it too! There have been energy shocks before, where the price of energy spikes and causes corresponding drop in energy consumption, leading to degrowth.
They only talk about the benefits in the abstract, but not what an energy shock actually means. It means people can’t afford to pay for heating and freeze to death. It means factories close down because the inputs are too expensive. Construction stops because the raw materials (steel, concrete) are too expensive to manufacture, and people don’t have money to pay for new homes.
We have done all these things just in the last 4 years! So why should we do more of it instead of just building more renewable energy?
degrowth is compatible with increasing standards of living for 99.5% of people all the while being able to then actually preserve these standards up in the future.
our current model produces growth without proportionally increasing standards of living, and accepts that livelihoods will collapse all over Europe and Africa as it becomes increasingly hostile to agriculture due to climate change.
think of the viability of degrowth as a policy within the prisoners dilemma of global capitalism as you want, but please come up with a more serious critique that doesn't equally indigte the staus quo
It's interesting that they're feeling emboldened enough these days to not hide who they are and what their agenda is. That general movement had a slow motion replay of the Bolshevik vs. Menshevik action, where the moderates (like Patrick Moore, Michael Shellenberger) got purged, and after quite a long time of having an established, comfortable monoculture now they're starting to no longer feel the need to create fake narratives around why nuclear or mines are bad, now they're just straight up saying they want civilization to collapse. (Which is what would happen, there's never going to be any such thing as an orderly impoverishment)
Maybe it's for the best. If they're being honest maybe it'll clarify debates and positions.
Yeah I’m really confused why France is in that list (also, less so, but China - they have come a great way, further than almost any western country save France, I’m just unsure I’d the metric here applies evenly).
I’ll stand by the only reason nuclear power is unprofitable (in most cases) is because we decide it is unprofitable.
I'd consider power generation (solar, wind, nuclear) as strategically important and accept that it may need subsidies long term. If this allows the country a degree of independence from external shocks, it would be worth it.
Agreed, I've always been pro-nuclear (although the arguments have been getting weaker as solar+batteries keeps getting cheaper). I just want the vocal advocates to be honest about the cost and timelines instead of blaming everything on environmentalists as a way to side step the argument.
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating, even mundane things like business offices real estate or highways wouldn't be economically viable if they had to provision for decommissioning.
You could clean up the high activity thing and let the buildings and their asbestos in place and nuclear decommissioning would still be more environmentally friendly than every other heavy industry.
> Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,
That is factually wrong. Coal mining has to re-naturalize the areas used for mining after the coal was removed.
And most industries are supposed to not just leave toxic waste and instead have a plan what to do with toxic waste products these days. And no, an empty building cannot be compared to radioactive waste.
I have a family member working for a Canadian company that steps in after a mine has stopped operating. It cleans up and remediates the surrounding land and water to minimize environmental impact. This is usually a thorough process that takes a long time. Many months or years.
> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean
Does not mean it's a made up issue. That's classic whataboutism. Ecologists are not concerned just about nuclear activity, but precisely about the overall industry destroying our entire environment, and for whose profit?!
Funny how all that concern they have never manifests for wind and solar power.
Nor do I see a great deal of concern for manufacturing, as long as it is done somewhere else. If it done here: it is super dirty and dangerous, jobs no one wants. Elsewhere: what great opportunity for them to rise out from poverty. The fact that the environmental regulations are nonexistent, either never brought up or dismissed because we can't regulate another government.
You seem out of touch with actual ecologists. Just because some ecologist discourse you don't hear on CNN doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Of course ecologists are very concerned for solar and wind power, or rather for their industrial counterparts! I know quite a few activists who are very concerned with non-recyclable solar panels and wind plants, but build solar "boilers" and tiny wind generators from spare parts and renewable materials (such as wood).
Ecologists are also concerned with outsourced manufacturing. Not every ecologist is a caricature of a Silicon Valley engineer who says we'll save the planet by buying Tesla cars and building solar plants. In fact, 100% of the ecologists i know (who are actually involved in activism) will say that those people are not ecologists but merely green-washing.
The only reason nuclear power facilities get decommissioned is because anti-nuclear politicians panic and force them to shut down. Sure, there's an ongoing cost of maintenance and replacement, but once you have a nuclear power facility, there's no reason for it not to continue generating power indefinitely. We're not going to stop needing or wanting more energy.
Re debt: check how much debt the SV giants have. Debt isn't a bad thing per se, it's just how you finance investments.
Its has always been state owned, and it's much better for critical infrastructures to be so anyway.
> suffering from aged power plants having issues?
There was one (1) instance if of a serious common issue between multiple plants found in 2022, unrelated to the age of the NPPs (the most recent were affected as well) which affected the exploitation for about a year. It was bad for a moment, but not that bad, it's like saying the automobile industry can't be profitable because the Tataka airbag problem happened. (And the corrosion issue was much less severe than the Tataka one!).
Because it isn't. EDF devt to EBITDA ratio is as healthy or healthier vs german eon/rwe. Debt is ok to have for big corpos, unless you think Apple is a failed company.
Over half of french fleet was already upgraded to have safety similar to gen3 reactors through great carenage.
France also set record production this summer vs prev ones
> When EDF signed a fixed cost contract to deliver nuclear in England the CFO resigned.
Yes, because they had to borrow at a 7 or 9% long term rate on the market (in the era of ZIRP!), which makes financing costs 70-80% of the overall final electricity price.
Of course that kind of deal was insane, but it says more about financing long term projects on the market than it says anything about nuclear as a technology.
> The "profits" are from running decades old reactors that were never transparently costed.
EDF gave more in subsidies to its competitors through ARENH over the past 15 years than what the entire fleet costed.
French nuclear has been an indisputable financial success over the past 40 years (while giving France one of the cheapest electricity in Europe). Saying otherwise is just ignoring reality entirely.
> Of course that kind of deal was insane, but it says more about financing long term projects on the market than it says anything about nuclear as a technology.
Well sure, but the alternatives aren't really affected by this, because they don't have to be planned and financed these such long time frames. So this is a problem for nuclear. The core technology seldomly is the deciding factor for these things.
I saw a DW Planet A documentary about decommissioning a nuclear plant in Germany. They walked around the plant in some safety gear, but with their faces fully exposed and no breathing apparatus. They said the project was decades behind schedule and it was costing ten times as much as expected. The decommissioning process involved spraying water and gels on slightly radioactive materials from the factory to reduce their radioactivity to effectively zero. The process created much more radioactive material than there was in the first place, which then itself had to be dealt with. The cost of decommissioning is determined by the lobbyists for the companies that do the decommissioning. Voters have no idea what decommissioning should cost, and no one will ever question going over budget. It's a great business.
The context is that all german reactors that aren't experimental or soviet are decommissioned on operators money without state financing.
The example of isar is particularly interesting - isar 2 is one of the latest that started decommissioning but is in much more advanced state vs others. Each operator does it as they wish. If you wait a bit more, rad levels drop so it's easier to decommission with less specialized equipment
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EDF Group assumes sole financial responsibility for decommissioning power plants. The cost is factored into operation from the start and included in the price of the kilowatt-hour. It is re-assessed every three years to take account of changing technical and financial assumptions, as required by law.
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The 100% state owned EDF group take sole responsibility for the finances? What a relief for the taxpayers of France...
But at least the cost is factored in from the start. Those costs often double during construction but at least we know the decommissioning costs are factored into the fake numbers they use to get approval to start builds.
You've quoted strike prices at the time, adjusted for inflation Hinckley is the most expensive of the three you quote. And it lasts nearly twice as long.
In fact this nuclear plant was the first use of CfD.
It's a great scheme because it (in theory) prevents cost blowouts being added to energy prices. Good incentives to get things built quickly and cheaply.
The actual price for Hinclkey is roughly a third higher than the CfD and that extra cost should be borne by the French taxpayers via EDF.
In reality they shifted some costs onto the next nuclear plant instead, working around the CfD and foisting the excess costs back onto the British tax/billpayer.
Obviously they refused to use CfD for the next UK nuclear plant because unlike wind power, they have no faith in it being completed anywhere near on budget. And if they bid the real cost it wouldn't get built in the first place.
So now UK taxpayers are paying in advance for a decade to get new nuclear built with no cap on cost.
Technically I think the Hinkley prices are what we'd call £2012 [if we could easily write a subscript here I would use that for 2012] that is, they are prices in the Pound Sterling as it was at some fixed point in the year 2012 and so when paid in the CfD contract they'd be adjusted for inflation.
All the early CfD prices were in £2012, whereas those newer CfDs have strike prices in £2024 which is about 40% more money in real terms. You can see this notation in the linked Wiki page.
So, if we adjust all the prices to £2024 that price for Hinkley is about £130 per MWh whereas Solar farms are £75, onshore Wind is £92, off-shore Wind is £113
Except, that's not really what's going on either because those AR8 prices are what's called "Administrative Strike Prices". AR8 like all the other allocation rounds is a reverse auction whose results we won't know for months, and those are the start prices in the auction, if you want to win and you're not the only bidder you will need to come lower. Maybe your competitor says they can do solar for £72, but you stared at your loan sheet and projected sunlight over the next decade and dared to say £71.50, you win that contract. But the strike price is now £71.50 not £75 per MWh. Your competitor might still build their solar farm, but at market prices not the guaranteed £71.50 per MWh you've contracted for. Maybe they get lucky - this summer the CfD "subsidy" for Solar farms paid us back many millions of pounds, because electricity prices were high and the subsidy is effectively a fixed price. Of course this doesn't cancel the hundreds of millions we spend subsidising Drax, but that's a completely different discussion.
Edited to add: Just like a conventional auction there may be no bidders at the start price. Unlike some low stakes auctions you might have seen in person or on TV they don't offer again with a better price, the auction just fails. This happened for offshore wind in AR5 a few years back, the government wanted to pay no more than £44 per MWh in £2012 for offshore wind energy -- cheaper than solar, so the firms who build wind farms looked at their costs and said "No thanks" and there were zero bids that round, and a subsequent government increased the ASP for AR6 wind and got bids at much more realistic prices.
technically speaking they don't have to be decomissioned and when they absolutely have to be I believe at that point we will have fusion which is only 10 years away.
That was infact the joke, but surely by the time this would need to be decomissioned we would have fusion power right? Some reactors we operate today are older than the oldest people on the planet!
I remember reading about coal-fired power plants specifically in Poland, which exceed the radioactivity levels for nuclear plants. This because the burnt-off coal contains small amounts of radioactive elements, which form particles and drop off near the flue.
But of course there are no norms for max radioactivity levels at a coal power plant site.
Coal plants spread radioactivity because it concentrates all the radioactive elements naturally found in the coal into ash, much of which then gets released into the air, deposited on surfaces and breathed in, which is extremely harmful.
But if decommissioned properly, most of the ash inside the building can be collected and mixed into soil and bricks at a safe concentration not far above background radiation level.
In a nuclear power plant, there is no release of radioactive materials, but it’s possible for parts of the structure to absorb radiation and become radioactive itself, and that’s much harder to deal with.
Steel is not vitrified, only high level nuclear waste - spend nuclear fuel with highly radioactive fission products.
Steel is taken apart and measured, non-activated steel can be melted down and recycled. Activated steel has to go into storage, either low level nuclear or medium level nuclear waste.
The biggest concern for steel is cobalt. During manufacturing steel with very low cobalt content is usually used for nuclear applications, but there is still small amount of cobalt.
In reactor, under neutron radiation, stable cobalt-59 changes to cobalt-60, strong gamma ray emitter with a half-life of 5 years. So neutron activated steel has to storage for at least few decades.
When done not properly, this is a health hazard.
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Circa 1983, construction was finished of 1700 apartments in Taiwan which were built with steel contaminated with cobalt-60. About 10,000 people occupied these buildings during a 9–20 year period. On average, these people unknowingly received a radiation dose of 0.4 Sv. Some studies have found that this large group did not suffer a higher incidence of cancer mortality, as the linear no-threshold model would predict, but suffered a lower cancer mortality than the general Taiwan public. These observations support the radiation hormesis model, however other studies have found health impacts that confound the results.
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The four low-level waste facilities in the U.S. are Barnwell, South Carolina; Richland, Washington; Clive, Utah; and as of June 2013, Andrews County, Texas.
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Have a look at this nuclear plant in Northern Germany that is in the process of being decomissioned since 1995. It's still not finished, suspected end date is now in the 2040s and is now projected to cost about 10B €. For a single plant.
Surely that's not because the people in power - the same people who have pushed trhough the decommissioning of these still functioning power plants - are want them to be expensive to decomission because it suits their agenda. Decomissioning costs can always be however high you want them to be but that doesn't mean that they have to be. Worst case you can just encase the whole thing in concrete until radiation levels naturally drop.
Did you honestly just invent a conspiracy about some unnamed people with a hidden agenda of making nuclear look expensive by paying 10B euros for decommissioning a working plant?
Just a suggestion, but alternatively you could also accept that in reality, decomissioning actually is expensive.
It’s not really that much of a stretch to think this is exactly what is going on.
One state in Australia, Victoria, recently disappeared $15 billion of public funds to criminal organisations under the guise of funding a big infrastructure project.
Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. No one knows how much money disappeared, it could be up to $30 billion.
Labor-Green governments do this everywhere.
It’s entirely reasonable to suspect something similar is going on in Germany around their nuclear decommissioning.
Yes, a lot of that is just waiting for the active parts to get less 'hot' though. But yes it's incredibly expensive and it's only going to get more so as we start caring more about pollution and proliferation.
Why people spread such bullshit statements? Take Germany which enacted EARLY phaseout, yet all it's reactors are decommissioned on operator money except experimental and soviet units
Just declare that LNT is wrong and treat materials as non radioactive if they are less than half the radiation level associated with cancer. For the rest you can try and reuse them in new reactors if possible or store it in the same place as other nuclear waste.
We've got the technology to drill deep bore holes, kilometers below where water will move on any time relevant to human existence, where we could stick what small amounts of dangerous material is left.
Encapsulating the waste and burying it somewhere on an abyssal plain in the deep ocean should also be a pretty low-risk approach, the IAEA has looked into variations of that.
Like someone else said, I think it's all expensive because some people want it to be.
Only true since 2023/2024, before EDF was nationalized by the Gov. because of the massiv debt and hefty losses, they kicked all shareholders and delisted the company then.
Sweden has been phasing out nuclear for 40 years, after a referendum where the people had the choice of "No nuclear!", "No nuclear", and "No nuclear". There was no "yes".
It's been phasing out nuclear since then.
Nowadays the Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are the only ones against nuclear power, but thanks to the left block winning the recent election, they may push that one issue enough that they get to continue the destruction of our planet.
Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are against nuclear because: ‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons. They conflate civilian and military use of nuclear energy
Sweden is currently using almost none natural gas for electricity production. How could the replace the current 25% of nuclear electricity? wind+natural gas? New hydro dams?
> [the two parties] conflate civilian and military use of nuclear energy
I would never associate these two parties with competence or intelligence, and there
certainly are people who think that a power plant is basically a bomb.
But no, their rhetoric against nuclear power today is at least ostensibly environmental. Well, as it's becoming clearer and clearer to everyone that environmentally it's at the very least the least bad option, they are shifting into trying to make it about economics. Of course completely ignoring that they want to price in (like in this thread) insurance with nuclear, but don't want to price in environmental damage of the alternatives.
How much does nuclear power cost? Well, it was literally illegal in Sweden to run those calculations until 2006. Could criminalizing thought for decades maybe drive up the costs, once the law is repealed?
> New hydro dams?
Unlikely. It's already built out where feasible and economical. And besides, the Greens would block new hydro at scale because of their environmental impact.
> How could the replace the current 25% of nuclear electricity?
Most common argument I see is "we'll just import it", which is just greenwashing since that comes from fossil fuels.
> ‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons.
I don't see the contradiction. USSR took 10% of Finland in living memory, hell that was just single digit years before Sweden started looking into becoming a nuclear state. The Baltics were under USSR control too, and during the cold war they (USSR) seized Swedish ships in international waters and killed and otherwise "disappeared" the crew.
I find the article you linked complete garbage. It's viewing 1940s defence choices through a 2020s post-nonproliferation treaties and post MAD game theory lens.
But even if we do that, would it be un-peaceful to have deterrence? Sweden preemptively surrendered to Germany in WW2 (a bit of hyperbole, and doesn't account for secret allies collaboration), rather than have the country destroyed. Having a nuclear deterrence would mean not having to surrender again, when the Russian comes.
Hopefully NATO membership has the deterrence without the drawback. But of course NATO wouldn't be NATO without its nuclear members. And with the US becoming unreliable, Sweden's defence is still backed by the nuclear agreement with France. So own nukes or not, at least by treaty Sweden still has nuclear weapons as deterrence. Is it really vital to discuss the operational control? If that's the sticking point, then fair enough. I'm not saying it's NOT a difference.
A better critique of Sweden is its relatively huge arms exports. But that too is not black and white. Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war).
It's a strange affair when swedish leftists are the economically responsible parties and the right wing wants to use government subsidies to prop up an industry which is not economically viable compared to all the other electricity generating methods are cheaper and easier to implement.
I know HN comments should be more constructive than that, but your comment is setting all these trumpesque fires in the form of lies, that no constructive debate or rebuttal would be useful. You would not be convinced, and anybody reading the back and forth would be under the misapprehension that "the truth is probably somewhere in between".
I know there was a bit of liberty with the phrasing that the leftish parties in Sweden aren’t always considered the strongest on the economic arena. But that was not my main point, and sorry if I stepped on your toes. My main point is that all science and facts point to the truth that NPP are not economically viable without significant government subsidies. No matter how much I (and perhaps you?) want NP to succeed, it should do it on a level playing field compared to the other energy industries it should never do that with unfair advantages not offered to others.
While we may not disagree on the base facts, I don't think that's a fair characterization. First of all, you say that there have never been solar panel subsidies, which of course there have been. So the advantage has most certainly been offered to non-nuclear.
By law, opting in to "green energy" on your personal electricity means to have a definition that excludes nuclear, so that's government steering of the market towards non-nuclear green energy. Certainly qualifies as incentive, if not downright subsidy by manipulating market forces. (I even contacted my energy provider saying I would gladly check a box if it included nuclear. They said it was out of their control)
Of course on oil lots more has been spent fighting over the resources. For a given country the cost of acquiring the resources may be more political than directly monetary. But I don't think you're defending fossil fuels, so I probably don't need to argue that being controlled by Russia has a cost.
Now, if nuclear is not economical as base load, I'd like to see a comparison with solar & wind for base load compared to nuclear. And it should be a calculation for the (very nearly) 100% use case. So comparing like for like. The cost of wind&solar is extremely different if aiming for 90 or 99.999%.
Some Greens say "shrug, what's so bad about power outages?" (yeah, good luck with that). Some say "we'll just import in the greater European grid!" (greenwashing).
> not economically viable without significant government subsidies.
Nor is gasoline or road maintenance. I'd like to price in those externalities first.
Oh, and as for the left-ish opinion in this issue. IIRC only Greens and Communists were actually against nuclear. The big one (Social Democrats) manifesto could be summarized as "Well, we're pro-nuclear, but we know we have to give that up because we need Greens & Communists to be able to form a government". It was very transparent.
The only money thrown around in French nuclear is handed out to EDF's competitors by EDF themselves as a compromise with the European Commission who didn't want EDF to reap to massive profits of the nuclear plants for itself (EDF has handed out around €100B over the past 15 years and still made a profit pretty much every year, despite massive forced investments in reaction to Fukushima).
> I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions
Gaullism and strong governments are not in fashion these days. The main thing that made Messmer plan work was Messmer himself, a strong leader with the power to tell everyone to stfu and do it.
Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
> Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
> Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.
I agree coal power plants are much worse. As an aside, I’m not convinced that’s the bar we need to clear. I would think we need to be safer than solar power, since that’s the source that’s actually growing rapidly. If we’re going to add new power generation, I think it’s probably a trade off between nuclear and solar.
And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.
Wow, that's really fascinating to me! I am a bit cautious that the distribution of outcomes from nuclear may be skewed, so we've maybe avoided some of the "black swan" events so far simply because we don't have much nuclear deployed. I think the common example is "Picking up pennies in front of a steamroller"; you'll be totally fine until you totally aren't. However, I expect we'd also learn more and improve the safety as we deploy more, so I (somewhat naively) feel this is a good argument in favor of more nuclear.
In Fukushima zero people died from radiation. If we regulated everything to a similar point (cars, planes, fossils), you'll start living like a monk. Fossils aren't just worse but orders of magnitude worse
They are in valleys and I think the risk assessment was heavily influenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard which has been toned down quite a bit since... But IRSN (now ASNR) studies all kind of risks seriously...
You're right but this seems difficult to estimate. From the wikipedia* article:
> ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
> ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (which also caused meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident) caused 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, 2,553 missing.
So nuclear radiation impact from Fukushima is minimal in the total loss of life.
Per UN no deaths are recorded nor will be recorded due to the low dose.
Evacuation wasn't necessary, govt enforced it deliberately. If ppl weren't evacuated in such a rush(or not at all), they would have been fine
The low dosage claim is shady considering we have parts of the world with higher natural background radiation and in some cases cancer rates are lower there
Still, even by wildest estimations nr is fairly low
Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).
To be fair, people will say many of those deaths are due to the evacuation rather than the meltdown, and they’ll say the evacuation was overblown — too _much_ regulation. However, I think you’re right that these can still be attributed to the meltdown, since the evacuations were undertaken to avoid the difficult-to-predict impact of the meltdown. In hindsight, we can see the evacuation wasn’t needed. But the reactor meltdown made an already-bad situation even more brittle, and in a disaster scenario i think we naturally prefer the evacuation, as opposed to the (low) chance of total destruction.
The deaths are due to the evacuation, and the evacuation is due to some combination of [poor judgement] and [reactor meltdown]. If we attribute all the deaths to poor judgement, then we’re asserting we could confidently predict a reactor meltdown would pose no danger. Some people might claim that, but it seems implausible to me.
That myth keeps persisting. In reality per $ of the project wind farms face significantly higher regulatory costs in many countries. Nuclear power operators also managed to get regulations on the turbines dropped compared to coal plants (in Germany IIRC).
In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.
The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it or tightening targets far beyond any useful range. Also, arguably the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have, an example of paranoia as opposed to effective regulation.
(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).
Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
Lot of health impact of Chernobyl disaster was also because of Soviet's obsession with saving face.
The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.
Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.
> the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have
This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".
People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.
The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.
To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.
But now you're using older designs to argue against not building newer ones.
The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't actually a nuclear reaction. It was that the reactor got hot enough to separate the cooling water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you can get a hydrogen explosion.
If the primary coolant is water. And the reactor is designed in such a way that that can happen.
Meanwhile you can use other primary coolants or other designs where that isn't a thing. There are designs that don't explode even if you lose power entirely. At which point the cost of an evacuation that the design doesn't require you to do, isn't a cost that you have to pay.
There is a fair argument for the uncertainty at the time affecting that call. And I think we can agree that avoiding what happened at Fukushima is a core part of nuclear safety. My main point, though, is that people often think that nuclear safety people spend most of their time and effort on 'make the reactor not blow up', but actually the regulations and practical reality is that they spend most of that instead on avoiding trivial amounts of radiation exposure to their workers and the public, perhaps to the expense of effort that could be spent on 'not having a massive disaster' or (assuming you somehow fix the other bits of nuclear that are really expensive) 'not having a climate that's too hot'. I'm not arguing that there should be no regulation, I'm arguing that even from the point of view of safety outcomes more regulation is not intrinsically better.
The problem is that if we don't find an exit, climate change will come with its old friend, war. War for the resources. And we didn't even globally agree in a minimum ruleset.
We are being promised about how much safe will be this new plants in a normal context while we do that, this context is vanishing. New possibilities opened and now we must deal with the possibility of a nuclear plant versus 1000 drones that want to destroy it, or that will keep coming for months until destroying it. Each energy plant is now a target, guided by AI.
Too much people in power are plutonium grade unstable, and is just a question of time that at some moment new "smart robot soldiers" will be asked to do unstable things also
So... how can you convince us, and guarantee that this is not just planting bombs under our own bedrooms?
No they didn't. Data was available to jot do rushed forced evacuation and for older people evacuation literally led to death. Even if Fukushima was as bad as Chernobyl (which would be a wild statement considering it has containment), those ppl would have died from age earlier vs cancer. It was absolutely idiotic decision in this regard.
The physics of nuclear reactors push you towards making them big, and that means that there are correspondingly few of them, and they are all big civil engineering projects that are a little bit different from each other. This is a recipe for expensive and slow construction. The whole reason people are trying to make SMRs a thing is to try and get around this but it's not obvious there's an intersection between what the physics is happy to make efficient enough and a scale where you can actually get some learning rates and economies of 'scale' (which is more economies of unit volume than just in total how big something is).
The human impact of those is a fraction of fossil-fuels. So it’s not fair to judge nuclear for being expensive if we don’t hold other fuels to similarly rigorous standards
Not GP, but plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is.
Don't get me wrong, it's super deadly, but there are loads of toxins that are more deadly than plutonium. And while its radioactivity is seen as ultra scary, it's actually pretty nice, because you can at least detect it. Harder than beta or gamma, but still, it announces its presence.
How I wish I had a magic wand (spectrometer) that I could wave over my food to see if cyanide, ricin, mercury, or lead were there.
This. I wish people made a Geiger counter equivalent for pm2.5 and other atmospheric pollutants, people would never get to the subway again. And breathing air in any big Asian city is much more dangerous than doing the same in Prypiat.
Yeah, the problem is the overhyping of radiation's danger kind of covers-up the other problem, radiation weakens everything. Hairline cracks are a threat because the radiation is going to weaken the cement that's holding the very high pressure steam that's generating electricity.
Nuclear meltdowns have been common but dangerous radiation leaks rare and over-hyped, sure. But meltdowns involve an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment irrevocably breaking and that is what has made nuclear power uneconomical, not environmentalists' hand wringing. Indeed, I'd suspect nuclear company executives love to say the environmentos killed things, much better than saying their operations weren't economical.
> plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is... it's super deadly
"Super deadly" sounds enough scary to me, thanks
There are things that are "super deadly premium" of course. Stupidity terrifies me more than Plutonium. Specially when both things come together, but in the end the result is not much different.
See nuclear topic, scroll just like 2 turns to see once again someone claiming nuclear is the one technology in all of history that doesn't improve with technology.
> Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive
Isn't this the thing where you require something in one case but not the others?
If every oil drilling operation had to carry enough insurance to cover Deepwater Horizon and every hydroelectric dam had to carry a policy large enough for Banqiao and every solar panel factory had to insure against leaving Superfund sites that leak into the groundwater in some of the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley then they'd be in trouble too.
> the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions.
People often say things like this and then if you actually have someone go through the existing process you find out that more than half of the labor is going to inspect things that aren't actually safety-related, or some corruption is involved which is quadrupling the cost because the contractor bribed a politician to make use of their services required by law or create artificial scarcity for something which is actually important but shouldn't cost as much as it does.
I'd argue at least half of it basically functions as a petroleum subsidy.
And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them, and would be even more so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated.
The only justification in nuclear right now it's deglobalization and energy independence. But I would argue all the money you throw into nuclear for that, it's much better served simply building out solar and wind
> And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them
> so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated
That sounds very very questionable. We have like tens of countries in Europe that are trying to implement solar and wind energy throughout the decades, and are undoubtful lieders and visioners in that areas. And what is the practical results? Energy costs like 10 times more than if that energy was generated through burning fissile fuel alone.
Yes this is true. Once you include all subsidies nuclear is cheaper than fossil fuels. Much cheaper than coal and oil and slightly cheaper or on par with gas.
But, the same is true for solar and wind which starts off much cheaper than fossil fuels in the first place.
Most new build energy is renewables, that's what nuclear needs to compete with.
You can count only the pure costs of generation of single type of power plant. But the customers are also paying the costs of distribution, costs of backup and firming.
Is the customer 10, 50 or 500 km from the power plant?
Do I need to build a second backup power plant for each installed primary power plant, 100% backup capacity? Or 40%, or 20% backup capacity?
Costs of pumped hydro/battery energy storage.
What are the costs of CO2 emission? Europe 80 Euro per tCO₂, China/India 8, US zero.
He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.
None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage?
Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.
There's also very interesting work on non-battery storage technology. The one that has gotten my attention is Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" thermal storage technology. I don't know where they are in crossing the chasm on this, but the theory looks very promising, with capex as low as $0.10 per kWh of thermal storage capacity. This promises to make 600 C heat available 365/7/24 for a cost as low as $3/GJ, similar to heat from combustion of Henry Hub natural gas.
Indeed. Cost of nuclear is static or climbing. Renewables are cheaper and falling. Batteries are about the same, and falling.
If a western country starts building nuclear today, they will have something to show for it in ten years at the earliest. Renewables and batteries are already cheap, and getting cheaper, so it seems like a very silly bet. Especially in a place like Italy with excellent sun and lots of space.
This must at least partly be region-dependent right?
In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).
From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?
Most of Finnish wind capacity was built without subsidies. The demand was saturated at ~25% of total generation, after which the market started building solar. Wind power is more cost-effective at these latitudes, but solar generation is currently more valuable, as it correlates less with existing renewables.
That only makes sense if you're burning hydrocarbons to heat your homes; about 1/3 of total energy use is space heating. Shifting to heat pumps and more wind before wasting money on solar panels at high latitudes is better ROI on energy independence and carbon reduction.
Heat pumps already became popular a long time ago. Electricity is so widely used for heating, that the difference in electricity consumption between the coldest winter days and July nights is almost 2.5x. While there are some old legends of Finnish (or maybe Sami) wind wizards, we still haven't figured out how to generate wind power on demand.
In any case, it's up to the market. If you believe it's possible to make money with wind / solar / nuclear power in Finland, you should be able to get permits in a reasonable time. Right now, those building solar are investing more than the others.
> China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor.
I've seen it claimed that this figure is not equivalent to the time-to-build in West, as the clock starts later in the process. I don't know if that's true, but I've seen the claim.
SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.
It is really ideal for solar.
But the emissions are still much higher than France.
Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.
But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.
Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :
> So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.
True. But France is 70% nuclear plus 15% renewables, with the remainder 5% fossil. In 2026 South Australia was 75% renewables, and 25% CCGT (gas turbine - fossil).
So France is 5% fossil vs SA's 25%, and accordingly has 1/5 the CO2 intensity. No mystery there - and obviously has nothing to do with nuclear vs renewables.
SA says they will hit 100% renewable in next year. [0] I struggle to believe that, but 95% at some point seems likely given the price of CCGT.
This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever
Imagine a city-sized solar panel array, sitting somewhere very shiny in the North African region.
A long, not insurmountable, cable strings its way across the gap and into Europes tender bits, i.e Spain and Turkey/etc.
Electrons, once redirected/collected, can be redirected far.
Heck, at scale, probably a lot of it could be done with microwave, anyway ..
If only these nations weren't in such constant conflict with one another. Those with all the energy could turn their deserts into paradise. Those with paradise already, could use their free time to find new ways to collect energy, better.
Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.
France's reactors became successively more expensive as the need for more layered safety features was exposed. The first generation (CP0, CP1, CP2) was quite inexpensive, the P4 and P'4 designs were already more expensive and the N4 was yet more expensive.
At this point I think if you want inexpensive nuclear, you just have to accept some risk. Going from 99.9% safety to 99.99% adds just too much complexity to remain economically viable.
Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
I've yet to see any serious engineer make the argument that Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage. I've more often seen it used as a straw man argument against renewables.
I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
> Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
From what I've seen, some countries have renewables comparable to nuclear for baseload power, at least for now, but in no country is new construction nuclear cheaper.
Those countries where nuclear does best will be energy ghettos in the post fossil age, as they will be competing with countries (typically sunny places closer to the equator) with cheap renewables.
I've seen calculations for Denmark that has a great offshore wind power potential[1]. They indeed don't need nuclear. The lowest cost mix is offshore wind power (66%), combined cycle gas turbines (26%), and solar PV (8%). The costlier carbon-neutral option is offshore wind power (84%), solar PV (13%), and biomethane CCGT (3%).
Solar photovoltaic is so low thanks to its intermittency. The more solar you have as a percentage of the total production the more costly it gets. At the limit of 100% solar its SLCOE is about 4 times higher than nuclear (Fig. 3).
So, the availability and the quality (offshore wind is less variable, causes less backlash and so on) of wind power resources play a big role.
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
Why use a bad metric when one can use the actually relevant metrics?
I see this from nuclear advocates when they talk about "energy density". Energy density (or EROI) are only relevant insofar as they affect cost. Why not just use cost? (The answer is that cost isn't giving the nuclear advocates the answer they want, so they have to lie and use some substitute metric.)
Not if you factor in all the residual. Adding to fossil or water based grid is okay, running on its own with all the necessary residual it gets way worse.
EROI of 5 means 20% all energy goes just to preserving current status. As wind is limited this gives hard limits to what is sustainable in northern countries. These problems completely disappear with nuclear.
Neither nuclear nor gas or coal will matter any more in a few years. It took California only six years to install 41% of the battery capacity goal it has for 2045[1]. As batteries are becoming part for new solar and wind installations, they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.
> they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.
Unfortunately, this probably won't work everywhere. Particularly in Northern Europe winter is tough as there's very little sunlight (manageable) and often very little wind (not manageable,as it lasts longer).
Nuclear is an expensive way of solving this problem, but it's carbon neutral which is super important.
Even that would be manageable with enough solar panels and batteries, no? Or is it certain that too much surface area would have to be covered with panels?
Batteries work for 1-2 days right now. These wind breaks can be 1-2 weeks.
Like, to be fair, batteries have improved so much in the last decade that this may be solved, but I'm generally sceptical of one thing that will save us, as I reckon we'll need multiple things to ensure resilience (which is really, really, really important when it comes to core needs like electricity and heating).
Is the need for "pretty large breakthroughs" based on realistic calculations, or are you just guessing? I know that most people subscribe to your position, but I can't say I've really seen convincing analyses that show the numbers:
- What thresholds of $/kWh, charge speed, power density etc. do we need to reach before scaling becomes viable? What are those thresholds based on?
- Where are we now on those metrics, and how did they evolve over the last 2-3 decades?
Still, everyone seems very confident that scaling is non-viable now. But IMO it should be possible to demonstrate the non-viability using the approach above - even if the exact numbers are wrong, the orders of magnitude should be good enough, right?
Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling and maintenance over their lifespans making them a poor fit for base load without extremely costly redundancy in a small country.
A couple points. No, entire plants aren't taken offline at once typically, individual reactor cores are, and modern designs work to minimize that. They still maintain extremely good uptime, especially if you're comparing them to intermittent renewables. Secondly, Italy isn't super tiny, and you need redundancy for outages and such in any grid regardless of its components.
Cutting out the “and maintenance” bit is misleading.
It’s commonplace for maintenance issues at non CANDU reactors to extend the “refelling” downtime. So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues. The major benefit is when manufacturing plutonium due to shorter fuel cycles, but overall CANDU reactors are less cost effective which is why adoption fizzled out.
> So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues.
There are several situations:
* refuelling occurs
* maintenance and/or inspection needs to happen
* refurbishment may be desired
Some of these things take downtime, some do not, depending on the design of the reactor and other factors. A blanket statement of "refuelling forces a downtime" is incorrect in many situations. Depending on the maintenance (or inspections) needed, this may or may not need downtime. Refurbishment generally means tearing things apart, so usually means downtime, but if a site has multiple reactors they can be done one at a time, e.g.:
Eh, again, I disagree. As an example: Many CANDU reactors have insanely high availability. Example: Qinshan CANDU Unit 1 only had a planned outage of less than 27 days in 2023. There are many other examples. That is crazy uptime in the world of electricity production. And to be clear, if you come at me with "Oh, what about the major maintenance required every 10+ years?". Thermal (coal/gas) has the same issue.
I had a discussion with ChatGPT about this concern. When comparing a modern EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) to a modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant, the required maintenance cycles look fairly similar. For the nitpickers/tomato throwers (I see you!): I am using EPR because it is state-of-the art for nuclear power, and I am specifically using the term "modern" for thermal power plant because the newest ones (China, Japan) are nearly at the frontier of efficiency possible for that type of electricty production.
Roughly: EPR runs for 18 months, then requires 1-2 months of maintenance (which includes refuelling about one third of its fuel assemblies). A modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant runs 12-18 months, then requires 1 month of maintenance.
Next, I could not resist as other commenters already mentioned it. You wrote: "small country". As the Aussies say: Yeah, no. Italy is 300,000 sq km. That is not small. If compared to the United States, it would be the fifth largest state.
Finally, why does it seem that all discussions about electricity production on HN always devolve into the "Base Load Wars"? For me, it is starting to feel like a meme. (Are there LLM troll bots trained to enter HN discussions and make a bunch of "base load" arguments?) Seriously, can someone please create a text-based role playing game that revolves around a future society locked into eternal "Base Load Wars"? (See: PhD Simulator[1])
But is this the intended maintenance duration, or the actual one? Because the construction of every EPR project has been a disaster. Construction took 20 years in Europe and 9 years in China.
Well, there are only four EPRs in the world. It is too early to say. Frankly, as a non-expert "armchair observer", Finland was dumb for starting the EPR project before the design was finalised.
From what I read no further EPRs are planned and they fully want to go ahead with a streamlined EPR2 design.
I think the problem of the Finns was that they really wanted energy independence and tge inly ones that were on the market were the french. No doubt the frenched used much diplomatic muscle to attract them as a first experiment.
Peak oil was supposed to have happened decades ago but current projections put it well past 2050. Demand for oil is going to fall due to electrification long before we run out of sufficient oil production capacity.
It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.
Yes. There's all kind of hydrocarbons that aren't economic or barely so, like oil shale or shale oil, with is rock with a stain on it.
Interestingly, Venezuelan extra heavy sour crude oil is not profitable to use at $55 a barrel, the price before the Iran war, but is profitable when it's over $90 a barrel.
It's easy to make money when someone else pays the costs but you get to keep the revenue.
This is wrong. The peak of conventional oil is documented around 2007. Since then, Europe's economy has been slowing down (if you look at physical indicators like how much is transported by trucks or what surface is being built each year, not artificial ones like the GDP).
Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).
> we had a peak of conventional oil in 2007, I don't get why I'm getting downvoted for that fact.
I don't think you were downvoted for that; instead, I think you were downvoted for saying "This is wrong" when GP commenter claimed the peak oil has been predicted decade after decade. GP also just said "peak oil" not "peak conventional oil" so I'm unsure why you brought up that distinction?
A better reply might have been "Peak oil has been wrong decade after decade, but current projections are somewhere between 2025 and after 2050. Additionally, if we restrict it to only specific geographic regions, or to only a subset of oil extraction, it occurred in the mid-2000s instead of the original global projections of between 1922 and 1960."
Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).
The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.
It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
The 138€ is under pessimistic assumptions. Min profitability limit on the other hand is 9ct/kwh. But nobody denies fla3 was a failure.
You didn't understand the electric cap in France. It's a cap on profits. If edf sells at certain thresholds above 70€ due to market, the state will take extra profit. It's sort of like double CFDs for renewables except edf has no minimum compensation
> It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
It was nationalized because it had suffered record losses in the previous year and was struggling with a ballooning debt mountain of 65B euro. The French government didn’t need to nationalize it to control its strategic direction - it already owned 84% of it. That was the press release claim in order to present the bailout as “strategic”.
And the point was to address the gp’s claim that nuclear was profitable. Profitable enterprises don’t lose 18B a year or suffer financial instability due to a debt mountain on their balance sheets.
> You didn't understand the electric cap in France.
I don’t see how you drew that conclusion - the reactor needs to earn €138 per MWh (that’s the middle estimate not the worst case which is €180 per MWh). But the most it can earn is €70/MWh due to The cap? You’re just restating what I said. This reactor will be deeply unprofitable for its entire life.
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
> EdF responded that it "assumes full responsibility for the technical and financial aspects of dismantling its nuclear plants," and noted that it was currently decommissioning nine reactors, so had a good basis of experience. It also pointed out that its funds set aside for decommissioning were audited by the Ministry of the Environment, Energy and the Sea the previous month.
And, a little bit earlier, the article author's assesment:
> There are well-developed plans for dismantling these (which have been shut down since 1990 or before) and work is progressing.
There’s tons of costs associated with coal, oil, and natural gas extraction, processing, and use, which are neither priced into up front costs nor the price that customers pay for the product. If those were priced in, then fossil fuels would have to become more expensive. Those costs currently get diffused into various other areas and paid for by a wide net of payers, including both the customers and non-customers, and a big one is the government (taxpayer).
Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.
Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens.
And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.
Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.
That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable
> Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.
You know when rivers run not-low? In winter when we need to heat all those freezing homes. Crazy how that works. Yup, it's not ideal in a summer heat wave... but that's precisely when solar can shine.
We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.
Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?
Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.
I'm not talking about manufacturing. I am talking about raw materials for chips, battery cells, etc. You can't be sovereign if you have the capability to build something but don't have the resources to build it
If your electricity usage isn't growing like crazy, existing batteries can simply be recycled to make new ones.
What chips are you talking about?
Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
Electronic chips in wind turbines, hydro stations, etc.. Believe it or not but all of these use chips...
> Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
I am not holding renewables to it. The person I was responding to made the erroneous claim that you would be sovereign with renewables. "Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue." I am just pointing out that most countries wouldn't actually have sovereignty and would still be reliant on other countries.
I am the one holding the consistent standard since I believe most countries wouldn't be sovereign regardless of them using fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
No one meets the ImJamal Standard of Sovereignty. It's completely useless.
Might as well go with the source of energy that pollutes the least and allows you to be import-free for the longest amount of time - solar, wind, and batteries.
So you think oil and coal doesn't use electronics?
They use exactly the same stuff. Nearly all power generation is just spinning magnets, obvious exception is PV. There are no particular electronic components you need for wind turbines that you don't also need for a coal or gas fired power plant. Everything uses electronic control systems.
Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
We did have electronics in 1900: Kirchoff's circuit laws date from 1845, the first semiconductor device (crystal detector) is from 1874 and the first vacuum tube is from 1904. What we didn't have is transistors and the miniaturization technology that gave us integrated circuits and microprocessors.
The conversation was clearly about more modern electronics since I was talking about rare earth minerals which were not used in the devices you are talking about.
You are able to drill and burn oil along with transmit the electricity without technology that requires rare earth minerals which are the electronics I was referring to.
You were able to drill and burn oil without modern technology. These days, pretty much all those easily accessible wells are drained and the only oil left is in harder to access wells that you'd never even find without modern technology. That's why we're fracking and messing around with oil sands and building offshore oil rigs etc.
We also had windmills long before we had electricity. And the west has plenty of rare earth deposits, despite the name they're not actually that rare. They're just expensive to refine and the refinement process causes a lot of pollution. China does it cheaper, polluting itself in the process and that's why we don't do it. If they were to stop giving us access to these minerals we could restart our own production. It's not just used for electronics by the way, it's also used for magnets which are a key component in electric motors/generators, so without rare earth minerals you're not generating electricity regardless of having oil.
They don't need to make things themselves, they just need to have the capability to make it themselves to be sovereign.
If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil? If you want sovereignty then it is critical to have the ability to make drills, tankers, etc in your country if you rely on oil.
This is no different than solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc when it comes to renewables. If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go. If you do, then you need to be able to handle everything yourself otherwise you are always going to be reliant on other countries.
> Your existing drills and pumps might work long enough for you to stand up a domestic drill manufacturing industry.
> Same for solar, except that panels and batteries operate for way longer than drills and pumps.
This is not about factories, but raw material as I said in a previous comment that you responded to. Most countries don't have uranium. A lot of countries do not have rare earth minerals for electronic chips.
> If no one is sovereign then sovereignty is meaningless. Who cares
The person I was originally responding to did and was claiming that you could achieve sovereignty with renewables.
An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors
The person I was responding to made the claim that renewables makes a country sovereign. I am saying it doesn't and it seems like you agree so I don't understand your point.
I never made the claim that nuclear would make a country sovereign. Only a small number of countries could have sovereignty with nuclear.
And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.
In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.
There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.
I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.
I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.
I've lived in Spain a couple years ago. I've seen the quality of its health care. Its easily 20 years behind the US and that's being charitable. The family that lived next to me had a man who had the exact same break I had had 20 years before. He had worse, more primitive care than I did in the US decades before. I had to explain to them why it was a bad idea for him to sit in his wheelchair all day because nobody in the Spanish system seemed to know how to care for a simple broken leg. You got what you paid for...
PS Spanish taxes are absurdly high...insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries. All that and an actual working economy and energy system.
> insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries.
If you are a white male. But what about suppressed minorities and women (and especially minorities women and nonbinary persons) that can't get job because of chauvinistic billionaires?
>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries
I actually do since I'm Italian lol
Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant
Uhhh, some nerve damage, news worthy? Ho qualche dubbio al riguardo.
Fellow italian here, let's not act like our third rate ERs never leave people suffering for hours without caring that it may have lasting consequences. I understand it's partially due to understaffing, but this is the reality. My dad had this happen to him as well. Thanks
> I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.
> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance
The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me.
Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff's incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.
My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.
Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.
> The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.
And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.
The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to the cost of living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
Count me in. I'd rather be poor in the worst neighborhood (or village) in Nigeria but healthy than in a European mansion and unhealthy. Feel free to tell me all about how I can't understand, champion of the proletariat.
Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.
If the nuclear power would not be profitable, then Germany would not have push nuclear phaseout through parliament in 2002. (Law: "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity")
The German nuclear phaseout, had as side effect a national security issue, increased dependence on Russian natural gas.
That's a bullshit Statement.
Nuclear in Germany was phased out because of ideology, not economics.
It was cheapest firm power in german merit order. Instead the guy that was later hired at gasprom had other plans, together with greens. As result coal is still used. New gas plants approved this summer
Exactly, there were no economical reasons for nuclear phase out in Germany.
It was a political decision and in the end a very costly one: much bigger burning of coal then necessary, new gas power plants, increased dependence on foreign energy imports.
But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
It should be in the national interest. But every nation is determined to let Russia have the last resources in 30 years by boycotting Russian oil and gas.
As we hear downthread though, we'll have warp drives by then.
there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision
Mining isn't a great argument against nuclear. Uranium fuel has an incredibly high energy density so a relatively small amount of high grade ore can be converted into a large amount of electricity so even when compared to the one time input from mining required to produce all of the components that go into making a PV installation it can still perform favourably. Uranium mining is also transitioning away from open pit mines to using in-situ recovery where a liquid solution is injected into a uranium ore formation to dissolve the uranium before recovering the solution, about 55% of current uranium production uses this method already.
Slavery is obviously not an issue in a country like Spain, but any kind of mining operation here seems to be heavily opposed by the people that live around the potential sites, for environmental reasons.
canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too
has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it
Canadian reactors don't use enriched uranium. Also many countries have centrifuges - Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, and of course all the nuclear armed states. Further, enrichment plants can be built anywhere.
Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.
Refueling nuclear power plants only happens fairly rarely. You hold your customer hostage a lot less if you say “ha! Next time in 8 years time when you need to refuel, we won’t sell the goods to you!” as compared to literally turning off the gas tap.
Many is how? Why are people spreading such bullshit? Only a subset of plants, mainly VVER are dependent on Russia, albeit that'll change too.
Russia is ore importer itself and Orano+Urenco have enough capacity to satisfy most of Europe, both expanding.
Decentralized is not guaranteed. You mostly deploy ren in productive areas, see northern offshore, or that most of Ukraine's ren were in the South. Guess what happened to that. France has a decentralized grid too- many plants scattered around the country, each with multiple units
I’m curious why profitability is the concern here? I was under the impression that abundant clean energy would be of higher concern than profitability of energy companies - unless you mean that profitability concerns will reduce the willingness to invest and develop more nuclear?
I guess we could argue that these sorts of operations should be state owned?
It's not. This whole discussion is confused because it's based on a misunderstanding of how electricity markets work. When states charge a captive customer base whatever nuclear project costs turn out to be, profitability is not a meaningful measure of economic attractiveness. Levelised cost of energy, or system cost of energy, under different regulatory and market regimes, is the relevant benchmark.
Even if they are state owned, they should break even at least somewhere on paper. Explicit and bounded subsidies are very different from implicit, open-ended ones.
So profitable yes. Would the owners/investors have made more money if they just bought random stocks based on some index? Probably. But not a loss.
Technically as a Mankala principle company TVO will never make any profit or loss. Profit here is some imaginary “how much money would they have made if the energy was sold directly to the nord pool”
Not to detract from your point, but France had a good run with nuclear energy throughout the 70s, no? They built them on mass, built them reliably and quickly, learned from project to project and had economies of scale.
And if I am not mistaken then for a long time energy prices in France were smaller than that of neighbouring countries.
But to be fair, it is difficult to tell what "profitable" means because a primary motivation has always been the development of nuclear weapons, so the true amortization is across industry and national security.
China is the only country on Earth that I would trust to build, manage and maintain nuclear power plants.
The point you're touching on is that nuclear power is expensive, so much so that not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the world without significant government subsidies. And even then the LCOE cost is basically the highest amongst all electricity sources. And it only gets that "low" by them pushing out the lifetime of the power plant, at least on paper, to 60 years.
As an example, Hinkley Point-C ("HPC") has that 60 year lifespan, a cost that has doubled since it was approved and a contracted electricity cost that is among the highest in Europe but I believe that contracted price only lasts 35 years. So what happens then? Likely because of increased costs of plant maintenance the costs are going to go way up.
But back to China. China is building over 30 nuclear reactors currently. It has largely standardized on two designs (rather than a unique design for each site). It owns the supply chain and the IP. And each project is getting cheap credit from the state (under 2%). All of this is going to make the end result far more cost competitive.
I cannot stress enough how much standardization matters here and China has proved this time and time again, for example with trains (both long-distance and for metros). A time-consuming and expensive part of any large capital project is procurement. Every city in the West that wants to build light rail has to put out RFPs for the rolling stock. That process is time-consuming and you get no economy of scale. China basically says "this is what you're using" and it saves years and billions off any project. As an example, there are cities in China that had no metro system 20 years ago that now rank in the 10 largest metro systems in the world by track length, number of stations and ridership.
Any private nuclear power plant in the West is going to try to raise profits by cutting maintenance. We see this with every private utility in the US. Even with oversight by the NRC, the NRC itself is subject to budget cuts.
There are large, unsolved problems with all of this too. Processing the fuel, processing the spent fuel and the transportation and storage of spent fuel are all unsolved problems, despite what the pro-nuclear crowd like to say.
Any argument that environmentalists run amok is the sole cause of nuclear's failure to launch has to address the fact that these two places, where environmentalists are a lot more likely to get a club to the head than a say at the table, are largely not expanding their nuclear power that much versus, say, solar in China.
The power trading market in the US and the markets in Russia and particularly China are not the same, at all.They are rife with tarrif pricing, state-set prices, and state-owned players. The whole idea of profit is only tangentially applicable.
In any case, your premise doesn't hold. China is hugely invested in nuke and continues to build as fast as they can. Theyve got 58 reactors operating (about 56 GW) and 33 more (over 35 GW) under construction. Theyve consistently been approving at least 10 new units a year. It's literally in the current 5 year plan.
China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…
…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.
China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).
China can be going green while also refusing to constrain it's economic growth on the short term.
When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.
All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.
At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.
Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.
> After the first three quarters of the year, China’s CO2 emissions in 2025 are now finely balanced between a small fall or rise, depending on what happens in the last quarter.
And then goes on to describe how the largest drop (3%) is happening at a time when it just happens that fuel is increasingly expensive and scarce, shipping is increasingly expensive and slow, and the global economy has spent months grinding increasingly towards a terrible outcome.
People might as well brag about their incredible weight loss journey through amputation.
That's 50% of electricity, but not 50% of energy. Coal still provides ~80% of energy IIRC (roughly 10% is carbon-free and growing faster than the US). China burns so, so much coal, while much of the world has shifted to natural gas, which has much less carbon per energy.
You don't recall correctly. Coal is also 50% of energy. It's used a lot for heating, but that is dropping rapidly. It's used in manufacturing, but that is also doing rapidly, except for steel. It's not used for transportation.
Maybe emissions fell because industrial activity fell instead? Maybe oil and gas have been used less because the cost has risen. Maybe that explains coal as well depending on how it is used. I’m speculating coal might be used in the production of steel - what if that product is highly tariffed in the US and EU so China had to cut back?
China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal. If it was they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
You can see the same dips hit at the same time for the same reason.
In terms of Chinese coal though there's a reason boosters always talk about percentages and not absolute number... one goes down, but the other keeps rising. Even if China continues on the current course in terms of tonnage burned they won't reach "peak coal" until at least 2030.
> China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal
Why does the "why" matter? Tons of carbon are tons of carbon, right? That's what people say when you tell them about per-capita emissions.
> they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled.
What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
Well it doesn’t entirely matter but we should just acknowledge that it’s a geopolitical strategy and not really something they are doing for the planet.
> You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled. What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports for example due to alleged “dual use” as they continue to apply military pressure on democratic Taiwan? I’d encourage you to read up on these restrictions with respect to Japan for example who is alarmed by Chinese and North Korean provocations.
You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels. For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies. It’s not just the US, by the way. The EU is tariffing China too.
They are entitled to pursue these strategies but we are also entitled in the west to recognize them and combat them how we see fit.
> not really something they are doing for the planet
If it doesn't matter why do you feel the need to acknowledge it?
> Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports [to Japan] for example due to alleged “dual use”
How do these restrictions prevent Japan from using Chinese PV and batteries in their grid?
> You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry
Translation: they gave the world a ton of deeply discounted goods. And you said they didn't do anything nice for anyone!
> so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels
Other countries are free to subsidize their own solar and battery industries. Godspeed to the ones doing it right now. But also is it really that amazing an industry to have? Low-margins, constant price wars, undifferentiated commodity product without much of a moat. Rich economies tend not to have those industries anyway.
> For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies
Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
> The EU is tariffing China too.
There are no EU tariffs on Chinese solar panels or grid-scale batteries or heat pumps. They are considering tariffing heat pumps right now.
> If it doesn't matter why do you feel the need to acknowledge it?
Just to make sure nobody is ever confused. Why do you feel the need to defend China?
> How do these restrictions prevent Japan from using Chinese PV and batteries in their grid?
It limits Japan from developing their own home grown market or utilizing technology for what China considers dual use?
> Translation: they gave the world a ton of deeply discounted goods. And you said they didn't do anything nice for anyone!
Other translation: Those cheap goods weren’t worth the cost to the environment or to empower an autocratic regime.
> Other countries are free to subsidize their own solar and battery industries.
When that happens there can be retaliatory measures against countries who are in for example the WTO or have other trade agreements. You don’t just subsidize products in a vacuum.
> Godspeed to the ones doing it right now. But also is it really that amazing an industry to have? Low-margins, constant price wars, undifferentiated commodity product without much of a moat. Rich economies tend not to have those industries anyway.
You’re focusing on solar panels but that’s not all we’ve been discussing.
> Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
That doesn’t follow from what you quoted.
> There are no EU tariffs on Chinese solar panels or grid-scale batteries or heat pumps. They are considering tariffing heat pumps right now.
They are tariffing other products/industries and working on additional ones.
That a country is acting in its own interests? I don't think that's news.
> Why do you feel the need to defend China?
I think climate change is the biggest problem of our lifetime. China's output of green tech is our best chance. I think useful idiots for the fossil fuel industry demonize China to transitively discredit renewables (i.e. not for "lofty moral reasons" like democracy). There's a genuine double standard.
> It limits Japan from developing their own home grown market
Drill deeper. How does this prevent Japan from "greening" today? That's the topic we're discussing.
> or utilizing technology for what China considers dual use?
Why can't Japan source "dual use" rare earths from somewhere else? They aren't actually that rare. Japan could invest in mines and processing facilities in Africa or the US or Canada.
> Those cheap goods weren’t worth the cost to the environment
Cheap, abundant PV and batteries that can decarbonize the world? I'm ok with localized damage to one country's environment, done voluntarily, for that. Climate change will wreck the global environment.
> empower an autocratic regime
Describes most oil-producing countries. This is virtue signalling.
> there can be retaliatory measures against countries who are in for example the WTO
How did China do it then?
> You’re focusing on solar panels but that’s not all we’ve been discussing.
Ok what else then? You want battery manufacturing? Motors? Has China somehow restricted countries from building their own industries?
> > Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
> That doesn’t follow from what you quoted.
Ok what is the US doing for renewable energy under this administration?
> They are tariffing other products/industries and working on additional ones.
We're focusing on renewable tech here. That's the focus of this thread.
> That a country is acting in its own interests? I don't think that's news.
You changed the topic though, that wasn't what we were talking about.
> I think climate change is the biggest problem of our lifetime. China's output of green tech is our best chance. I think useful idiots for the fossil fuel industry demonize China to transitively discredit renewables (i.e. not for "lofty moral reasons" like democracy). There's a genuine double standard.
That basically proves my initial point lol. That's why it's important to make sure while the effects may be good for the climate, it's not done with any intention for the planet's benefit and specific tactics that are being used are harmful to other countries.
> Drill deeper. How does this prevent Japan from "greening" today? That's the topic we're discussing.
I'd challenge you to do the same thing. How can Japan "green" when China has restricted exports of rare earth materials to Japan because China and its junior partner North Korea are engaging in provocative military activities near Japan?
If your version of "Japan can green by buying China's products" you're being immature in your understanding of international relations, the importance for countries like Japan to maintain their industrial base, and how the environment is an important consideration, but just one of many.
> Why can't Japan source "dual use" rare earths from somewhere else? They aren't actually that rare. Japan could invest in mines and processing facilities in Africa or the US or Canada.
Well Japan and western allies and democracies are working on it, but the problem isn't the location of rare earths it is the ability (as far as I understand) to process them. It'll take time for those capabilities to be stood up, and they have to be subsidized or benefit from tariffs because China has built up so much excess industrial capacity that other countries can't build their own without such policies.
> Describes most oil-producing countries. This is virtue signalling.
Norway is an oil-producing country and not an autocracy. Your point was disproven.
> Cheap, abundant PV and batteries that can decarbonize the world? I'm ok with localized damage to one country's environment, done voluntarily, for that. Climate change will wreck the global environment.
That's your opinion but it's not the opinion of others. I disagree, for example.
> How did China do it then?
You want me to explain the history of the World Trade Organization, the US advocating for China to do it under the guise that China was going to liberalize and democratize, and then how China used most-favored nation status, a regime of state subsidies, and artificially depressing its currency to boost exports? If you're not aware of this stuff, are you sure you should be speaking on this topic without even the basics?
> Ok what else then? You want battery manufacturing? Motors? Has China somehow restricted countries from building their own industries?
Already explained above.
> Ok what is the US doing for renewable energy under this administration?
Idk? We'll have a new administration in a couple of years though.
> We're focusing on renewable tech here. That's the focus of this thread.
Ok then you can stop replying to me since that's not the only thing I'm talking about. I'm focused on more than renewable tech and that's of little concern to me in the grand scheme of things including climate change.
> If your version of "Japan can green by buying China's products" you're being immature in your understanding of international relations
Japan (and most other countries) are already "not green" by buying oil from other autocratic nations. Like I said this is all virtue signalling to avoid going renewable. The fossil fuel industry loves it.
"Rare earths" are a strategic necessity for defence, and China won't sell them for that reason - fine. Countries who still need them can nationalize processing capacity and run it at a loss for the sole use of defence industries. No need to participate or compete in the market at all. China's subsidies and the WTO don't matter.
Industrial output falling because of tariffs for example would be aligned with my initial post. You're being argumentative here for no good reason. If you just want to talk about the engineering technology I don't have much else to say about it. But if you want to talk about the important stuff, why it's not being adopted, why some countries are adopting it and others aren't, I think that's an interesting conversation to have.
> Japan (and most other countries) are already "not green" by buying oil from other autocratic nations. Like I said this is all virtue signalling to avoid going renewable. The fossil fuel industry loves it.
Well they're stuck between buying oil from autocratic nations (China also buys oil from autocratic nations) or buying green technology from autocratic nations which are also threatening them or stopping exports of the technology or industry. Saudi Arabia (or insert whatever country here) doesn't for example stop oil exports to Japan for example if Japan also does their own oil drilling or exploration. China does stop exports of certain technologies or even processed rare earth minerals.
> "Rare earths" are a strategic necessity for defence, and China won't sell them for that reason - fine. Countries who still need them can nationalize processing capacity and run it at a loss for the sole use of defence industries. No need to participate or compete in the market at all.
No lol they'll subsidize them and refuse to buy China's products to protect domestic industries and capabilities to build the products themselves. It won't be limited to defense. Plus as I have pointed out a few times China itself restricts exports because of the threat of dual-use (which is in response to Chinese provocations) so China will in effect stop the export of defense-related products even when they can be used by consumers.
China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market.
They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.
You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.
Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments.
Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.
Quite telling, but then so is climate change and it's not exactly hard to understand the motives of those who want(ed) to deny it for power and profit. We should be listening to their wise advice on this topic... why?
If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities.
It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)
It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?
Even if China is the number one in installing nuclear power, the installed capacity dwarfs compared to solar. China is "betting" on anything that produces electricity that doesn't depend on imports, and if that is nuclear they go for it. But it is clearly not their main bet:
Wind overtook nuclear production in 2016, Solar FV in 2022. Today both more than double it.
Tables in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Ch... are also very telling. Total power production: 15% wind, 17% solar, 5% nuclear. Nuclear is almost stagnant, but they will probably finish what they are already building, or have planned. That is the way they work. But they are slowing the rate of nuclear installations, it took 5 years to go from producing 400 TWh to 500 TWh, while wind in the same time went from 500 TWh to 1.1k TWh and sun from 260 TWh to 1.2k TWh. These growing rates will drive nuclear from being ~5% of production to be irrelevant in 10 years. But you will read from pro-nuclears that they "plan" to double nuclear output in those 10 years, even when they barely put a +20% in last 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised it they pivot to solar, wind and batteries suddenly (a very China thing to do), abandoning all nuclear that is not already almost finished.
IMO China is not betting on nuclear. Just before solar was economically sound (c. 2015), they believed nuclear could be a solution for their dependency problems, and bet on it. As of today, they are no longer betting on nuclear, or at least the bet is crawling to a halt.
No nuclear debate without Germany. This is my opinion: Germany actually is winning. Not a lot, but their current situation is far from the catastrophe some predicted (massive blackouts! outrageous electricity price!). Nuclear was quickly replaced with solar and wind after an initial coal and gas spike. But now coal usage is going down, and gas is stable. Dependency from Russia is less than 10 years ago. OTOH, France is having serious problems to 1) increase their nuclear production and even maintaining what they have (average reactor age: 35 years, younger reactor: 18 years) and 2) to deal with the install of cheaper energy sources because their base load is so high and can't be easily phased out.
And please, stop with the "bad press" tune, as if everyone that doesn't blindly believe nuclear is the future is dumb and can be manipulated with ease, meanwhile pro-nuclear are very smart and impossible to manipulate. Do you think there is no nuclear or fossil lobby also releasing "bad press" about everything else and selling nuclear as the only solution? It only causes high friction unproductive debates: it is like Democrats firmly believing that Republicans are dumb, and vice versa. Either you accept that you are also being manipulated by the nuclear lobby to support them, or stop accusing others of being manipulated. Italy is running without nuclear power for more than 30 years, but only recently, when it makes absolutely no economical sense to start new nuclear plants if you have your production-demand figured out (not booming like China), some politics, not at all "manipulated" or "bought" by the nuclear lobby, plan up to 10 new reactors against people will (94% of voters against installing new nuclear in 2011). Yes, people are dumb, politics are honest and smart. That is the only possible cause.
I would imagine that China not having a world wide market for selling/dumping their reactors would have some relation too.
I have no horse in this race but anyway, I hope Europe goes back to nuclear, and then get nukes enough to wipe out anyone in the world some 35 times if needed.
Europe is already heavily nuclearized. Even the nuclear lobby recommends a "10% nuclear power in the mix", which many countries en Europe already meet... or way more than that. On average 24% (varies between sources) of European mix is nuclear. Yes, there are a couple of countries (Germany and Italy) that banned nuclear, but there are also the most nuclearized country in the world (France, 60% nuclear), and countries like Slovakia (60% nuclear), Hungary (40% nuclear).
Europe produces almost no uranium, and France has a historical problem with uranium mining in Africa, is not like Europe is giving up a free-of-trouble energy source. Honestly, sometimes it feels that some pro-nuclear won't be happy until 100% of the base load is nuclear. They are asking for more nuclear than the nuclear lobby does.
People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder.
I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did.
Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.
Did I imply anywhere anyhow that I am a fan of coal?
I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong.
Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).
Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories.
We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.
Exactly. You can buy and deploy solar, wind and batteries as much as you want now.
If you care about strategic independence, build factories for them.
But a nuclear reactor takes a long time to get build. And is likely way more expensive. If italy manages to do it fast and cheap - other countries will follow, but I believe it when I see it.
And China is importing some of their reactors from France, Russia and USA. It is not like they become fully independent (maintenance and parts). More independent than oil and gas imports, but can't depend forever on these three either.
Oh, I know and am in favor of shutting coal down asap and before nuclear. But you seem to imply handling radioactivity is not a big problem compared to fossils, but I believe it is, considering how faulty and corrupt individual humans are, or corporations or government bodies doing the oversight.
If your trying to argue that 417 operating reactors and 377 GW of operating nuclear capacity at end-2024, producing roughly 2,600–2,700 TWh/year, about 9% of global electricity isn't profitable at all and that somehow all that money is just lit on fire not generating profit/value? Bold claim -- the ecosystem is about $300-500 B/year globally per isn't profitable?
How can the scientific progress of developing nuclear power + medical isotopes and the entire value chain associated with that development, incredibly long lived assets, nuclear fuel development not have been profitable? The fact that you have baseload generation that supports the entire grid?
What part of the equation are you talking about - at what part of the project life cycle? Are you trying to say they were built and weren't profitable the minute the switch turned on?
Most electricity and infrastructure is profitable. But not after carving it out in a way that looks at it in complete isolation. Just like train infrastructure creates a lot of business around the area of the train infrastructure, even if the train itself may seem not self sustained.
Sure, but then that's not "profitable" in the direct sense of "makes rich oligarchs richer".
I'm all for improving the quality of life for society. In the end the goal is to live well, not to destroy our living conditions for a few oligarchs to make more money. But "profitability" is not generally optimised like this, unfortunately.
I'm fairly sure that the total economic value that we get out of roads far exceeds the cost it takes to create and maintain them, yes. A similar argument can probably be made for justice systems and armies.
If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.
I think that for your analogy to work, you also need to consider the total economic value that we get out of electricity as opposed to just revenue from electricity bills...?
If every government had subsidized and pushed forward a transition to ~100% nuclear power back in the 70s it would have effectively solved climate change. Electricity, industry and heat production account for >50% of CO2 production.
Then there's all the other effects of not having a high demand for hydrocarbons including less Middle East entanglement, less mining and drilling, more abundant and cheaper oil for uses other than burning it, etc.
Notice how for roads you compare the total economic value of all roads against the cost of them. But for electricity you compare a single power generation system. You are not comparing the same thing. A fair comparison would be the total economic value of having electricity against the cost of all electricity infrastructure. Sadly this fair comparison is irrelevant in this thread.
Profit is the best way to measure that economic outputs exceed economic inputs, which is the whole point. But profit doesn't work so well as a measure when the outputs are hard to measure per individual beneficiary. Inputs are generally always pretty clearly measurable, but outputs aren't always, as in the case of roads and bridges - although even there often you can.
Electricity is super-duper easy to measure the individual benefits of, so profit is a really simple and easy way to measure the overall effective economic benefit. It's not perfect though - there are external costs to consider which aren't paid for directly, but we have lots of experience with that across all sorts of industries and usually solve for that via taxes and regulation, which become part of the profit equation.
Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?
There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.
Batteries and solar and wind are a lot cheaper, faster to deploy, and scale a ton better.
Nuclear is far too slow to solve our emissions problems, there's no chance of us being able to scale the nuclear industry to be able to confront climate change on the time scale necessary.
In contrast, batteries, solar, and wind are scaling on their own, without the massive government subsidies that would be needed to deliver nuclear too late to help.
Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.
So the alternative is relying on solar panels made by a quasi-hostile country, because for some reason we can't produce them economically ourselves, or continuing to burn fossil fuels?
Countries just can pretty easily make solar economically themselves, it’s no great secret. But they don’t because china makes them a bit cheaper , you keep them forever and we’re not in a war. You think all the billions of parts and steel in a nuke will all be locally built too? For eg Go look up who owns almost all the foundries in the world that are required to build large pressure vessels for reactors.
So, option a sounds great to me, but you clearly have some kind of agenda here, that maybe you could make clearer
Not sure about profitable but the lower the cost is the generate electricity, the better off the world will be. Cracking energy is, to state the obvious, a huge unlock.
SMR makes no sense. It never did. It's a program to fuel academic empire-building and to siphon government money in the form of research grants and investment.
You see this pattern a lot in academia. Education is a great example. We know what works when, for example, it comes to teaching literacy. It's phonics. But over the past few decades we had a fad with "sight words". The evidence has come in that this has been a disaster. So why did it happen? Because nobody is going to get prestige in their education PhD by pushing an existing idea. They're incentivized to reinvent that wheel to shape themselves as an expert in the new wave.
That's exactly how SMR came about. It takes the idea of scaling by going small and repeating what you're doing rather than doing what you actually need to do and that is to standardize large designs. Larger reactors are just more efficient and that's physics.
I bet I could come back to HN in 10 years and SMR will still be exactly nowhere yet people will still be promising a bright future for it.
Yeah but we are su subsidizing so much stupid stuff in the world, that dont need to be. Safe and clean energy is on top of my list of things i am very much ok with.
At the current cost in France for building a new nuclear power plant, renewables would be much cheaper. The existence of legacy plants there doesn't change this. Realize also that much of the cost of those plants was off the books, involving subsidized financing. That a government can fund something at lower interest rates doesn't mean that isn't a subsidy; it's just that the subsidy is concealed.
Does it need to be profitable without subsidies? Governments run a lot of stuff at a loss as a service to citizens. For instance highways, trains, post offices etc.
Where is most of that future power going? Where are those power plants going to be installed? What need does those particular nuclear reactors would fill?
Do not get me wrong: I am not anti-nuclear per-se, but my main concern is that it would have made sense to have a long term strategy including phasing out of nuclear not directly shutting down in the 90's as the Italian did, but progressive phase out with upgrades to existing plants... Now it seems to be going a bit backwards.
Also, to contrast and put in context, in Belgium, Nuclear power plants were build by the state and therefore paid by the tax payers, raising taxes in order to afford them. The underpinning idea was that you pay a bit more and then once paid off you can get cheap energy.
This is not what happened, the power plants got privatised and the gains went to the new operators, leaving tax payers with the bill...
I agree with that, in Italy the telephone lines, highways and trains were privatized the same way, but that's just because politicians are corrupt and they were able to convince people that public companies had to make money like they were private and operating at a loss was bad.
Yes, because profitable enterprises are able to grow faster than unprofitable ones. If you think something is good, and want more of it, making it profitable is conducive to your goals.
Nuclear power is not a renewable power source in the technical correct meaning of the word. Fission material is "only" abundant, in that we can win nuclear fission material from many sources, including recycling spent nuclear material, but it is not available and spent without human intervention (otherwise we could argue fossil fuels are renewables, too).
As an aside, nuclear fission power differs from renewable power in many other ways, too. It is not clean, it is not easy to harvest, it is not safe, it is not cheap, it is not a mass job engine, it is not low-maintenance, it has less utility, and it has less flexibility.
IF the world got its primary energy from today's kind of light water reactors, uranium available at up to 3x the current price would only last for about five years.
A fully nuclear-powered world (including all energy use, not just grid electricity) would need breeding of some kind; otherwise the uranium just gets too expensive. So when you hear people claiming nuclear is cheap, ask them if that cheapness includes the technologies that would actually be needed for nuclear to do the full job.
If we needed more nuclear fuel we would be producing more of it. Comparing current production to a world where we use a thousand times more of it is ridiculous. Uranium is not that rare, and spent fuel rods still have well over 90% of their potency so they can be recycled.
Nuclear energy could easily power the entire planet for thousands of years.
Sure, we could produce more. It would have to be from much lower grade ores, and so would be much more expensive and disruptive. This is why breeding would be needed, so the cost of the uranium would not make nuclear even more unaffordable than it already is.
The argument about affordability is quite ridiculous in a world that is becoming uninhabitable as a direct cause of the "affordable" alternatives.
We could easily afford to use nuclear, and we wouldn't have to rely on it entirely - we have many alternatives such as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal etc. I'm also quite confident that economy of scale would improve the fuel cost, and the higher investment would make breeding and other nuclear technology advancements much quicker than they are and have been. Not to mention fuel cost is quite insignificant in nuclear energy.
We can however not afford the consequences of fossil fuels. We are already severely impacted by global warming and it will get much worse very quickly. I think this chart conveys the severity of our situation very well: https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
Affordability most definitely figures into which avenue forward should be taken. It cannot be used to justify fossil fuels over nuclear, but it can be used to justify renewables instead of nuclear.
Nuclear doesn't have a "get out of economics free" card just because fossil fuels are to be eliminated. I understand the desire of nuclear fans to pretend otherwise.
I'm not a "nuclear fan", I'm a "don't destroy the planet fan". I'm not saying we should build nuclear instead of renewables, I'm saying we should build it instead of fossil fueled generation. It seems you agree with this, so I'm not sure why you seem to be arguing against it.
Until the day that we stop burning fossil fuels entirely, we should be building nuclear to replace it. If it's more expensive that's fine, I don't think it would be, at least not significantly, but I can't prove it and I don't care either way, it doesn't matter. What matters is replacing fossil fuels as fast as possible. It's probably already too late, and the powers that be don't give a shit anyway so none of this will actually happen but this is what we should do.
That's why I think lifters are really the only true path to cost reasonable nuclear power... They "burn" almost all fuel and have separation procedures for the other fission products, and I believe they can consume nuclear waste since it's a breeder reactor.
Any commercial venture will just become dominated by compounding interest payments on debt. Keeping so much capital tied up for so long without revenue is just too expensive.
I agree with the sentiment of your post. In short: "I'll believe it when then finally build and operate one."
About decommission: (segway first) When the United States Navy decommissions nuclear submarines (and there are a lot!), they basically chop out the nuclear reactor whole, then seal in a giant steel box, and bury it in an open trench. It called "Trench 94" at Hanford Site, Washington (state). You can read about it here[1]. The photos are weirdly dystopian. You can also see it on Google Maps here[2].
How do small modular reactors (SMRs) plan to decommission? Can they follow a similar route as the US Navy? Honestly, I don't know if the size is comparable, or if "sealed in a big steel box" will also work for SMRs.
In most sunny places a decentralized per-home solar policy is cheap, sustainable, and more robust to severe local weather events.
While fission reactors are still the cheaper initial energy choice (like a future cancer patients love of cheap cigarettes.) Small Modular reactors are a fools errand for most places, as they have all the same security, labor, and maintenance issues of full sized installations. Thus, instead of repairing one of four turbines every few years, the contaminated components must now be reprocessed or safely hidden away on mass.
Maybe fine for submarines or aircraft carriers, but for massive infrastructure it is trivial to prove it causes major long-term problems.
Anyone that has ever purchased a property with an old leaky heating-oil tank nasty surprise site-reclamation cost... will understand the initial unit price never covers the actual clean up cost. =3
Also, dealing with the nuclear waste can be problematic. Even if you recycle it like France, it still costs to re-enrich it and still produces waste itself.
In France, which has the most nuclearized electricity, 13% of the electricity bill is actually a tax to finance the subsidies to solar and wind power plants.
Nuclear is highly profitable, if you compare prices for 24x7 electricity (i.e., if comparing with solar, factor in the cost of energy storage at grid scale, or separate power generators able to provide for peak demand).
That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.
In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.
Given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and that the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 fleet are ruinously expensive France is unable to build competitive new nuclear.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Look up Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, it was 14 years late and (depending on whose figures you believe) cost nearly 10x more than the original estimate of €3 billion, bankrupting Areva in the process.
Solar and wind aren’t profitable either if you count the entire lifecycle including bill of materials, production, transportation, maintenance, and teardown for replacement.
At least it is greener and cheaper. Especially Solar cells have become incredibly cheap now. Combined with battery storage, it's far safer and cheaper than nuclear.
And in a territory affected from seismic activities, I would avoid nuclear at all
The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.
As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.
Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:
I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power.
And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).
Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.
My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.
I love renewables, especially solar with batteries, but I definitely see the tail risks of not having some amount of independent base load, for which nuclear seems like the best fit. The tail risk could materialize from different sources; could be an asteroid, nuclear war, weird weather patterns etc. nuclear would chug along in most of these conditions. So if I would be a policy maker or decision maker, I would definitely invest in nuclear and maintain an industry regardless of the initial cost. I would try to make it as cheap as possible.
Valcoe paper is written by the founder of antinuclear movement in Denmark(which led at ti becoming one of the highest coal burners), has wild assumptions about hydrogen getting basically free for firming
Australia's weather is different from what we got in Europe. And let's not pretend many of aemos estimations are already obsolete due to increased costs of transmission and hydro storage that are huilt.
Dk still has worse emissions vs france/sweden, just like SA
If you don't like nuclear, you'll have gas peakers, like Germany
Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues? Or the majority of the Eastern European due too hot or low rivers? Or half the Swedish fleet multiple times the last couple of years?
Please do tell what is wrong with the CSIRO GenCost.
There are scenarios where either can fail, that’s why it’s smart to have a multi pronged energy strategy. Maintain strong industries for being able to do both renewables and nuclear in house so you can hedge the tail risks of either of them. Not everything needs to have the most economically efficient model. As we’ve seen with the supply chain problems they happened during Covid, some things are more important than absolute cost.
"Multi pronged" works when different technologies complement each other. The problem is that renewables and nucelar power competes for the same slice, a battle nuclear loses with a mile. Any grid will include emergency reserves. But those optimize for lowest possible CAPEX and higher OPEX. Since they sit idle most of the time.
Nuclear power has the opposite spread of ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.
I would say the pandemic shows that you do not need to account for every possibility. Humanity is amazing at adapting itself and finding new solutions to the problem at hand, rather than wasting all our resources trying to prevent the next made up disaster.
This is why we model with 10 year winters, X00 year floods or similar. Fix reasonable problems, leave the tail risk as tail risk. The worst that happens are rolling blackouts until the grid adapts, which is no different than any other outage due to grid maintenance or someone cutting a cable with a digger.
OP (ViewTrick) is very well known in the online nuclear energy community. He is the moderator of the NuclearEnergy subreddit where he regularly bans people for saying positive things about nuclear energy.
I didn't downvote but it's nonsense, nobody can sustain a winter with batteries and other storage.
I only checked the first paper and it doesn't seem talk about what would happen if a 3 weeks bad wind event would happen in winter, and a rough look at the figures makes me think it just wouldn't work at all. I didn't check the other papers.
And the proof is in the pudding anyways, if it's that cheap and feasible to do, well let's see who's doing it.
I think he points to a valid point but completely over plays his hand. Everyone that has argued these kinds of points have brought valid arguments but have completely under estimated the pace of change.
Do keep in mind that Michaux is a fan of being a little contrarian. He likes the attention it being to him.
He might be right, and him pointing to the issues may actually be something that helps us avoid these issues. Generally, knowing about a problem is a much better position than being slammed by something you didn't anticipate.
I tend to think long term we are going to a much lower energy world, that we made the mistake of building a world and our expectations to the paradigm of fossil fuels. But I also think that we are not going back to the stone age and that renewables will do better than the pessimists. Good chance we will hit a reasonable mid-ground even if it means living standards change, possibly a smaller, slower but more intentional world. It may be nice even if it means you can no longer get a slab of Coke for an hours wage.
I think the complete opposite, we are going towards a high energy world, I expect the current electric grid to be multipled by 3, both to replace petrol and add new usage on top.
Which makes the whole "we'll build renewables and storage" sounds even more unrealistic
Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.
Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh
Countries should definitely evaluate LMRs (Large Modular Reactors) too. Most countries need large amounts of carbon free energy, not small amounts. And nuclear power plant economics have profited in the past from making larger, more powerful reactor units.
But yeah their most modern nuclear power plant was a BWR 4 with Mark II containment, which would probably not be worth modernizing instead of building a new GenIII+ PWR from scratch that lasts a century.
The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.
What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.
Yeah, the issue isn't knowing how to build small reactors, it's whether you can do so with enough economy of scale and learning to make it cheaper than conventional nuclear.
And I personally have switched from bull to bear on that. I was rooting for NuScale but they're hitting the same thing as everyone else.
Meanwhile, battery storage has been on an insane cost reduction curve.
If they can get Starship reliable enough, it'll definitely be successful even if it never goes to mars.
But despite SpaceX's huge successes with Falcon, that doesn't prove they'll cross the finish line with Starship. Falcon and specifically the Merlin engine made just about every choice they could in favor of risk reduction rather than the best possible performance. It was a continuation of work that Tom Mueller did while at TRW.
With Starship they're in more uncharted territory, especially the re-entry concept, and the engine has been designed under the opposite philosophy of trying to push limits.
They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.
Gotcha - yea I think it’s a good idea to try out these things.
I just hope it doesn’t become a ideological fight to make something work at any cost to fit a certain narrative (same goes for renewables of course)
Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime
Okay yeah as expected some people seem to be too fucking dumb, so I’ll expand a bit, in case someone bothers to read this later.
There are several different concepts being collapsed together here.
“Baseload is a myth” is mostly a semantic dodge. Base load is simply the minimum demand on the system. You do not need a special category of plant called a “baseload generator,” but you absolutely need enough firm capacity and energy to meet demand continuously, including when wind and solar are producing very little.
“The grid can handle peak load, therefore it can handle base load” confuses transmission capacity with generation availability. A grid capable of carrying 50 GW does not produce 50 GW. The engineering problem is having enough generation available at the exact hours when it is required.
And batteries do not make that problem disappear. They are excellent for frequency response, peak shaving and moving solar production from noon into the evening. But a battery is an energy buffer, not an energy source. During a prolonged shortage it can discharge only what was previously stored, and then it must recharge. Once the problem lasts several days rather than several hours, the amount of stored energy required becomes enormous.
Germany provides a very useful real-world example.
Germany began its nuclear phase-out under the 2000/2002 agreement, briefly extended reactor lifetimes in 2010, then accelerated the shutdown after Fukushima in 2011. The final three reactors closed in April 2023.
In 2008 German nuclear plants produced roughly 149 TWh of electricity. Germany subsequently built huge amounts of wind and solar, and those renewables have unquestionably displaced a great deal of fossil generation. But Germany eliminated its existing firm, low-carbon nuclear fleet while it was still burning very large quantities of coal and gas.
And then there is the problem Germans have an excellent word for: Dunkelflaute.
This is not some hypothetical edge case invented by nuclear advocates. Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur defines a Dunkelflaute as a period of at least 48 hours during which combined wind and PV generation remains below 15% of installed capacity. Low-wind periods are recurrent; analysis of four decades of German weather data found roughly a five-day period with average wind output below a 10% capacity factor in a typical year, with substantially longer events occurring less frequently.
Germany got a particularly good demonstration in November and December 2024. During two Dunkelflaute episodes, renewable production collapsed while demand remained high. Germany’s own Bundesnetzagentur says that almost the entire controllable power-plant fleet was brought into operation and that substantial electricity imports from neighbouring countries were required. The regulator concluded that Germany urgently needs additional controllable generation capacity for future Dunkelflauten.
That is basically the entire argument in one empirical example. When there is plenty of wind and sun, Germany can have extremely cheap electricity and sometimes negative wholesale prices. When the weather changes, the system suddenly needs the plants that supposedly became obsolete.
And the price swings are spectacular. Germany’s average day-ahead wholesale price in 2024 was about €79/MWh. During the November and December Dunkelflauten it exceeded €300/MWh for dozens of hours and reached approximately €936/MWh at the peak. The Bundesnetzagentur investigated whether those prices resulted from market manipulation and found no such explanation; the underlying condition was very low renewable production, high demand, extensive use of controllable thermal generation and limited remaining dispatchable capacity.
At the retail level Germany also remains one of Europe’s most expensive electricity markets. In the second half of 2025 a typical German household consuming 2,500–5,000 kWh paid €0.3869/kWh, compared with an EU average of €0.2896/kWh—about 34% more. Germany had the second-highest household electricity price in the EU after Ireland.
Those retail prices cannot honestly be attributed entirely to the nuclear phase-out or to renewables: taxes, levies, network costs, fuel prices and the consequences of the European gas crisis all matter. But neither can anyone point to Germany as evidence that a wind-and-solar-heavy system has somehow made firm generation economically irrelevant. Its own regulator is saying the opposite: when Dunkelflaute hits, Germany needs controllable generation and imports, and it says additional controllable capacity is urgently required.
What supplies that capacity today? Coal and gas remain substantial. Germany has zero domestic nuclear generation, yet it still burns coal and natural gas and participates in a European interconnected system containing large quantities of French and other nuclear generation.
So the actual German experiment is considerably less impressive than the slogan. Germany spent decades building an enormous renewable fleet while simultaneously destroying an existing fleet of firm low-carbon reactors. It succeeded in greatly increasing renewable generation and reducing coal use over the long run, but it did not abolish the requirement for firm generation. When wind and solar disappear together, Germany burns dispatchable fuels, imports electricity, draws on reserves and watches wholesale prices rise.
Which brings us back to the original question.
Once you accept that an electrical system requires firm energy during prolonged periods of inadequate intermittent generation, the menu becomes fairly obvious. Hydro and geothermal are excellent where geography permits them. Storage, transmission, demand response and renewable overbuilding all help. Countries fortunate enough to possess enormous reservoirs, geothermal resources or exceptionally strong interconnections can lean heavily on those advantages.
Those countries are not a universally reproducible model. A solution intended to work in most industrial countries has to survive winter demand, multi-day wind lulls, minimal solar production, droughts, transmission constraints and simultaneous weather patterns across neighbouring regions.
Under those conditions, you need some combination of renewables and firm generation. At present, for most countries without exceptional hydro or geothermal resources, large-scale firm generation means principally nuclear or combustion, with storage and interconnection reducing how much of it must run.
So yes: build wind and solar. Build batteries where they make economic sense. Build transmission. Use demand response. Exploit hydro and geothermal wherever available.
But after all of that, somebody still has to answer the boring engineering question: what produces electricity on the fifth cold, dark, windless day after the batteries have discharged?
“Baseload is a myth” does not answer it. “Batteries” does not answer it unless you specify the required energy capacity and how it is recharged. And Germany, of all countries, does not answer it: every serious Dunkelflaute demonstrates why it still maintains dispatchable fossil generation and depends on the wider European grid.
The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.
"France's largest electricity producer said the move was required to comply with environmental regulations."
This is a policy decision, not a technical limitation. Palo Verde has been operating in the Arizona heat for forty years: nuclear can handle situations of low/high-temp water.
It doesn’t matter what you think. What does the data tell us?
Won’t it also take decades and cost billions to roll out renewables to the extend that they can even put a dent in total energy usage? So I don’t see how that is even an argument.
It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
"as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill.
US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.
It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se.
The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x.
For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.
For a point of comparison, I understand the Fukushima plant survived the mag 9 earthquake just fine - but got damaged by the ensuing tsunami. Specifically, the water flooded the diesel generators for emergency cooling - and it went downhill from there.
Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?
Just like with skyscrapers in Taiwan, we can and have built earthquake-resistant nuclear power plants before. Fukushima only failed due to the tsunami water shorting transmission lines and the emergency generators. It withstood the earthquake itself fine.
wow, seems like Italy and Turkey are few places where you _would not_ want to go back to nuclear. Wild. I guess the old geezers approving this wouldn't even live to see the first meltdown anyway.
Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.
I'm Italian, too. A country with a weaker energy infrastructure is prone to being controlled better.
Italy lost WWII, and became a de facto protectorate/colony of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if behind the nuclear referendum in the 80s there way to gentle hand of US services.
> France and Switzerland shut down nuclear power plants amid scorching heatwave
Spain's reactors were fine. Regulations of cooling water discharge temperature are what are limiting the reactor output. Adding cooling towers to the power stations leads to a poorer condenser vacuum than river water, reducing electrical output by a few percent, but still a possibility. Whether it is economically worthwhile to retrofit cooling towers is another question.
It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?
It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.
This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.
> Wind and solar overtaking fossil fuels in 2025 can be largely attributed to a staggering rise in solar power. Solar grew by more than a fifth (+20.1%) for the fourth year running. It generated a record 13% of EU power in 2025, above both coal and hydro. This trend was widespread: all EU countries saw growth in solar generation compared to the year before, amid a huge expansion in EU solar installations. Solar provided more than a fifth of electricity in Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands. Renewables provided nearly half of EU power (48%) as unusual weather conditions caused hydro generation to fall by 12% and wind by 2%, but boosted solar generation. Wind remained the second largest EU electricity source at 17% of EU power, generating more than gas. Signs of a structural shift are clear across the EU, as wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil sources in 14 of the 27 EU countries in 2025. Over the past five years, wind and solar have experienced massive growth (from 20% in 2020 to 30% in 2025). Fossil fuels have fallen from 37% to 29% in the same period, while hydro and nuclear remained stable or slightly declined.
> certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.
> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.
The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).
So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.
Nuclear fuel rods get used for 1-2 years before they need to be replaced. This is much longer than it takes to burn a shipload of liquefied natural gas, though it's much shorter than it takes for solar panels or grid scale batteries to need replacement. Both nuclear energy and renewable energy are less sensitive to supply shocks than fossil energy, even if Europe doesn't reduce the percentage of its energy needs that depend on imports.
It would cost a bit more is the worst case if you had to build your own centerfuges, uranium is not all that rare. And a single ship could carry a decades worth of fuel (not that I recommend a decade of fuel on a single ship), so even if shipping was costly it would be cheap compared to the actual fuel refinement. You couldn't Hormuz a uranium fuel supply because it doesn't take thousands of ships or miles of pipeline to deliver.
So maybe not worry free, but if you are able to run nuclear reactors for power to start with, obtaining fuel for them in any scenario shouldn't be impossible. You got atleast a year or two lead time between refuelings, and it might be able to be stretched a little longer in an emergency. And even more time if you hold some in reserve.
Australia and Canada are top producers of uranium ore, and uranium ore is a small fraction of total lifecycle costs. Given a ~2 year refuelling cycle and the possibility of stockpiling uranium, this is very far from an interruption to oil and gas flows - which you need a continuous supply of. Security isn't just a function of autarkic raw material supplies.
>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,
That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.
The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.
Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
>t's that or buying gas from Russia.
Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.
And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?
> Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident. Pollution from coal plants running normally causes 1 million premature deaths per year. The deepwater horizon spill was a $100 billion disaster with an environmental impact greater than any nuclear incident. The Centralia fires in PA are still burning after over 60 years and lead to a town being abandoned. Nuclear is not uniquely risky by any rational metric.
>The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident.
The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding. Estimates range from 26000 to 240000 people dead, but rationally one has to assume the typhoon would have caused some damage in these areas even without the dams.
So claiming this was a single hydro dam causing 250 000 dead is hardly rational.
If you live in a narrow valley downstream from a dam you are aware of the danger. You as an individual can take action to protect yourself. If you live upstream by even 10 feet you are in no danger at all from the dam.
With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.
Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also it wasn't a power plant, not even indirectly as oil is mostly used for transportation, not electricity. Chernobyl and Fukushima were power plants.
So again, there is just no comparison between nuclear plants and any other power plant. Nuclear really does have a unique level of risk.
Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood, and for nuclear the consequence is immense. Meaning effort has to be spent keeping the likelihood extremely small, in order for the risk to be low.
This has to be accepted and considered in any discussion about nuclear power. Pretending it doesn't exist is not rational.
> The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding.
So we're not counting natural disasters that cause power infrastructure failure? I take it you don't consider the events of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to be a nuclear accident then.
> With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.
And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China, and will be until the world stops burning coal.
> Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima.
It was much worse in terms of environmental impact, particularly the area impacted.
> Also it wasn't a power plant
I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.
> Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood
I was being generous in only looking at consequences without considering likelihood. The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives, but the likelihood has been astronomically less, hence Nuclear has been the safest power source ever utilized by mankind. So yes, in a way nuclear's risk is unique - uniquely low. I fully agree this should be accepted and considered in any discussion.
>So we're not counting natural disasters that cause power infrastructure failure? I take it you don't consider the events of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to be a nuclear accident then.
Of course not, if I did that's 20 000 dead from a "nuclear accident" right there. But that would be dishonest and silly, and I aim for rationality.
>And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China
Not even if you assign all the blame of global warming to chinese coal plants would this be even remotely true.
>I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.
You responded to a claim that no other power plant represent as great a risk at a nuclear power plant.
Maybe you should have created a new thread saying something like "a nuclear plant is not as bad as the entire fossil fuel industry worldwide"? ;-)
>The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives
You completely ignored the facts that clearly tell you that the consequences are orders of magnitude worse.
So you are in a phase where coal is safer than nuclear? Sorry but that's bullshit. German early nuclear phaseout did already cause due to pollution half of total nr of estimated deaths from Chernobyl per UN assuming LNT is true at low doses. It's you that are ignoring facts and spread literally fossils fuel propaganda to justify your antinuclear position
>So you are in a phase where coal is safer than nuclear?
The permanent truth phase yes. Coal is so much safer than nuclear that a comparison is hardly meaningful.
Let me put it this way - If coal power plants were run with as much security as nuclear plants they wouldn't kill mosquitoes sleeping in their chimneys.
If nuclear power plants were run with as little security as coal plants however, we would not be here to have this discussion.
You seem to be well aware of the dangers of fossil fuels, but you come across as entirely ignorant of the dangers of nuclear power. Good decisions need knowledge of both.
I'm as anti coal as I am anti nuclear because both are terrible ideas. Renewables, batteries, e-fuels and other storage options are here now. They're better, faster, cheaper, safer. Let's do that.
The statement about getting 70% from Russia is total bullshit
What non zero chance of millions of casualties? Chernobyl, a shit design that weren't allowed in the west even then is estimated to kill about 4k in total. In Fukushima the number is zero or 1 deaths from radiation due to low dose. And that's old gen2 reactor striken by tsunami and earthquake
I've seen what antinuclear europe does to remove the weakness of renewables - subsidies for new gas peakers in Germany
It's not, the estimated production cost for existing swiss nuclear plants is 4-6 centimes per kWh, which is already expensive electricity and frequently higher than the market prices today. That is also the self-cost price, meaning whenever the market pays less for electricity, ch nuclear plants lose money.
And as always, swiss taxpayers cover that loss so you won't ever see it in the operators financial reports.
Also worth noting is that EDF in France sells for 7 cents after being bailed out when sellng at 4 cents. This is not cheap electricity.
> What non zero chance of millions of casualties?
Just to take one trivial example:
If nobody is able to refill the water in spent fuel pools at any nuclear plant, they will catch fire. Assuming a radial spread of the fallout it will be near guaranteed lethal for at least 50 miles, probably lethal for some 500 miles, and you "won't want to live there" for even further than that. And this will remain the case for millennia to decades, depending on weather and distance.
So basically 500 miles radius, uninhabitable for several generations if you run out of water.
Then consider that Switzerland is covered by a circle of some 120 miles, and has a population of several million.
Do you think the 4-6 centimes per kWh covers a scenario like that? I don't. Good thing Switzerland has lots of water...
4-6ct/kwh is dirt cheap. It's so cheap that even curtailing renewables to let it run more instead of using gas peakers is cheaper
And it's far from being higher than avg market prices today in Switzerland, where did you get this nonsense?
The price includes their profit margin. Even if they sell at lower, they'll still make profit, just less.
The claim about swiss taxpayers is bullshit, please stop spreading it, there's no proof to this whatsoever. Swiss nuclear plants operation is not subsidized.
Edf was not bailed out. It was renationalized (albeit state was always majority owner) to push for construction of epr2. EDF debt to EBITDA is healthy. It made profit pretty much every single year despite arenh, except 2022. EDF could definitely operate their npp more profitable but that's another story.
But even if we assume that 9bn transaction was a subsidy, do you realize it's merely half of what Germany is spending for EEG alone EACH YEAR?
"If nobody is able to refill the water in spent fuel pools at any nuclear plant, they will catch fire. Assuming a radial spread of the fallout it will be near guaranteed lethal for at least 50 miles, probably lethal for some 500 miles, and you "won't want to live there" for even further than that. And this will remain the case for millennia to decades, depending on weather and distance."
Please refrain from spread utter bullshit again. Not only you don't comprehend under what conditions used fuel catches fire or that if by some absurd reason nobody can cool the spent fuel to avoid boiling, something much more terrible happened, but catching fire/melting doesn't mean it'll be a fallout. It's clear you are antinuclear person and enjoy fossils. You don't need to invent bullshit to firm your position.
Land is not uninhabitable. Heck, even in freaking Chernobyl animals are thriving. Try saying the same about german coal mines
>And it's far from being higher than avg market prices today in Switzerland, where did you get this nonsense?
It's not nonsense but you made a different statement than I.
Switzerland doesn't use market prices. Electricity in Switzerland is regulated so they pay vastly more than the european market at most times.
This Sunday for example, Germany enjoyed spot wholesale prices of 2 centimes per kWh while Switzerland had 12. You can verify the German prices on nordpool and an equivalent swiss energy market site.
Citizens in Switzerland pay much more than wholesale, averaging over 20 centimes last year. They are forced to do so by regulations.
When you force your population, aka the taxpayers, to pay 5-10x as much for electricity as it costs in the open market you using taxpayer money to subsidize electricity.
You follow?
>Edf was not bailed out. It was renationalized
Thats synonymous, and it was actually the second time EDF were bailed out, France had to pay for the overruns on the plant in Finland too. Lucky Finland!
The mechanism varies by country, but the bottom line is that taxpayers always have to pay for nuclear. They have no choice.
There is no option to walk away, you can't leave it, it has to be taken care of. Every other power plant you can shut down and walk away but nuclear is, again, unique in this respect.
When all the swiss nuclear operators go bankrupt, the swiss will still have to pay people to operate the plants, or decommision them, and then store the waste, for longer than Rolex has existed as a company.
Nobody else will. So it's the taxpayers, always.
>by some absurd reason nobody can cool the spent fuel to avoid boiling,
Absurd reasons are not that uncommon. War for example. Also, landslides, earthquakes, terrorists, pandemics, sinkholes. Stupid politicians. Lots of things. Non-zero.
>something much more terrible happened,
The spent fuel fire will be the most terrible thing that happened that day, unless the cause was an actual nuclear weapon strike.
Or well, since it's Switzerland I guess CERN could have come up with something worse but I can't imagine what. ;-)
Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.
It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.
To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.
Conspiracy hat time: I think this is the main reason it's being pushed so hard. The US and Russia feel threatened by the rise of renewables and will do anything to get countries dependent on them again.
This isn't right, in fact one of the main reasons for building nuclear power plants is independence from politically unstable places like Russia and the Mideast.
There are some better mines in different areas of course, but it is available across most of the planet. Processing it is way harder than finding a source of it, but that is also a solved problem, you just gotta put in the capital to build it.
But it also secures your energy needs independent from anybody else and still scales. Solar lasts a long time, but not nearly as many countries have the minerals for building more panels and batteries as they do uranium refinement.
What? Solar panels last virtually forever. The oft-quoted 25 years is for a 30% efficiency loss, they actually last way longer.
Any country that can figure out uranium processing can figure out solar panel production, and they are made entirely from common materials with advanced processing steps. Silicon is literally the most abundant element on the planet; other main ingredients include glass, aluminium (or any other support material) and copper (or any ither conductive material). The most obscure material you'd need is some kind of dopant, of which you have several alternative choices if you don't have access to the best ones for some reason. Solar cells are literally sheets of treated silicon sandwiched between conductors - they're not like microchips.
> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment
... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
> and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
It's perfectly figured out. Just entomb it in concrete and store it on site. All spent nuclear fuel to date combined would quite comfortably fit in an average Walmart parking lot. It's a complete non-issue. And if we'd get really desperate, the spent fuel could be re-enriched.
2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;
3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);
4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;
5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;
6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;
7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;
8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;
9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";
10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and
11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.
> No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost.
Do fossil fuel plants pay co2 costs, or insurance costs for killing the planet? Well, it wouldn't make any sense, since it's not accidents that kill in that case, but the steady state.
The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
About waste: somehow, this is a solved problem (at scale) ? Fast breeder reactor, half life ~= 30 years (IIRC)
From your message, I understand that your country fails to build nuclear plant in a timely fashion but that other (china) can. Seems like a lack of skill/willingness to me, not a technical issue.
We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.
I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
> I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
I mean, you need to radiation-harden your structural materials and electronics for both fission and fusion, and some hypothetical antimatter reactor is probably using an evolutionary version of EM confinement techniques from fusion.
But, yes, fission reactors are ultimately kind of ooga-booga (put a pile of metal in some water and run a steam engine) that's hard to characterize as on track for something sci-fi like an antimatter reactor.
> Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Trivially. If we push hard, more than three orders of magnitude are possible (even for overall energy use, which is itself around an order of magnitude more than electricity), even without launching anything to orbit.
IMO it's much better if we go to space after the first of those orders of magnitude, rather than pursuing K1 on the ground.
> I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
Solar is as likely as fission to lead to either of these things. Each of the four is a different beast.
Solar is also the only way to scale up to a K2, which would trivially obviate both even when the ships' primary propulsion is solar (laser) sails.
If you're asking why we would want to progress as a species, I suppose that's a rather subjective question. I like the idea of materially improving the lives of humans. That includes scientific discoveries, curing ageing and other diseases, space exploration and interplanetary colonisation, material abundance like unlimited food, etc. We don't achieve this unless we make major technological advancements, and this requires major new sources of energy.
Why shouldn't our civilization be defined by how efficiently we use the energy we gather? Or the lifespan and health of our citizens?
Claiming that the sum of a civilization is how much energy it controls is just a meme from the 50's. It's a shitty, short-sighted metric. One that would consider building a nuclear reactor and dumping the power into a bank of resistors as contributing "more progress" than growing abundant food, or protecting the ecosystem.
It's our civilization, we can define progress however we want.
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
Only a tiny fraction of the Federation's population is part of Star Fleet. There are only a few thousand star ships scattered over thousands of light years. Crew complements are rather small, so at most a single-digit million people are on Star Fleet ships. That's comparable to the size of just the current US military personnel but the Federation has hundreds of planets and many billions of people.
You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.
It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged.
I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.
You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.
Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true.
The industrial revolution begot the labor movement, which is what caused greater freedom.
It could do that because of the dependence on labor for production, or in other words leverage over the ownership class.
If we accelerate technology to the point where we sever this dependency, all those freedoms will no longer have the leverage required to extract them. Our lives didn't become not worthless because of the steam machine. They became not worthless because of leverage over capital reproduction, and once that's gone they may well become worthless again.
Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
I think you're both right in different ways. Some labour movements were not dependent on technological advancement. Some technological advancements materially and independently improved the lives of people. The contraceptive pill gave women much greater control over the timing of pregnancy. [Its diffusion substantially affected women's investment in professional careers and the timing of marriage.](https://www.nber.org/papers/w7527) Medical and reproductive technologies played an important role in increasing married women's ability to participate in paid work. Those are changes in actual individual choice brought about, in significant part, by technology.
However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.
> However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.
This is somewhat overstating the case, though I currently agree "the abundance must come first".
Capitalism, as it was understood when the Communist Manifesto was written, i.e. laissez-faire, basically doesn't exist any more. A large subset of what the Communist Manifesto called for is now so widespread even in "capitalist" nations that the absence of those things is considered a sign of being a failed state.
Yes, there are three primary examples of Communism absolutely failing, hard: Four Pests, Holodomor, and Pol Pot.
The Communist Manifesto was written during the famous potato famine. Less famously, the impact of the blight hurt the Irish much more than other places that were also using potatoes as staple crops, and the British Government of the era (which controlled Ireland) was pursuing laissez-faire capitalism at the time.
Similar (that a capitalist regime was in charge) can be said about subsequent famines in India before independence.
Some say that Communism ended with the USSR, that while modern China uses the name "Communist" for their one-party state it is really state-capitalism. By this standard, capitalism (as the term was understood by Marx et al) ended gradually, with most of the change roughly in the era containing both Roosevelt's New Deal taking root in the USA and the UK's Labour Party replacement of the Liberal Party's position in Westminster.
So I think abundance completely changes the game and I think we can all agree on that.
I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
Labor will no longer be required for their productive needs, so that handful of people that controls the abundance machines will no longer have any incentive to keep the rest of humanity satisfied, or even alive for that matter.
In other words, if we don't change social relations before we get to this state, we will end up in a world where the Musks, Bezos and Zucks of this world control all material production, with the rest of us reduced to being dependent on their charity.
Personally, that sounds like the worst dystopia imaginable.
I will give you that prior attempts at socialism weren't necessarily successful and a lot of people died, however, I also think that argument requires holding one eye shut.
People are dying from capitalism right now. There's a homeless guy in SoMa that is breathing his last breath as we speak. There's entire villages in Africa that can't afford clean water while Nestle sells it in plastic bottles that pollute our planet. The status quo is not without its own violence and I think that is a point that too often gets swept under the rug.
Either way though, I think even if I were to concede that capitalism historically had better outcomes (which I have not been fully sold on! it's positives have just been more articulated imo, but that's another debate.), we are in a critical moment right now.
If we really believe we're to transition into a post-scarcity world, we need to make sure the right social relations are in place before that happens and whatever we have right now is locked in forever.
All criticism of socialism's supposed productive ineffectiveness becomes irrelevant once the transition is done anyways.
> I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
It's a valid concern. We use democracy right now to address inequality. Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
Perhaps this is more of a regional risk? There are some nations which culturally value individuality. I'm not sure the U.S. would build national abundance machines.
I think I broadly agree with your thesis, however. Abundance is going to force massive social change. If goods and services are effectively free, most jobs disappear. So too does their income and consumer demand, which destroys the entire premise of capitalism. You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
When Middle American manufacturing jobs were offshored to China, Hilary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." I fear many more people whose jobs are lost to AI will be met with similar derision. It is only when things get very bad that change will occur. The Star Trek timeline describes this collapse between 2020s-2053.
> Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources?
Even though I'm not too concerned about that specifically, that is clearly a plan they have. [0]
> To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
> You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
I, too, am worried about the transition, but for different reasons. I believe Elon when he says he believes capitalism will end in a few decades. However, I don't think he has prosperity for all in mind and that end state won't just naturally happen by itself.
I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
That, to me, is the core transition risk we need to manage. We need to make sure abundance machines aren't just a device for completely centralizing power in the hands of a few.
> I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
I understand. I place less weight into this risk. The current AI supply chain is so globally interdependent that it has effectively distributed itself beyond centralised control. China has received the full weight of global chip sanctions and still somehow manages to provide competitive coding models using either grey imports, offshore cloud compute, or locally produced chips. It would be very difficult (and I would argue almost impossible) for a nation and especially an individual/company to seize ownership of the entire supply chain and prevent everyone else in the world from producing their own AI/chips/abundance machines.
> I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
No doubt many people in positions of power are megalomaniacs. This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.
> This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.
I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
You see both of these in action right now. Think of Elon Musk actively defying Brazilian rule of law [0] or him literally being put into a position where he can neuter the institutions designed to hold him democratically accountable with the DOGE appointment.
To quote MLK - "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
I think fundamentally one cannot disentangle democratic control of political power from democratic control of the economy, because economic power can be converted into political power and as long as we let economic power concentrate in the hands of a few unelected oligarchs, they will continue to use it to exert political power as well.
> I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
I agree there is a risk, and I think defence of democracy should be at the forefront of fighting against the future you fear. I do not think the risk appears at the end of a gun. Rather, via propaganda and corruption. We know how effective propaganda can be, starting with Goebbels and all the way through to social media today. The problem here is that there is no clearly defined solution. Some people prescribe state control of information, which has historically resulted in catastrophic outcomes. Some people prescribe uncensored information to the greatest degree possible, and to the degree we have that today, it's also not working out very well. Perhaps this will be the great question of our time.
For the record, re DOGE, I see that as the people getting what they voted for. Musk campaigned clearly on his intended actions, and for better or worse, a plurality of voters voted for that. We should be careful not to criticise democracy just because voters chose a different direction. However I think this is partly influenced by what I describe above.
> And 30 years ago you could still afford a house.
It is the people, who had build houses 30 years ago, and who set a price for those houses. Then came the government and start to regulate, redistribute, optimize and improve housing. And We live with the results.
> Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit.
And as a drunk, who got to this stage in the aftermath of WW3, which was definitely not post-scarcity at this point because of how hard it was to "scrounge together enough titanium for the cockpit".
And immediately after the test flight, some pointy-eared vegetarian space Buddhists landed and said hi.
> It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
TOS is very much "space is an ocean". NCC-1701 is very obviously a shoe-in for CVN-65, the "colonies" and other locations they visit are scaled more like Pacific islands than planets, the episode with Romulan cloaking device is classic submarine warfare filmography including getting people to be quiet (so the space sonar wouldn't pick them up?)
TNG kept a lot of this, but was also "families on board" from the get-go.
Are you really going to keep on trying to defend the notion that the human society portrayed in Star Trek is not socialist? (In The Next Generation, no human investors, traders or financiers are ever depicted, and human society did away with money. Socialist countries have militaries, too.)
The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.
I regret publishing that second paragraph. I knew (or would've known if I had been paying sufficient attention) it would offend many in this audience, and I should've held my tongue.
But I really do believe that Star Trek, specifically the parts that Roddenberry personally oversaw (namely the original series and the first four seasons of The Next Generation) had a very negative effect on the world.
In addition to making some viewers more committed to socialist ideology[1] Roddenberry's Star Trek made many committed to the ideology of technological progress.
Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
[1] In a (private) debate with me, a committed socialist asserted that a successful transition to socialism would result in a society much like the one depicted in Star Trek. Since it is very unlikely that he engaged in many debates about socialism before his debate with me, the reason he believed that that assertion might make me warm to socialism is probably because it had contributed to his own warming to socialism.
> Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
I think you may have fallen victim to a common misconception of how ideology actually functions.
The most affected by ideology aren't the ones consciously committing to a cause. Ideology is strongest precisely when you think you're outside of it - when your ideological commitments have become so normalized that they are completely invisible to you.
There is no such thing as being unideological, whatever you perceive as such is just a reflection of your own ideology.
If you'd like to delve deeper into the theory of ideology and how it functions, I'd recommend the works of philosophy legend and ideology expert Slavoj Zizek.
There's his seminal work, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which goes into this at depth, but is a very dry and academic read. If you'd like something a bit more digestible, I would recommend the movie The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which uses a more pop-sci approach of dissecting popular movies to demonstrate their ideological function.
I'm pointing at a different thing in the world than you're pointing at.
One reason I know they're different is that the thing I'm pointing at is vastly less influential in some people than other, so much so that it clearly makes sense to call some people "unideological" or if one is being tediously precise "almost completely unideological".
Everyone is strongly influenced by their language, their culture and the family they grew up in. Not everyone has even a weak commitment to an ideology.
I'm willing to switch to a different term for the thing I'm interested in, but I haven't been able to come up with one.
That’s not what I said. I said that the human society portrayed in Star Trek had warp drive before it had socialism. Viewed charitably, it reflects how society might plausibly be structured when technology renders questions of resource or capital allocation largely moot.
You're right. I had something I really wanted to say, which would have fit into
the conversation if you had said something somewhat similar but actually quite
different from what you actually said, but I overlooked the difference so that
I could say what I really wanted to say.
In other words, I sacrificed the
quality of the conversation (namely, I introduced not only a tangent, but also a tangent rooted in a
confusion) so that I could express some thought that had risen to salience in my solitary mind. My doing that made the conversation worse, and the conversation is what matters, not whether I got to express myself in a way that is quick and easy for me.
Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
> The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.
And the nuclear power boosters, especially the SMR fans, are riding in the data center slipstream. All kinds of debunked ideas have seen a chance for revival in the AI bubble.
I'm no fun because I've spent a lot of time doing critical path analysis in projects. A lot of planned data centers will never power up because the lead time for gas turbines is a few years now. You can't expect the first SMR to power a data center to come online with in 10 years. And while Bloom has done impressive work making a credible methane fuel cell, they have only a slim chance of scaling up their production to power the big Oracle data center in New Mexico.
There is an exasperating amount of BS to call out on this planet even before we get to wild promises of what's going to be put into orbit or on the moon or on Mars,
Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.
I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.
> It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.
People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.
That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.
My argument was that while waiting for renewables to become cheap, we could have built nuclear instead of fossil capacity and avoided a shitton of emissions. The Messmer plan being an existence proof that such a thing would have been possible.
Wether we like it or not power generation at this scale is political. And whilst the culture war stuff is rubbish we can't escape the fact that these questions exist on dozens of different dimensions and include things like economics, politics, emotional, human factors, the environment etc. ultimately the argument needs to be won rather than settled.
Time and demographics are also a component. Italy is old, has worker shortages for living wage work (and is currently issuing ~500k work visas over three years to attract labor to the market), and a new nuclear generator takes at least ten years to build. Each year, an additional 1TW of solar will be deployed globally. Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled.
> 49% of Italy’s electricity was generated from low-carbon sources in 2025, below the EU average of 71%. As of 1 January 2026, Italy was aiming for 69% of renewable electricity generation by 2030. For the country’s latest renewables targets, see our 2030 Global Renewable Target Tracker.
Record 2026 summer heat impaired nuclear generation in France, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, so I'd be curious how they intend to solve for that as the climate continues to warm (reduced capacity factor from reduced output due to cooling constraints impairs the economics).
Nuclear power plants are uninsurable in the private market. There is no natural investor base for a product that is uninsurable. Unless you are an imagining a culture war where real capitalists are fighting corporate welfare queens, it's not a culture war issue.
The German study is not undisputed, but the opposing side was funded by nuclear industry, while the original study was done by insurance providers and aligns with the Japanese results.
Neither study considered terror, or hybrid warfare as additional risks.
Given the amount of sabotage we see in Europe at the moment, premiums would probably be even higher.
Are large hydro dams insured for the total costs of catastrophic flood event?
A typical third-party liability insurance cap for large hydroelectric dams ranges from $50 million to $100 million per occurrence, with major facilities stacking excess liability layers well beyond that.
Dam failures can cause very large costs. The 2015 Fundão tailings dam breach:
"
On 25 October 2024, mining companies BHP and Vale signed an agreement with the Brazilian government to pay nearly US$30 billion in compensation over the Mariana Dam collapse. The terms include $18 billion in funding for public authorities and $5.6 billion in additional compensation, resettlement, and environment restoration.
"
1975 Banqiao Dam failure, Deaths 26,000–240,000. Property damage: 62 dams collapsed, more than 5 million houses collapsed, 10.75 million people affected
For sabotage in Europe, I would be much more worry about security of hydro dams, chemical facilities and water supply. They are much more weakly protected then nuclear power plants.
There was not only massive amounts of ecological damage due to russian destruction of the Kakhovka Dam (which was a war crime), but also at least 59 people died. This would be impossible at Chornobyl because nobody lives around it.
In Germany liability was covering 2.5bn+ full assets of owners. I still find it funny how germans are concerned about nuclear when each 2y the same nr of ppl die as total estimation for Chernobyl (if we assume LNT is correct at low dosages). Yet nobody demands full cars ban. Even funnier considering Germany is still burning coal and approved subsidies for new gas peakers
Your document shows 10.9 ct/kWh normalised production cost for 2025 (roughly double the ~5 ct of a normal year, because the plant was offline half the year). That shows how exposed such a plant is when it's offline; and running an existing, paid-off plant built in the 1970s, like the one you linked, is a very different thing from building a new one today.
Burning coal sure is stupid, but so is being stuck in the outdated idea that we need either coal or nuclear for baseload. Solar, wind and storage are much cheaper, more flexible and far faster to build (a year or two, not 15+). IMO that's a much better answer than starting some SMR pipe dream now. 10 or 20 years ago it would have been different, but there's no point clinging to a solution just because it made sense back then, and was rejected for the wrong reasons.
So you see that avg opex price is cheap, thanks for acknowledging. That was the statement, not that in new plants power is more expensive because they need to repay loan (which is balooned due to delays)
We need firm power. This isn't outdated. That's also why Germany approved subsidies for new gas plants, which were recommended even by Fraunhofer ISE
Basically either you build a mix like france/nordics and get very low emissions or you are stuck with vre+bess+gas combo like Germany.
Or, if you are convinced VRE are enough, provide an estimation/simulation for German grid based on existing data of last decade (capacity factors/demand)- how much vre+bess is needed to ditch firm fossils fully
I agree with everything you said but want to add some more about the Price-Anderson Act. It does a few things:
1. It caps the liability for an incident at a single reactor. It goes up with inflation and I believe it's currently $500 million;
2. It establishes an industry-wide secondary self-insurance fund for broader incidents and caps liability. I believe the current theoretical value is $15-20 billion; and
3. In the event of a wider incident, the per-reactor liability cap is lower than (1). I believe it's $150 million.
So who pays if an incident exceeds these caps? The government does. These are either entirely or largely privately owned. Why exactly are we subsidizing private providers this way while enjoying none of the profits?
Now go and look at the cleanup costs of either Chernobyl or Fukushima. The latter is going to take decades, possibly a century, and the costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Chernobyl is probably higher.
Yet these get hand-waved away by nuclear advocates despite there being 2 major events when fewer than 700 nuclear plants have been built (and I believe that includes non-power plants).
Take coal, then. The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But you focus on one single thing: Oil spills. The grandparent comment talks of fossile fuels. What about co2?
Co2 has been leaking out into the atmosphere for many years. You know what happens to it? It stays around basically forever, kills enormously (directly and indirectly), and in fact causes a spiralling effect.
In my opinion the best argument for nuclear power is not money, but environmental.
The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But also: What is the cost of non-nuclear's raising of co2 levels and climate change?
The environmental argument would be to reduce coal as quickly as possible.
Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.
Which is an economic argument, too. It's merely not been priced in yet.
Yup. I guess we still disagree if nuclear is needed long term for Dunkelflaute, and for countries with darker winters.
It's one thing to use storage for overnight. Another if it's for a couple of weeks. And yet another for 6 months.
And take Sweden: Lots of hydro power yes, but where it can feasibly & economically be built, it already has. You can't expand it. And that's not even mentioning that all you need is a drought in winter, and you can no longer rely on it. Currently Sweden is backed by coal plants in Germany. But we need to plan for it being Dunkelflaute in Germany and Italy, at least enough to not have surplus for the nordics.
As for "it's always sunny somewhere", sure, but you need to get it there, somehow. Transmission is why electricity prices in Sweden can be "more than infinity percent" more expensive in south of Sweden compared to north. (electricity prices in the north has gone as far as negative), and is why data centers are built near power plants, or at least it's part of DC location planning.
If transmission costs were negligible then we wouldn't need to take power into account for DC placement. I have some rants about this related to how some DCs are away from population centers to save money on power, noticeably sacrificing latency to the actual end users.
The zonal pricing differences in Sweden are mostly a mathematical mirage. The cheap zones 1 and 2 are combined together only a third of the demand of zone 3.
If you waved a magic wand and combined them with infinite transmission for free the price in the expensive area with all the people and energy demand would barely move. (It would disproportionately rise in the cheap zones).
So any sane approach wouldn't spend money shifting the small amount of surplus power from the cheap region but spend the same money on say offshore wind feeding into the expensive zone. This is basically the pitch for zonal pricing, it tells you where demand and supply are needed. Building lots of transmission until the price is the same everywhere defeats the purpose. Building lots of offshore wind was the actual plan but most of those got rejected on bogus national security grounds.
The rejected wind farms would have doubled the entire country's generation.
For China, coal power generation is the bedrock of electric production. They have plenty of coal reserves and are building a plenty of new coal power plants.
But there is one positive change. 2025 was the first year in history of China when solar energy production increased more then increase in coal, gas or oil energy production.
From google translate
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Depending on the probability of such an event occurring, the annual premium varies between €0.01 and €305.83, based on a mean total insured sum of approximately €6,090 billion. If the entire insured sum were to be provided over a period of 100 years, the annual insurance premium per nuclear power plant would amount to €19.5 billion.
"""
No mention where the 6.09T EUR (presumably 2011) cost comes from. Given the stated insurance premium of 19.5B EUR power station per year I would naively expect such a cataclysm to happen perhaps once every 300 years. The global reactor fleet has been running for at least 19,000 years (https://www.ans.org/cdn/policy/statements/docs/ps51.pdf); the two IAEA INES level 7 accidents relating to nuclear power stations were Chernobyl and Fukushima, and cost nothing like 6T EUR. Therefore the numbers in the insurance study do not align with what is observed.
>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.
>The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.
Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.
I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?
I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.
Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that.
France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.
We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.
They were already safer than coal...by several orders of magnitude. A Chernobyl level disaster every single year would have killed fewer people than coal power. The level of safety you are describing has literally killed millions of people.
Commoditizing the existing reactors of 40-50 years ago would have lead to a dramatically better world than we currently live in, with cheaper power, essentially defeated climate change, better air quality, and fewer premature deaths associated with that air quality.
They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them.
You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.
At least these installations don't need to deal with radioactive material directly, so they will have the same financial infact as similar improvements to, say, coal-fired power plants.
> We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.
Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.
You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.
Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on.
There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.
New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs
Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer.
The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.
Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.
It will reliably cost only 10x, and it theory it will roll of a production line.
The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle were explicitly marked for the modular construction as a key selling feature, which would reduce time and cost. It came out 20B over budget and 7 years late.
It's a great story: in theory you can produce modular components of a full scale nuclear power plant in a controlled environment. In theory.
In practice the production line wasn't as controlled as it needed to be and ended up delivering modules that needed significant rework. That caused modules to be delivered and ready out of order. In other words they bought a lot of project management complexity that was hidden behind the theory of modularity.
SMRs are turning out to be even more expensive than conventional nuclear power plants, which are so expensive compared to renewables that even without a risk premium they are uncompetitive.
Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements
AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.
Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.
Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.
Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units.
> Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C
Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late.
These are terrible results.
That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun.
The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.
That is why even Flameville 3 was cheaper than Hinkley point C, not that it was cheap.
Flameville 3 is the first reactor for France in 21st century and suffers the frequency problem I am arguing. It was a path finder therefore only one was ever ordered. EPR2 is 6 under construction and France does have a track record of doing it consistently at scale for cheap(by nuclear standards).
The Asian giants all do it for cheaper because they build regularly, Japan (post Fukushima policy direction notwithstanding) and South Korea achieve overnight numbers of $5-6M/MW or less, so does China.
Regular construction is key, to the industry having a chance, without SMR that is never realistic anymore.
The most annoying thing about Hinkley Point C is that after all the delays and investments, the electricity it generates won’t even be cheap. £133/MWh!
Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind farm is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.
Overnight costs do not get impacted by guaranteed purchase price or subsidy for it neither does it include interest rates. It is a specific aspect of the TCO.
Nobody is saying nuclear is cheap it is not - we will be building a plant once in while for pure strategic reason no matter the cost anyway. The point is construction cost comes down per MW with higher frequency of plant building, and this is the case SMRs, we can get cheaper construction both Per MW and overall TCO in absolute dollar terms relative to large plants with SMRs.
There is no economic case for SMR that you couldn't make for a larger one with a massive benefit of economies of scale. SMRs are - in my opinion - a dead end, larger reactors could work well but will be delivered later and likely will still not be profitable on a KWh basis when compared to an equivalent installed base of solar and wind and will most likely be deliver much, much later.
Wright’s law is the only way to reduce costs. It’s a generalization of Moore’s law. The more of anything you build the cheaper it gets. Most products get 10% - 20% cheaper every time total production volume doubles. The most obvious example right now is rockets - launch costs are going down exponentially because we (SpaceX mostly) are doing so much of it we are finally getting economies of scale. SMRs will too, but only if they become popular. It’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but the economics are clear. If lots of people start using SMRs they WILL get cheap. And it’s a form factor where it’s plausible lots of people will.
That's another interesting theory, but Wright's law doesn't mitigate many other disadvantages of SMRs: the need for multi site security; the need for on-site technicians at more sites; the need to build grid hook up to more locations, etc. There's a reason reactors grew to a certain size, no smaller and no bigger. Ignoring that lesson has a high price.
Main idea: license once, then repeat and repeat. Scale. The cost to produce energy from one single SMR is higher than fomr a classical PWR (diving output per full buidling cost) but that cost is reduced once you start scaling (all the costs associated with initial license are amortized).
Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.
In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.
This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.
I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.
I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.
>massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather.
Italy has all that right across the pond.
And no energy source can beat solar on the speed of build out. And when it comes to the energy the next few years is all about build out [for AI]. Countries who get it right - like China, look at their solar and new datacenters getting powered by it, may be US if the required thinking wins - are going to lead the world in the near to mid-term future, the rest are going to be struggling seconds.
Building nuclear today in the energy field is like building tanks in military whereis solar is like drones - i.e. we have choice between 2 classic paradigms - very limited vertical scalability with extremely costly units vs. unlimited horizontal scalability of extremely cheap units.
nuclear is a great option for ice breakers & submarines.
in a connected grid nuclear cannot economically compete against solar (which pushes the cost of daytime energy to effectively 0€) so it has to be heavily subsided, which raises the cost for everyone. a euro spent on nuclear is a euro not spent on batteries or hydrogen production
That's about half of the average cost right [1], so literally it will make electricity cheaper. Also, it will be cost that will not go up willy nilly when someone decides to do something absolutely stupid
I doubt that number but it would be an improvement: the MW in Italy is far beyond 200 USD/MW in wholesole market.
Btw, it is not completely about price/MW but it is also about sovereignty and... No, there is no U mines in Italy but a commodity market is much more managable than the oil market.
Italy is hugely dependent on natural gas for electricity, so it actually makes economic sense.
South Korea has a lot of nuclear power for related reasons - they can't risk being too dependent on LNG imports, lest some of their more volatile neighbours capture the shipments.
Italian here. I seriously doubt this thing will lead anywhere. If something slightly more concrete than this will appear, there will be an insurrection. NIMBY is very strong in Italy (after decades of attempts, we are still without a spent fuel depot for this reason).
Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way. As soon as popular opposition will manifest, the politicians will forget the whole issue.
“Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way.”
Public opinion can change very quickly, and it usually it does not need to change significantly to have a big impact (see Brexit).
40 years ago public opinion was heavily influenced by the Chernobyl disaster, the last major nuclear accident (Fukushima) happened 15 years ago and it is quite far from memory.
Much more pressing matters today are energy costs and independence, so I expect a new referendum would have at the very least a much closer outcome.
To be fair, the referendums for Nuclear were so poorly timed. Just after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I don't know if this was a deliberate choice of the governments leading the country those years (the tinfoil hat in me can see big oil pushing for those referendums at those particular times) or pure bad luck. Anyway, public opinion was highly biased which led to "No" winning with fair margins. With that said, I believe NIMBY is a contributing factor and not the whole explanation.
It wasn’t a government initiative. In Italy, citizens can request (500k signatures needed) a referendum to abrogate a law. This is what happened in this case, the law being the one that allowed nuclear reactors.
Hopefully Germany will follow next. It’s absurd that they rely on fossil fuel and coal when they can build modern nuclear plants that can provide stable energy for the energy heavy industries.
It would take 5-10 years to build the power plants and maybe with Chinese aid even faster
I don't think that nuclear projects of any size could pass current environmental impact assessments.
Only a severe energy shortage could motivate politicians enough to temporarily skip these, like they did for the LNG terminals. But you can't build a nuclear power plant of any size within a single legislative period so its just not going to happen.
Where in comparable countries (= in europe) did new reactors take less than 10 years (from scratch even)? So we are at at least 10 years. But more realistically, taking recent megaprojects into account, its 20 years. In that time, batteries are way ahead and you can overbuild _so_ _much_ renewables and people even do it without subsidies (strangely, nobody builds nuclear plants without subsidies).
regarding the "stable energy" point: germany has one of the most (if not _the_ most) stable grids in the world and that is even with 50+ % renewables. And given it sits in the center of europe with grid connections all around, it's far cheaper to buy from whomever has the most favourable weather anyways (and sell to them if they don't). Thats why one of the biggest issues right now is not nuclear, but grids.
Fun fact: in the 60s Italy was after the US and UK the county with the most advanced nuclear energy plants. These days still North Italy produces key parts of nuclear reactors in other countries.
Partially true, the largest uranium mines are in Canada, Australia and Namibia, but it is a commodity market and it is way more managable than oil market.
Also, you can stock pile uranium and forget about the market for ten years. Oil strategic reservers requires large infrastructures and usually last only few months.
As an Italian, I know exactly how this playbook plays out.
Nuclear energy is a big business for intimates friends, so on the trend that it's a green tech (apparently no carbn footprint, but what about the depleted fuel?) they approved the reopening of this technology.
Why going for SMR?
Well, it's the penalties business model and SMR is ideal because they are on paper, no valid proven commercial implementation.
A company wins the contract, in this case i'm not sure if they'll go for a open bid, the contract include research, design, building and so on. At some point the political wind changes, contract canceled and hundreds of milions in contractual penalties to pay. It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends, with zero obligation to ever break ground.
It's from 19th century that they are thinking about a bridge between Sicily and mainland. The last time the project was revived, the playbook went exactly as described above: years of studies, cancellation and massive state penalties paid out to contractors for a bridge that still doesn't exist (Sicily and mainland are on different tectonic plates).
No mention there is no national deposit for nuclear waste, especially in a highly sismic territory.
>It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends,
I agree completely and would go so far as to claim that presently in 2026 that money-transfer mechanism is the real motivation for any nuclear project in any country. Renewable options are the better path now from a technical point, but politicians and their buddies can't easily make as much money from that.
In the current landscape—with the costs of solar and wind power steadily falling and storage technologies emerging, driven by the expansion of electric vehicles—I really don't know what kind of commercial future nuclear energy has (in terms of delivering lower energy costs).
Brace yourself, every large nuclear accident has been preceded by the Italian considering nuclear again. (Well at least Tchornobyl and Fukushima, ”which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice”)
I just don't get people saying how terrible climate change is going to be for the world and then refuses to support nuclear.
If climate change is such a critical problem, then let's try everything to get this solved even if it costs more to do it. If you are only willing to do some solutions because it is cheaper then I don't believe you when you say it is important to solve.
And frankly, we don't know the full impact of climate change, so having as many alternatives as possible just makes sense. Hydro can be impacted by droughts which will be more common. Solar may be impacted if there are increased storms. Wind may be impacted due to stilling (slowing of wind due to an increase in co2).
Why not throw nuclear into the mix to ensure we do not run out of power?
Most of the environmentalists will tell you that it's dumb to shut down nuclear, but building new plants just takes too long and is too expensive. Why then not just put the money into things that are cheap now and will get even cheaper tomorrow?
Hedging against downtime is comparatively easy, just diversify by location and improve the grid, which is way less expensive than building out power plants.
Every source of power has pros and cons. They all have risks and benefits.
If there is a push to do a specific clean energy I think we should go for it regardless of the cost. If you think the climate issue is going to be a very severe issue then you should take every option at our disposal and encourage every push for an alternative to fossil fuels. Since you are refusing this, then I assume you don't think it is severe.
Large countries may be able to hedge against downtime, but smaller countries can't. Also, like I said, we don't really know the impact of all of this which is why we should diversify as much as possible. One of those diversifications should be nuclear as well as solar, wind, and hydro.
Has there been a single SMR deployed and working yet? There were lots of talk about GE BWRX-300 and Rolls Royce SMR but none of them seems to have even started construction.
There are! But not in Europe yet. Both are in China and russia. (China's HTR-PM at Shidaowan and Russia's floating Akademik Lomonosov). Check the full fleet (operating, under construction, etc) at the bottom of this post: https://reactoratlas.com/en/wiki/smr
It doesn't work that way in Italy. A popular referendum can only abolish an existing law, partially or fully. The general public cannot vote to adopt new legislation.
I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.
The referendum is obviously legally binding, the laws they were about were abrogated as the vote requested and it's been 15 years since the last one.
Since then politics shifted, technology changed, the geopolitical situation changed, 10 million people died, 9 million people became adults that weren't before
If people are still against nuclear the same mechanism to call for a referendum to reject this law still exists and there's elections next year anyway.
This is somewhat strange. Italy has a lot of sun, and a lot of mountains for these pumped storage hydropower plants. It is way harder to store output from PV on Great European Plain.
We are currently running nuclear at a capacity factor of around 91% in the US. Solar is somewhere around 24%.
1GW at noon vs 1GW forever. The area under the curve is what matters. Not the peak of the curve.
How much more would you be willing to spend to get 4x the nameplate capacity and to also get it whenever you need it?
The economics of a single plant are irrelevant in comparison to the requirements of the grid that it operates within. If someone could invent a source of power that magically scales exactly with the duck curve in Texas, I guarantee that would fetch a premium on the market, even if other economic characteristics are not competitive.
The solution to nuclear is to standardize the design and deployment process. France has demonstrated it can be done. Perhaps their engineers should be in charge of some new global standards body.
Yeah, good for them. The main thing is to follow proper safety procedures and keep improving them. Other than that, nuclear power is a great source of energy.
"I'm virtue signaling because I'm Pro nuclear yes it's a luxury belief you're promoting something nuclear power is a luxury belief you heard it here first because they're going to put these things in poor communities and so it's never going to affect your life they're putting them next to Data Center in like Oregon like it's easy for you to say oh I support nuclear look how Progressive I am look how smart I am you haven't internalized the downsides [...]"
Nuclear power is a smart choice going forward but renewables are approaching good conversion efficiency - in solar 25-30% was unheard of a couple decades ago
I wonder how much of a factor is that nuclear plants are effectively "unbombable". Ukraine's thermal plants have taken a beating, but their nuclear plants are still generating.
If a power source is profitable on its own, it can be financed by private investors. If it is unprofitable, it needs to be financed at least in part by the state, so it would come at the cost of the taxpayer.
Looking at the top comments in this thread claiming a bunch of false things I see HN is essentially fully captured by anti-progress populism at this point.
It’s sad to see, for a former community of “hackers.”
Good luck with that. No problem with investing some money , but it has to be commercially viable first and recent Western projects all over the globe have not instilled any confidence in that.
Always funny to see how plutonium pilled hn is. Nuclear power in Italy is idiotic. They won't even be able to cool the damn reactors. Europe is drying out.
the Mediterranean has dried up several times in history and it will dry up again, as the African continent collides with Europe. Currently, water flows in at Gibraltar with a very strong current to try to keep up with evaporation, making the Mediterranean saltier and saltier (than the Atlantic) over time. When the strait closes because Africa and Spain push together, the Meditteranean will very quickly dry up.
I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
> country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA
Are you serious when putting France in this list? Nuclear is such a cash cow here that EDF manage to make profits even while being forced by the regulator to sell a big fraction of its nuclear capacity below the operating cost and buying it back to them at market price! (We're talking about a multi-billon subsidies scheme, look for ARENH).
And that is despite (rather legitimate IMHO) regulatory constraints that have no equivalent in any other industry.
France is in that list (hello i'm from france too) because construction is heavily subsidized and decommission is overall not happening, not planned, and more or less not even approaching the planning stage. The few decommissions that are taking place are decades late and billions over budget.
It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have. Does that mean it's a bad investment? Not necessarily. If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth. Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.
And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive. TBH, i haven't followed developments in the last years in regards to french neocolonialism collapsing in sub-saharan africa, but here's a small article from 6 years ago: https://infokiosques.net/IMG/pdf/uranium_de_la_francafrique-...
> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.
Why would an ecologist have to be against more energy consumption? For climate change, what matters is energy from the sun hitting the earth vs. energy being radiated back into space. More energy consumption also doesn't necessarily cause more pollution of any kind.
You're redefining environmentalism with a very narrow and technical view. Goodhart's law does not only apply to computer science, but to ecology as well, and says that CO2 emission alone is not a good metrics.
I'm not saying energy consumption overall is a perfect metrics, but the degrowth movement is a philosophy / science that's not aligned on a specific metrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
I think to most people, environmentalism is mostly about climate change and pollution. You're free to widen the definition of course, but note that even that Wikipedia article basically calls it a fringe ideology (in different words).
Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption as opposed to specific energy sources or downstream effects like pollution, which is avoidable?
The degrowth movement is very fringe indeed. But its ideas are not, some have even been assimilated by the green-washing apparatus such as "reduce, reuse, recycle". I agree with your definition because it includes pollution, which is deciding factor for reducing production overall.
> Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption
The question is good but not the framing. How is pollution avoidable? Energy consumption is not the problem but it's the means by which the auxiliary problems arise, and therefore a correct proxy to measure them. One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.
It's like in software development when people consider CPU/RAM is unlimited and don't provide any optimization. That may be fine in hypothetical settings, but in the real world resources are finite. (the analogy stops because using too much CPU/RAM does not "pollute" the rest of the machine and create memory corruption or whatever)
> One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.
Yes, but my entire point is not only is this solvable without throwing the energy baby out with the dubious quality goods bathwater, it's easier to solve with more and cheaper energy.
If the consumption of abundant energy has negative externalities, then those need to be appropriately priced. At that point, buying pollution causing junk will become more expensive than buying clean junk, but we'll still be able to afford the clean junk we want.
We are using that energy no matter how produced to terraform the planet into a less hospitable one for nearly everyone. Some get hung up on the resource extraction and associated pollution for renewable energy. But ultimately you can't fix "wanting the wrong thing" with technology. Our way of life and expected conveniences are not sustainable, they can't last 100k years, probably not even 100.
The issue is not only climate change. More consumption means more consumer goods, more resource extraction, more transport, more waste
We have huge environmental problems ranging from ecosystem simplification, microplastics, etc. The answer is not to keep consuming as we are. We really have to stop the neoliberal system that's based on ever increasing growth and externalisation of environmental impact.
There is a possible future where none of these things are a problem and yet energy consumption is greater than it is currently. I think it's actually the most likely future. The ship may have sailed on climate change, but plastic pollution is not solved by consuming less, it's solved by consuming differently.
I get being critical of mindless consumerism, but degrowth doesn't seem to be about "order less junk on amazon/temu", but fundamentally reducing economic activity and energy consumption, which is civilisational suicide.
> I think it's actually the most likely future.
Well that deserves some actual argument. This abundant future has been promised to us for generations and has served as a justification for precisely fucking everything up in the name of the brighter future. Yet now we have, to my knowledge, no indicator of things getting better, but all indicators going way worse than we thought.
> I get being critical of mindless consumerism, but degrowth doesn't seem to be about "order less junk on amazon/temu"
Yes it is. It's about mindful production of useful products and services. Which is very much the same as reducing economic activity and energy consumption.
> Yet now we have, to my knowledge, no indicator of things getting better, but all indicators going way worse than we thought.
Several forms of pollution are now much better than they were decades ago. Chlorofluorocarbons, lead in gasoline, rivers and lakes around the world, catalytic converters, slash-and-burn agriculture etc. etc.
Electricity generation is also headed the right way.
The solution is usually better technology and political action, not abstinence. We still have fridges, just not with CFCs.
I'm not saying we'll fix climate change in time, by the way. That is uncertain. But if we do fix it, it won't be with degrowth.
> Yes it is. It's about mindful production of useful products and services. Which is very much the same as reducing economic activity and energy consumption.
Why do you think that wanting less cheap temu junk means overall economic activity will decrease? Why can't that economic activity be redirected to a sustainable future with abundance instead? I still want to eat food grown elsewhere in the world, just not sold in plastic packaging and transported with fossil fuels.
> We really have to stop the neoliberal system that's based on ever increasing growth and externalisation of environmental impact.
Like, I too would like a pony, but we gotta live in the real world. Ultimately we need more energy of basically every carbon neutral form.
I agree that the ideology of growth at all costs is problematic, but it's how our society is structured right now, so we need to fix our current energy problems rather than bet on transforming society.
To be fair, the declining fertility rate will probably solve a bunch of environmental issues over the next few generations.
> I agree that the ideology of growth at all costs is problematic, but it's how our society is structured right now
With this mindset, nothing ever changes. No social problem was ever solved without looking at it from a social/political perspective. If you agree that growth ideology is problematic, then that's what you need to dismantle.
> To be fair, the declining fertility rate will probably solve a bunch of environmental issues
I think this is just wrong. The problem is the lifestyle: the throwaway culture and abundant consumption of throwaway goods. We could be just as many billions living OK in our environment, but you could have just 100 million average middle-class westerners continuing to fuck up nature (just slightly slower).
> With this mindset, nothing ever changes. No social problem was ever solved without looking at it from a social/political perspective. If you agree that growth ideology is problematic, then that's what you need to dismantle.
OK great, what's the plan then?
Where do we start?
What small problem can we fix to make this better?
If you don't know the answers to the above, then this discussion is entirely pointless, and I would remind you that although I would love a pony, that doesn't mean that I'll get one.
Any "solution" that relies on changing the entirety of how society is structured isn't going to work, absent an incredibly good plan (against which one can make incremental progress).
To ask probably the most important question, in a world of zero growth, how do we pay back all the consumer debt we owe? Thinking specifically of mortgages here, as they're the largest amount of debt held by the populace.
Well it's just American society that really has this so deeply ingrained that it's deemed irreversible.
Europe only turned neoliberal a few decades ago and only some countries are deeply into it like the Netherlands. Before the 90s we were much more socialist and can go back that way.
China also isn't neoliberal. They're good at playing the capitalist game but they're not afraid to pull the handbrake where needed and they are going good things for green energy.
> Europe only turned neoliberal a few decades ago and only some countries are deeply into it like the Netherlands. Before the 90s we were much more socialist and can go back that way.
We all have the same financial system. Like, if you have interest bearing loans, then some amount of growth is required to pay back the principal + interest.
I think calling it neo-liberal isn't really correct, it's fundamental to the economic system we call capitalism.
Neoliberalism is strongly tied to capitalism, but it is more than that, it's a strong belief that capitalism is the only possible way and that it works best with no restrictions on it.
What we need to do is restrict capitalism. Some capitalism is ok, I'm not advocating for a pure communist system, but there needs to be a balance between both. Since the fall of the soviet union, the balance has swayed wayy too much in favour of the unlimited capitalism option, whatever you call it.
And no the system isn't really the same, or at least it wasn't. Interest-free loans were pretty common and when I studied the government even provided them as student loans. Unfortunately they don't anymore.
> What we need to do is restrict capitalism. Some capitalism is ok, I'm not advocating for a pure communist system, but there needs to be a balance between both. Since the fall of the soviet union, the balance has swayed wayy too much in favour of the unlimited capitalism option, whatever you call it.
I don't disagree with this at all, I'm all for red in tooth and claw capitalism, once every person has food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education.
> And no the system isn't really the same, or at least it wasn't. Interest-free loans were pretty common and when I studied the government even provided them as student loans. Unfortunately they don't anymore.
I think that many people are missing my point here. Fundamentally, "capitalism" is structured (today, at least) around people with money giving it to others and getting the interest payments as the reward.
In a world with zero growth, where does the money for interest come from? (hopefully this is also a world with zero inflation, or we're all in trouble).
Again, philosophically I agree with a lot of this (our society is very rich, and yet millions of people starve and die from avoidable illness), but my core question is how we get there.
Preferably in small, incremental steps as that's the safest way for us in general.
The energy received is always the same as the energy radiated, its just the temperature increases to maintain that balance.
No. Temperature increases until balance is restored. Temperature is currently increasing, which means the planet is not radiating away as much energy as it is receiving.
I think we're talking at cross purposes. There's a clear equilibrium state which is both higher temperature and notably bad whilst completely balanced from an energy perspective. Climate change is not bad because the temperature is increasing, its bad because it has increased and is going to increase more. The fact we still have baked in warming is additional bad.
Yes, at equilibrium the temperature stays constant. I'm talking about the average temperature of the entire Earth over time. We are currently not at equilibrium because we're pumping unfathomable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, so the average temperature is skyrocketing. If we were to stop emitting CO2 today then in a few decades or so the planet would reach equilibrium and the temperature would stay constant at that new normal.
This is of course simplified, but roughly correct as I understand it.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. This is the first law of thermodynamics and as far as I'm aware nobody has managed to refute it.
Finding better ways of controlling where energy comes from and where it goes, and doing it in a controlled way that has minimal impact on the surroundings is good (from an ecological perspective)- it is the most pure good an ecologist can hope for.
"Reduce, Reuse" has its place, but that place has to be in-line with also finding a way to balance our human needs with the environment.
I don't think reducing our energy consumption is realistic, many things that have a long-tail reduction in energy consumption have a huge up front cost.
For example, electric vehicles are a bitch to manufacture but are less impactful for the environment over a long term; and this is amplified if the energy that is produced to be used in the electric car has a minimal impact on the environment (Solar, Wind, Nuclear) - but nuclear plants have a huge up-front energy cost too.
I'll be forthcoming and say that I have a concern that over-reliance on solar and wind may have negative consequences on the environment too- harvesting wind energy from the atmosphere that animals may rely on, will likely impact the environment in ways we haven't thought about. However it's significantly better than coal and gas, and that's the marker we're going for: not perfect.. better.
Everything is bad at a certain scale after all, we just haven't hit that scale with our renewables- and because of this, on a baseline, I agree with you.
For France investment in nuclear is a big benefit, as you can see in the amounts of coal and gas burned to generate electricity in neighboring Germany in the last two decades, and still burning today.
Try to present the idea of "degrowth", to China, India, Indonesia, Brazil. They all on path of growth.
I agree that France, should be paying more to Françafrique countries, but raw uranium cost is only 50% of the finished nuclear reactor fuel. And nuclear reactor fuel is 5% to 10% of the operating costs of a nuclear power plant.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Heinrich Böll Foundation and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, both funded from Germany, published many documents criticizing uranium mining in Africa:
" Addressing uranium-producing countries in particular, whom it seems to want to stop or at least reduce their activities, the report also focuses on the health hazards associated with extraction and the neo-colonial aspect of exploiting the resource. Particularly virulent regarding France, which is the subject of three articles and cited in several others, the Atlas targets head-on Paris's relationship with one of its main suppliers: Niger.
The Atlas likens the uranium mining model to a vestige of Françafrique and accuses the French government of enriching itself on Niger's behalf while orchestrating an ecological, human and social catastrophe in the country. The French company Orano - formerly Areva - which mines and produces uranium in Niger for French power plants, is a particular target."
https://www.docdroid.net/y7NENZB/comment-lallemagne-finance-...
https://www.ege.fr/sites/ege.fr/files/media_files/German_Int...
Thank you for this post. It is informative and nuanced about a complex topic.
I was born and raised in several countries that are a part of the NATO alliance. Without getting too preachy here, I want to say that I deeply value the nuclear deterrence that France proudly and effectively provides the alliance. Plus, personal here, I like the "je ne sais quoi/don't fuck with me" attitude of the French forces. I welcome the wildcard that keeps our adversaries on their toes! I am not French, nor deeply familiar with the arrangements here, but what happens if the uranium price is 2x or 5x? I am guessing it has little impact on the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant. Also: There are lots of alternatives. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Namibia control nearly three-quarters of the entire global uranium market. To be clear: I am not doubting that the existing purchasing agreements between France and its former African colonies are fair.History behind the French decision to build it's own independent nuclear deterrence was interesting:
" De Gaulle asked asked Kennedy: “Would you trade New York for Paris?” His point was that if he wasn't convinced, would the Russians be? So it's not just about numbers of warheads. It's about the defensive posture overall. "
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/03/nuclear-deterre...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1962/08/de-gaul...
De Gaulle, like most of the French political elite at that time, also got a wake up call during the Suez Crisis: if you don't have the bomb you can't intervene to protect your own interests anywhere in the world, because one of the great power could block you without shooting a single bullet and the other won't come to your rescue.
> construction is heavily subsidized
It's not subsidized, quite the opposite EDF is subsidizing its competitors through ARENH.
> It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have.
It's not. It only appears expensive compared to other decarbonized means because the calculations never take the opportunity cost of intermittency. Wind and solar are only cheap because you never count the price of the back-up plan in the cost (and also because magnets and solar panels are bought for cheap from China). If you count the price of running an actual grid all year long then it suddenly becomes the most efficient option after hydro and that's why France has among the cheapest electricity in Europe. The German Energiewende is the canonical example of what the theoretical calculations leave out. It should have been cheaper and less carbon-heavy in the end, but instead hundreds of billions have been spent to get only expensive and high-emission electricity in the end.
>And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.
Come on, the Uranium coming from Niger is a just a fraction of the consumption: https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/questions-et-reponse...
> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.
What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.
Taken to it's logical end it's quite literally just anti-human. Their ideal outcome is a suicide pact.
No, it's not a suicide pact. If it was just a suicide pact, they'd get it over with and leave the rest of us alone. It's a homicide pact, a genocide pact for the entire human race.
And we have tried it too! There have been energy shocks before, where the price of energy spikes and causes corresponding drop in energy consumption, leading to degrowth.
They only talk about the benefits in the abstract, but not what an energy shock actually means. It means people can’t afford to pay for heating and freeze to death. It means factories close down because the inputs are too expensive. Construction stops because the raw materials (steel, concrete) are too expensive to manufacture, and people don’t have money to pay for new homes.
We have done all these things just in the last 4 years! So why should we do more of it instead of just building more renewable energy?
degrowth is compatible with increasing standards of living for 99.5% of people all the while being able to then actually preserve these standards up in the future.
our current model produces growth without proportionally increasing standards of living, and accepts that livelihoods will collapse all over Europe and Africa as it becomes increasingly hostile to agriculture due to climate change.
think of the viability of degrowth as a policy within the prisoners dilemma of global capitalism as you want, but please come up with a more serious critique that doesn't equally indigte the staus quo
None of that is true.
> degrowth
Thanks for showing your true face. But no thanks for your anti-humanism.
It's interesting that they're feeling emboldened enough these days to not hide who they are and what their agenda is. That general movement had a slow motion replay of the Bolshevik vs. Menshevik action, where the moderates (like Patrick Moore, Michael Shellenberger) got purged, and after quite a long time of having an established, comfortable monoculture now they're starting to no longer feel the need to create fake narratives around why nuclear or mines are bad, now they're just straight up saying they want civilization to collapse. (Which is what would happen, there's never going to be any such thing as an orderly impoverishment)
Maybe it's for the best. If they're being honest maybe it'll clarify debates and positions.
Finally, someone with common sense. Nuclear is bad BECAUSE it produces lots of cheap energy. We DON'T WANT this. More energy = more capitalism = evil.
DEGROWTH NOW!
"degrowth" ... aand this is how you spot the real agenda of most environmentalists. ofc they'll call that a "philosophy".
glad you pointed out something very few people point out in these conversations - the cheap uranium fuel France gets has a very large hidden cost.
the coups that happened recently in west africa are largely due to that largely hidden cost.
Yeah I’m really confused why France is in that list (also, less so, but China - they have come a great way, further than almost any western country save France, I’m just unsure I’d the metric here applies evenly).
I’ll stand by the only reason nuclear power is unprofitable (in most cases) is because we decide it is unprofitable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821997
I'd consider power generation (solar, wind, nuclear) as strategically important and accept that it may need subsidies long term. If this allows the country a degree of independence from external shocks, it would be worth it.
Agreed, I've always been pro-nuclear (although the arguments have been getting weaker as solar+batteries keeps getting cheaper). I just want the vocal advocates to be honest about the cost and timelines instead of blaming everything on environmentalists as a way to side step the argument.
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating, even mundane things like business offices real estate or highways wouldn't be economically viable if they had to provision for decommissioning.
You could clean up the high activity thing and let the buildings and their asbestos in place and nuclear decommissioning would still be more environmentally friendly than every other heavy industry.
> Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,
That is factually wrong. Coal mining has to re-naturalize the areas used for mining after the coal was removed.
And most industries are supposed to not just leave toxic waste and instead have a plan what to do with toxic waste products these days. And no, an empty building cannot be compared to radioactive waste.
You throw the radioactive waste in a breeder reactor and make more fuel out of it. It's really not that hard.
They consider the concrete around the plant's parking lot to be nuclear waste though (I'm not kidding, that's how the French regulations works).
Wind farms are expected to a account for it and it is routinely included in cost calculations.
> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,
Oil and gas extraction platforms here in Norway, I believe.
I have a family member working for a Canadian company that steps in after a mine has stopped operating. It cleans up and remediates the surrounding land and water to minimize environmental impact. This is usually a thorough process that takes a long time. Many months or years.
> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean
Does not mean it's a made up issue. That's classic whataboutism. Ecologists are not concerned just about nuclear activity, but precisely about the overall industry destroying our entire environment, and for whose profit?!
Funny how all that concern they have never manifests for wind and solar power.
Nor do I see a great deal of concern for manufacturing, as long as it is done somewhere else. If it done here: it is super dirty and dangerous, jobs no one wants. Elsewhere: what great opportunity for them to rise out from poverty. The fact that the environmental regulations are nonexistent, either never brought up or dismissed because we can't regulate another government.
You seem out of touch with actual ecologists. Just because some ecologist discourse you don't hear on CNN doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Of course ecologists are very concerned for solar and wind power, or rather for their industrial counterparts! I know quite a few activists who are very concerned with non-recyclable solar panels and wind plants, but build solar "boilers" and tiny wind generators from spare parts and renewable materials (such as wood).
Ecologists are also concerned with outsourced manufacturing. Not every ecologist is a caricature of a Silicon Valley engineer who says we'll save the planet by buying Tesla cars and building solar plants. In fact, 100% of the ecologists i know (who are actually involved in activism) will say that those people are not ecologists but merely green-washing.
Do you think it is cheap to decommission a large water power dam?
That's just a bullshit Statement considering all german plants except experimental or soviet units are decommissioned on operator money.
Costs are accounted and in some cases you have even price breakdown https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
The only reason nuclear power facilities get decommissioned is because anti-nuclear politicians panic and force them to shut down. Sure, there's an ongoing cost of maintenance and replacement, but once you have a nuclear power facility, there's no reason for it not to continue generating power indefinitely. We're not going to stop needing or wanting more energy.
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If nuclear is such a big cash cow, why is edf in huge debts, state owned and suffering from aged power plants having issues?
Re debt: check how much debt the SV giants have. Debt isn't a bad thing per se, it's just how you finance investments.
Its has always been state owned, and it's much better for critical infrastructures to be so anyway.
> suffering from aged power plants having issues?
There was one (1) instance if of a serious common issue between multiple plants found in 2022, unrelated to the age of the NPPs (the most recent were affected as well) which affected the exploitation for about a year. It was bad for a moment, but not that bad, it's like saying the automobile industry can't be profitable because the Tataka airbag problem happened. (And the corrosion issue was much less severe than the Tataka one!).
Because it isn't. EDF devt to EBITDA ratio is as healthy or healthier vs german eon/rwe. Debt is ok to have for big corpos, unless you think Apple is a failed company.
Over half of french fleet was already upgraded to have safety similar to gen3 reactors through great carenage.
France also set record production this summer vs prev ones
Because being a cash cow does not mean the cash will be reinvested by the owner. The owner might just milk the cow and use the money for other things.
Couldn’t be because nuclear-hating bureaucrats have over regulated the industry?
No. Either it's profitable or it is not. It is not.
You don’t believe markets exist in a political environment?
When EDF signed a fixed cost contract to deliver nuclear in England the CFO resigned.
It's currently double its original budget and likely to grow further.
The "profits" are from running decades old reactors that were never transparently costed.
> When EDF signed a fixed cost contract to deliver nuclear in England the CFO resigned.
Yes, because they had to borrow at a 7 or 9% long term rate on the market (in the era of ZIRP!), which makes financing costs 70-80% of the overall final electricity price.
Of course that kind of deal was insane, but it says more about financing long term projects on the market than it says anything about nuclear as a technology.
> The "profits" are from running decades old reactors that were never transparently costed.
EDF gave more in subsidies to its competitors through ARENH over the past 15 years than what the entire fleet costed.
French nuclear has been an indisputable financial success over the past 40 years (while giving France one of the cheapest electricity in Europe). Saying otherwise is just ignoring reality entirely.
> Of course that kind of deal was insane, but it says more about financing long term projects on the market than it says anything about nuclear as a technology.
Well sure, but the alternatives aren't really affected by this, because they don't have to be planned and financed these such long time frames. So this is a problem for nuclear. The core technology seldomly is the deciding factor for these things.
Sure, but sometimes it's better to invest for the long term, and that's among the most fundamental purpose of the State.
France doesn't have an answer for decommissioning costs.
I saw a DW Planet A documentary about decommissioning a nuclear plant in Germany. They walked around the plant in some safety gear, but with their faces fully exposed and no breathing apparatus. They said the project was decades behind schedule and it was costing ten times as much as expected. The decommissioning process involved spraying water and gels on slightly radioactive materials from the factory to reduce their radioactivity to effectively zero. The process created much more radioactive material than there was in the first place, which then itself had to be dealt with. The cost of decommissioning is determined by the lobbyists for the companies that do the decommissioning. Voters have no idea what decommissioning should cost, and no one will ever question going over budget. It's a great business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKIaRg3SdTw
Now check how decommissioning is going with Isar reactors instead of soviet ones
Would you like to provide some context?
The context is that all german reactors that aren't experimental or soviet are decommissioned on operators money without state financing.
The example of isar is particularly interesting - isar 2 is one of the latest that started decommissioning but is in much more advanced state vs others. Each operator does it as they wish. If you wait a bit more, rad levels drop so it's easier to decommission with less specialized equipment
" EDF Group assumes sole financial responsibility for decommissioning power plants. The cost is factored into operation from the start and included in the price of the kilowatt-hour. It is re-assessed every three years to take account of changing technical and financial assumptions, as required by law. "
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/producing-a-climate-frie...
The 100% state owned EDF group take sole responsibility for the finances? What a relief for the taxpayers of France...
But at least the cost is factored in from the start. Those costs often double during construction but at least we know the decommissioning costs are factored into the fake numbers they use to get approval to start builds.
Taxpayers of UK are supporting wind energy producers using CfDs (Contracts for Difference).
UK Eighth Allocation Round are from 20 July to 7 August 2026, Offshore wind £113 /MWh, Onshore wind (>5 MW) £92/MWh
UK Government also awarded a CfD to Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, set at £92.50/MWh for a 35 year period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
You've quoted strike prices at the time, adjusted for inflation Hinckley is the most expensive of the three you quote. And it lasts nearly twice as long.
In fact this nuclear plant was the first use of CfD.
It's a great scheme because it (in theory) prevents cost blowouts being added to energy prices. Good incentives to get things built quickly and cheaply.
The actual price for Hinclkey is roughly a third higher than the CfD and that extra cost should be borne by the French taxpayers via EDF.
In reality they shifted some costs onto the next nuclear plant instead, working around the CfD and foisting the excess costs back onto the British tax/billpayer.
Obviously they refused to use CfD for the next UK nuclear plant because unlike wind power, they have no faith in it being completed anywhere near on budget. And if they bid the real cost it wouldn't get built in the first place.
So now UK taxpayers are paying in advance for a decade to get new nuclear built with no cap on cost.
> You've quoted strike prices at the time
Technically I think the Hinkley prices are what we'd call £2012 [if we could easily write a subscript here I would use that for 2012] that is, they are prices in the Pound Sterling as it was at some fixed point in the year 2012 and so when paid in the CfD contract they'd be adjusted for inflation.
All the early CfD prices were in £2012, whereas those newer CfDs have strike prices in £2024 which is about 40% more money in real terms. You can see this notation in the linked Wiki page.
So, if we adjust all the prices to £2024 that price for Hinkley is about £130 per MWh whereas Solar farms are £75, onshore Wind is £92, off-shore Wind is £113
Except, that's not really what's going on either because those AR8 prices are what's called "Administrative Strike Prices". AR8 like all the other allocation rounds is a reverse auction whose results we won't know for months, and those are the start prices in the auction, if you want to win and you're not the only bidder you will need to come lower. Maybe your competitor says they can do solar for £72, but you stared at your loan sheet and projected sunlight over the next decade and dared to say £71.50, you win that contract. But the strike price is now £71.50 not £75 per MWh. Your competitor might still build their solar farm, but at market prices not the guaranteed £71.50 per MWh you've contracted for. Maybe they get lucky - this summer the CfD "subsidy" for Solar farms paid us back many millions of pounds, because electricity prices were high and the subsidy is effectively a fixed price. Of course this doesn't cancel the hundreds of millions we spend subsidising Drax, but that's a completely different discussion.
Edited to add: Just like a conventional auction there may be no bidders at the start price. Unlike some low stakes auctions you might have seen in person or on TV they don't offer again with a better price, the auction just fails. This happened for offshore wind in AR5 a few years back, the government wanted to pay no more than £44 per MWh in £2012 for offshore wind energy -- cheaper than solar, so the firms who build wind farms looked at their costs and said "No thanks" and there were zero bids that round, and a subsequent government increased the ASP for AR6 wind and got bids at much more realistic prices.
technically speaking they don't have to be decomissioned and when they absolutely have to be I believe at that point we will have fusion which is only 10 years away.
There is no reason to assume that fusion will be a particularly cheap power source.
Fusion has been 10 years away for the past 3 decades.
(I think fusion is great, by the way, but I just don’t believe any timelines at this point anymore)
That was infact the joke, but surely by the time this would need to be decomissioned we would have fusion power right? Some reactors we operate today are older than the oldest people on the planet!
Some reactors we operate today are older than the oldest people on the planet!
You might want to look that up, because I’m older than the oldest operating reactor.
>Some reactors we operate today are older than the oldest people on the planet!
That is not correct.
My mom is older than any reactor that’s used for power generation.
like zeno's paradox(es).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno_of_Elea
i like how he died. guts.
some dumbkopf hners can't even handle historical stories and simple straightforward comments on them, so they downvote.
and yet they aspire to run or work in startups. ... hee hee.
I see what you did there :D Good one, thank you!
And the world leaders don't have an answer for the cost to keep our atmosphere habitable due to using fossil fuels as hard as possible?
> using fossil fuels as hard as possible?
All the data showing that it is still free. There is no cost, generally anthropogenic climate change is increasing the habitability of our atmosphere.
What are these decommissioning costs?
The reactor vessel and the primary coolant loop.
All that steel can be vitrified and stored in stainless casks somewhere fairly indefinitely.
Or just buried. It doesn’t stay reactive very long.
The rest of the site is no different to any other electricity generator, and no different really to the average industrial manufacturing plant.
Everyone likes to just say ”decommissioning costs”, without actually thinking about what any of that means.
It’s not like every nuclear power site is a Chernobyl.
I remember reading about coal-fired power plants specifically in Poland, which exceed the radioactivity levels for nuclear plants. This because the burnt-off coal contains small amounts of radioactive elements, which form particles and drop off near the flue.
But of course there are no norms for max radioactivity levels at a coal power plant site.
Coal plants spread radioactivity because it concentrates all the radioactive elements naturally found in the coal into ash, much of which then gets released into the air, deposited on surfaces and breathed in, which is extremely harmful.
But if decommissioned properly, most of the ash inside the building can be collected and mixed into soil and bricks at a safe concentration not far above background radiation level.
In a nuclear power plant, there is no release of radioactive materials, but it’s possible for parts of the structure to absorb radiation and become radioactive itself, and that’s much harder to deal with.
Steel is not vitrified, only high level nuclear waste - spend nuclear fuel with highly radioactive fission products.
Steel is taken apart and measured, non-activated steel can be melted down and recycled. Activated steel has to go into storage, either low level nuclear or medium level nuclear waste.
The biggest concern for steel is cobalt. During manufacturing steel with very low cobalt content is usually used for nuclear applications, but there is still small amount of cobalt.
In reactor, under neutron radiation, stable cobalt-59 changes to cobalt-60, strong gamma ray emitter with a half-life of 5 years. So neutron activated steel has to storage for at least few decades.
When done not properly, this is a health hazard.
" Circa 1983, construction was finished of 1700 apartments in Taiwan which were built with steel contaminated with cobalt-60. About 10,000 people occupied these buildings during a 9–20 year period. On average, these people unknowingly received a radiation dose of 0.4 Sv. Some studies have found that this large group did not suffer a higher incidence of cancer mortality, as the linear no-threshold model would predict, but suffered a lower cancer mortality than the general Taiwan public. These observations support the radiation hormesis model, however other studies have found health impacts that confound the results. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60#Steel_contamination
They have to be stored but storage isn't particularly difficult. Just don't built them into a structure where to close to people.
They are similar to many other landfills.
" The four low-level waste facilities in the U.S. are Barnwell, South Carolina; Richland, Washington; Clive, Utah; and as of June 2013, Andrews County, Texas. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-level_waste
Have a look at this nuclear plant in Northern Germany that is in the process of being decomissioned since 1995. It's still not finished, suspected end date is now in the 2040s and is now projected to cost about 10B €. For a single plant.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald (you have to translate that page yourself, the English version doesn't contain the relevant information)
Surely that's not because the people in power - the same people who have pushed trhough the decommissioning of these still functioning power plants - are want them to be expensive to decomission because it suits their agenda. Decomissioning costs can always be however high you want them to be but that doesn't mean that they have to be. Worst case you can just encase the whole thing in concrete until radiation levels naturally drop.
Did you honestly just invent a conspiracy about some unnamed people with a hidden agenda of making nuclear look expensive by paying 10B euros for decommissioning a working plant?
Just a suggestion, but alternatively you could also accept that in reality, decomissioning actually is expensive.
It’s not really that much of a stretch to think this is exactly what is going on.
One state in Australia, Victoria, recently disappeared $15 billion of public funds to criminal organisations under the guise of funding a big infrastructure project.
Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. No one knows how much money disappeared, it could be up to $30 billion.
Labor-Green governments do this everywhere.
It’s entirely reasonable to suspect something similar is going on in Germany around their nuclear decommissioning.
> Labor-Green governments do this everywhere
I suppose your name ("rightnutwingjob") gives it away but "Did you know crooks exist" isn't actually a proof that grand conspiracies are true.
Yes, a lot of that is just waiting for the active parts to get less 'hot' though. But yes it's incredibly expensive and it's only going to get more so as we start caring more about pollution and proliferation.
Why people spread such bullshit statements? Take Germany which enacted EARLY phaseout, yet all it's reactors are decommissioned on operator money except experimental and soviet units
Just declare that LNT is wrong and treat materials as non radioactive if they are less than half the radiation level associated with cancer. For the rest you can try and reuse them in new reactors if possible or store it in the same place as other nuclear waste.
We've got the technology to drill deep bore holes, kilometers below where water will move on any time relevant to human existence, where we could stick what small amounts of dangerous material is left.
Encapsulating the waste and burying it somewhere on an abyssal plain in the deep ocean should also be a pretty low-risk approach, the IAEA has looked into variations of that.
Like someone else said, I think it's all expensive because some people want it to be.
Only true since 2023/2024, before EDF was nationalized by the Gov. because of the massiv debt and hefty losses, they kicked all shareholders and delisted the company then.
Yes, France is pretty much alone in making nuclear work. It's impressive. That said, it is alone.
IE, I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions and culture that allowed this. Will France itself even continue them?
What about Sweden?
South Sweden, with most of Sweden's population is at 20 gC02eq/kWh and at 36% nuclear
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/SE-SE3/yearly
Also Ontario?
Finland?
Sweden has been phasing out nuclear for 40 years, after a referendum where the people had the choice of "No nuclear!", "No nuclear", and "No nuclear". There was no "yes".
It's been phasing out nuclear since then.
Nowadays the Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are the only ones against nuclear power, but thanks to the left block winning the recent election, they may push that one issue enough that they get to continue the destruction of our planet.
Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are against nuclear because: ‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons. They conflate civilian and military use of nuclear energy
https://theconversation.com/peaceful-sweden-once-sought-nucl...
Sweden is currently using almost none natural gas for electricity production. How could the replace the current 25% of nuclear electricity? wind+natural gas? New hydro dams?
https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Sweden
> [the two parties] conflate civilian and military use of nuclear energy
I would never associate these two parties with competence or intelligence, and there certainly are people who think that a power plant is basically a bomb.
But no, their rhetoric against nuclear power today is at least ostensibly environmental. Well, as it's becoming clearer and clearer to everyone that environmentally it's at the very least the least bad option, they are shifting into trying to make it about economics. Of course completely ignoring that they want to price in (like in this thread) insurance with nuclear, but don't want to price in environmental damage of the alternatives.
Between 1987 and 2006 "the thought crime law" made it illegal in Sweden to even think about constructing a nuclear power plant. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankef%C3%B6rbudet
How much does nuclear power cost? Well, it was literally illegal in Sweden to run those calculations until 2006. Could criminalizing thought for decades maybe drive up the costs, once the law is repealed?
> New hydro dams?
Unlikely. It's already built out where feasible and economical. And besides, the Greens would block new hydro at scale because of their environmental impact.
> How could the replace the current 25% of nuclear electricity?
Most common argument I see is "we'll just import it", which is just greenwashing since that comes from fossil fuels.
> ‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons.
I don't see the contradiction. USSR took 10% of Finland in living memory, hell that was just single digit years before Sweden started looking into becoming a nuclear state. The Baltics were under USSR control too, and during the cold war they (USSR) seized Swedish ships in international waters and killed and otherwise "disappeared" the crew.
I find the article you linked complete garbage. It's viewing 1940s defence choices through a 2020s post-nonproliferation treaties and post MAD game theory lens.
But even if we do that, would it be un-peaceful to have deterrence? Sweden preemptively surrendered to Germany in WW2 (a bit of hyperbole, and doesn't account for secret allies collaboration), rather than have the country destroyed. Having a nuclear deterrence would mean not having to surrender again, when the Russian comes.
Hopefully NATO membership has the deterrence without the drawback. But of course NATO wouldn't be NATO without its nuclear members. And with the US becoming unreliable, Sweden's defence is still backed by the nuclear agreement with France. So own nukes or not, at least by treaty Sweden still has nuclear weapons as deterrence. Is it really vital to discuss the operational control? If that's the sticking point, then fair enough. I'm not saying it's NOT a difference.
A better critique of Sweden is its relatively huge arms exports. But that too is not black and white. Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war).
It's a strange affair when swedish leftists are the economically responsible parties and the right wing wants to use government subsidies to prop up an industry which is not economically viable compared to all the other electricity generating methods are cheaper and easier to implement.
Every single word you said is wrong.
I know HN comments should be more constructive than that, but your comment is setting all these trumpesque fires in the form of lies, that no constructive debate or rebuttal would be useful. You would not be convinced, and anybody reading the back and forth would be under the misapprehension that "the truth is probably somewhere in between".
I know there was a bit of liberty with the phrasing that the leftish parties in Sweden aren’t always considered the strongest on the economic arena. But that was not my main point, and sorry if I stepped on your toes. My main point is that all science and facts point to the truth that NPP are not economically viable without significant government subsidies. No matter how much I (and perhaps you?) want NP to succeed, it should do it on a level playing field compared to the other energy industries it should never do that with unfair advantages not offered to others.
While we may not disagree on the base facts, I don't think that's a fair characterization. First of all, you say that there have never been solar panel subsidies, which of course there have been. So the advantage has most certainly been offered to non-nuclear.
By law, opting in to "green energy" on your personal electricity means to have a definition that excludes nuclear, so that's government steering of the market towards non-nuclear green energy. Certainly qualifies as incentive, if not downright subsidy by manipulating market forces. (I even contacted my energy provider saying I would gladly check a box if it included nuclear. They said it was out of their control)
Of course on oil lots more has been spent fighting over the resources. For a given country the cost of acquiring the resources may be more political than directly monetary. But I don't think you're defending fossil fuels, so I probably don't need to argue that being controlled by Russia has a cost.
Now, if nuclear is not economical as base load, I'd like to see a comparison with solar & wind for base load compared to nuclear. And it should be a calculation for the (very nearly) 100% use case. So comparing like for like. The cost of wind&solar is extremely different if aiming for 90 or 99.999%.
Some Greens say "shrug, what's so bad about power outages?" (yeah, good luck with that). Some say "we'll just import in the greater European grid!" (greenwashing).
> not economically viable without significant government subsidies.
Nor is gasoline or road maintenance. I'd like to price in those externalities first.
Oh, and as for the left-ish opinion in this issue. IIRC only Greens and Communists were actually against nuclear. The big one (Social Democrats) manifesto could be summarized as "Well, we're pro-nuclear, but we know we have to give that up because we need Greens & Communists to be able to form a government". It was very transparent.
For some definition of "work". They don't seem to be able to build new nuclear plants now without massive cost overruns.
I am pretty sure anyone could make nuclear work by throwing lots of money around
The only money thrown around in French nuclear is handed out to EDF's competitors by EDF themselves as a compromise with the European Commission who didn't want EDF to reap to massive profits of the nuclear plants for itself (EDF has handed out around €100B over the past 15 years and still made a profit pretty much every year, despite massive forced investments in reaction to Fukushima).
Considering how much money is extracted from edf through dividends and in the past through arenh, it's the opposite - edf is subsidizing french state.
I'm sure edf would be happy to get 18bn/y in govt handouts like ren get in Germany through EEG
One can argue that Switzerland is doing a good job too. Also, it is profitable for existing plants for the next 60 years or so.
> Yes, France is pretty much alone in making nuclear work. It's impressive. That said, it is alone.
Ontario, Canada may have something to say about that:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply
> I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions
Gaullism and strong governments are not in fashion these days. The main thing that made Messmer plan work was Messmer himself, a strong leader with the power to tell everyone to stfu and do it.
Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
> Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
> Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.
I agree coal power plants are much worse. As an aside, I’m not convinced that’s the bar we need to clear. I would think we need to be safer than solar power, since that’s the source that’s actually growing rapidly. If we’re going to add new power generation, I think it’s probably a trade off between nuclear and solar.
And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.
Ironically, nuclear is similar to solar already with old gen2 plants https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Wow, that's really fascinating to me! I am a bit cautious that the distribution of outcomes from nuclear may be skewed, so we've maybe avoided some of the "black swan" events so far simply because we don't have much nuclear deployed. I think the common example is "Picking up pennies in front of a steamroller"; you'll be totally fine until you totally aren't. However, I expect we'd also learn more and improve the safety as we deploy more, so I (somewhat naively) feel this is a good argument in favor of more nuclear.
In Fukushima zero people died from radiation. If we regulated everything to a similar point (cars, planes, fossils), you'll start living like a monk. Fossils aren't just worse but orders of magnitude worse
In France after Fukushima nuclear plants that are 500 km inland had to be safeguarded against the risk of a tsunami.
They are in valleys and I think the risk assessment was heavily influenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard which has been toned down quite a bit since... But IRSN (now ASNR) studies all kind of risks seriously...
Fukushima killled a couple of people? More died that day from car crashes.
You're right but this seems difficult to estimate. From the wikipedia* article:
> ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
> ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (which also caused meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident) caused 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, 2,553 missing.
So nuclear radiation impact from Fukushima is minimal in the total loss of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
So a couple of orders of magnitude below the number of deaths caused by things like car crashes in Japan in a single year.
Per UN no deaths are recorded nor will be recorded due to the low dose.
Evacuation wasn't necessary, govt enforced it deliberately. If ppl weren't evacuated in such a rush(or not at all), they would have been fine
The low dosage claim is shady considering we have parts of the world with higher natural background radiation and in some cases cancer rates are lower there
Still, even by wildest estimations nr is fairly low
This is incorrect and naive.
Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
To be fair, people will say many of those deaths are due to the evacuation rather than the meltdown, and they’ll say the evacuation was overblown — too _much_ regulation. However, I think you’re right that these can still be attributed to the meltdown, since the evacuations were undertaken to avoid the difficult-to-predict impact of the meltdown. In hindsight, we can see the evacuation wasn’t needed. But the reactor meltdown made an already-bad situation even more brittle, and in a disaster scenario i think we naturally prefer the evacuation, as opposed to the (low) chance of total destruction.
The deaths are due to the evacuation, and the evacuation is due to some combination of [poor judgement] and [reactor meltdown]. If we attribute all the deaths to poor judgement, then we’re asserting we could confidently predict a reactor meltdown would pose no danger. Some people might claim that, but it seems implausible to me.
> For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50”
In 2011 4,612 died in Japan from motor vehicles. And a similar number every year since.
Your 3 examples were all different regulatory regimes.
That myth keeps persisting. In reality per $ of the project wind farms face significantly higher regulatory costs in many countries. Nuclear power operators also managed to get regulations on the turbines dropped compared to coal plants (in Germany IIRC).
In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.
Then why is the insurance for every single reactor public sector based?
Possibly because if there's a big accident, everybody in the region who gets cancer will sue, even if there's no detectable change to cancer rates.
Cancer is the smallest problem when bigger areas become inhabitable, and food inedible.
Yes and we should also shut down the large hadron collider because it might cause a black hole.
you do you
Unfortunately if other people act on irrational fears to the extend that it affects my energy prices I cannot just do me.
Nothing irrational here, already happened
Once, with a horrible reactor design that nobody builds anymore. It had two major problems:
1) It was inherently unstable because when the fuel temperature increased, it made the reaction speed up. Modern reactors do the opposite.
2) It didn't have a containment dome.
how many black holes have been created by particle accelerators in the past?
No,
The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
Fukushima and Chornobyl happened directly for a lack of paranoia, regulation and lobbing. I hope that we don't commit the same mistake again.
Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it or tightening targets far beyond any useful range. Also, arguably the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have, an example of paranoia as opposed to effective regulation.
(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).
Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
Lot of health impact of Chernobyl disaster was also because of Soviet's obsession with saving face.
The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.
Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product#Iodine
> the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have
This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".
People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.
The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.
To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.
But now you're using older designs to argue against not building newer ones.
The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't actually a nuclear reaction. It was that the reactor got hot enough to separate the cooling water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you can get a hydrogen explosion.
If the primary coolant is water. And the reactor is designed in such a way that that can happen.
Meanwhile you can use other primary coolants or other designs where that isn't a thing. There are designs that don't explode even if you lose power entirely. At which point the cost of an evacuation that the design doesn't require you to do, isn't a cost that you have to pay.
There is a fair argument for the uncertainty at the time affecting that call. And I think we can agree that avoiding what happened at Fukushima is a core part of nuclear safety. My main point, though, is that people often think that nuclear safety people spend most of their time and effort on 'make the reactor not blow up', but actually the regulations and practical reality is that they spend most of that instead on avoiding trivial amounts of radiation exposure to their workers and the public, perhaps to the expense of effort that could be spent on 'not having a massive disaster' or (assuming you somehow fix the other bits of nuclear that are really expensive) 'not having a climate that's too hot'. I'm not arguing that there should be no regulation, I'm arguing that even from the point of view of safety outcomes more regulation is not intrinsically better.
The problem is that if we don't find an exit, climate change will come with its old friend, war. War for the resources. And we didn't even globally agree in a minimum ruleset.
We are being promised about how much safe will be this new plants in a normal context while we do that, this context is vanishing. New possibilities opened and now we must deal with the possibility of a nuclear plant versus 1000 drones that want to destroy it, or that will keep coming for months until destroying it. Each energy plant is now a target, guided by AI.
Too much people in power are plutonium grade unstable, and is just a question of time that at some moment new "smart robot soldiers" will be asked to do unstable things also
So... how can you convince us, and guarantee that this is not just planting bombs under our own bedrooms?
No they didn't. Data was available to jot do rushed forced evacuation and for older people evacuation literally led to death. Even if Fukushima was as bad as Chernobyl (which would be a wild statement considering it has containment), those ppl would have died from age earlier vs cancer. It was absolutely idiotic decision in this regard.
> Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
What are they?
The physics of nuclear reactors push you towards making them big, and that means that there are correspondingly few of them, and they are all big civil engineering projects that are a little bit different from each other. This is a recipe for expensive and slow construction. The whole reason people are trying to make SMRs a thing is to try and get around this but it's not obvious there's an intersection between what the physics is happy to make efficient enough and a scale where you can actually get some learning rates and economies of 'scale' (which is more economies of unit volume than just in total how big something is).
The human impact of those is a fraction of fossil-fuels. So it’s not fair to judge nuclear for being expensive if we don’t hold other fuels to similarly rigorous standards
[flagged]
Not GP, but plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is.
Don't get me wrong, it's super deadly, but there are loads of toxins that are more deadly than plutonium. And while its radioactivity is seen as ultra scary, it's actually pretty nice, because you can at least detect it. Harder than beta or gamma, but still, it announces its presence.
How I wish I had a magic wand (spectrometer) that I could wave over my food to see if cyanide, ricin, mercury, or lead were there.
This. I wish people made a Geiger counter equivalent for pm2.5 and other atmospheric pollutants, people would never get to the subway again. And breathing air in any big Asian city is much more dangerous than doing the same in Prypiat.
It exists already.
Yeah, the problem is the overhyping of radiation's danger kind of covers-up the other problem, radiation weakens everything. Hairline cracks are a threat because the radiation is going to weaken the cement that's holding the very high pressure steam that's generating electricity.
Nuclear meltdowns have been common but dangerous radiation leaks rare and over-hyped, sure. But meltdowns involve an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment irrevocably breaking and that is what has made nuclear power uneconomical, not environmentalists' hand wringing. Indeed, I'd suspect nuclear company executives love to say the environmentos killed things, much better than saying their operations weren't economical.
> plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is... it's super deadly
"Super deadly" sounds enough scary to me, thanks
There are things that are "super deadly premium" of course. Stupidity terrifies me more than Plutonium. Specially when both things come together, but in the end the result is not much different.
See nuclear topic, scroll just like 2 turns to see once again someone claiming nuclear is the one technology in all of history that doesn't improve with technology.
Insuring is dirt cheap. You don't insure against any nonsense but against most probable one.
Nuclear gets cheaper if you have several units built in same place and if you increase CF with various methods, incl higher enriched fuel
> Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive
Isn't this the thing where you require something in one case but not the others?
If every oil drilling operation had to carry enough insurance to cover Deepwater Horizon and every hydroelectric dam had to carry a policy large enough for Banqiao and every solar panel factory had to insure against leaving Superfund sites that leak into the groundwater in some of the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley then they'd be in trouble too.
> the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions.
People often say things like this and then if you actually have someone go through the existing process you find out that more than half of the labor is going to inspect things that aren't actually safety-related, or some corruption is involved which is quadrupling the cost because the contractor bribed a politician to make use of their services required by law or create artificial scarcity for something which is actually important but shouldn't cost as much as it does.
Yeah, let's not forget defence budgets that are spent to prop up oil availability too.
War would be so much harder w/o oil, yet we fight wars for oil. Hmmm.
Yes, think about the US military budget.
I'd argue at least half of it basically functions as a petroleum subsidy.
And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them, and would be even more so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated.
The only justification in nuclear right now it's deglobalization and energy independence. But I would argue all the money you throw into nuclear for that, it's much better served simply building out solar and wind
> And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them
> so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated
That sounds very very questionable. We have like tens of countries in Europe that are trying to implement solar and wind energy throughout the decades, and are undoubtful lieders and visioners in that areas. And what is the practical results? Energy costs like 10 times more than if that energy was generated through burning fissile fuel alone.
Yes this is true. Once you include all subsidies nuclear is cheaper than fossil fuels. Much cheaper than coal and oil and slightly cheaper or on par with gas.
But, the same is true for solar and wind which starts off much cheaper than fossil fuels in the first place.
Most new build energy is renewables, that's what nuclear needs to compete with.
You can count only the pure costs of generation of single type of power plant. But the customers are also paying the costs of distribution, costs of backup and firming.
Is the customer 10, 50 or 500 km from the power plant?
Do I need to build a second backup power plant for each installed primary power plant, 100% backup capacity? Or 40%, or 20% backup capacity?
Costs of pumped hydro/battery energy storage.
What are the costs of CO2 emission? Europe 80 Euro per tCO₂, China/India 8, US zero.
That is clearly true, here and in other situations.
But, the public has made it clear they are unwilling to give up the implied subsidy the unaccounted externally provides.
That... doesn't seem true?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.
Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.
He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.
None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...
Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage?
Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.
There's also very interesting work on non-battery storage technology. The one that has gotten my attention is Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" thermal storage technology. I don't know where they are in crossing the chasm on this, but the theory looks very promising, with capex as low as $0.10 per kWh of thermal storage capacity. This promises to make 600 C heat available 365/7/24 for a cost as low as $3/GJ, similar to heat from combustion of Henry Hub natural gas.
Indeed. Cost of nuclear is static or climbing. Renewables are cheaper and falling. Batteries are about the same, and falling.
If a western country starts building nuclear today, they will have something to show for it in ten years at the earliest. Renewables and batteries are already cheap, and getting cheaper, so it seems like a very silly bet. Especially in a place like Italy with excellent sun and lots of space.
This must at least partly be region-dependent right?
In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).
From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?
Most of Finnish wind capacity was built without subsidies. The demand was saturated at ~25% of total generation, after which the market started building solar. Wind power is more cost-effective at these latitudes, but solar generation is currently more valuable, as it correlates less with existing renewables.
That only makes sense if you're burning hydrocarbons to heat your homes; about 1/3 of total energy use is space heating. Shifting to heat pumps and more wind before wasting money on solar panels at high latitudes is better ROI on energy independence and carbon reduction.
Heat pumps already became popular a long time ago. Electricity is so widely used for heating, that the difference in electricity consumption between the coldest winter days and July nights is almost 2.5x. While there are some old legends of Finnish (or maybe Sami) wind wizards, we still haven't figured out how to generate wind power on demand.
In any case, it's up to the market. If you believe it's possible to make money with wind / solar / nuclear power in Finland, you should be able to get permits in a reasonable time. Right now, those building solar are investing more than the others.
> China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor.
I've seen it claimed that this figure is not equivalent to the time-to-build in West, as the clock starts later in the process. I don't know if that's true, but I've seen the claim.
SA is at 168 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly
France is at 32 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.
So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.
SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.
It is really ideal for solar.
But the emissions are still much higher than France.
Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.
But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.
Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...
This is despite increasing solar.
> So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.
True. But France is 70% nuclear plus 15% renewables, with the remainder 5% fossil. In 2026 South Australia was 75% renewables, and 25% CCGT (gas turbine - fossil).
So France is 5% fossil vs SA's 25%, and accordingly has 1/5 the CO2 intensity. No mystery there - and obviously has nothing to do with nuclear vs renewables.
SA says they will hit 100% renewable in next year. [0] I struggle to believe that, but 95% at some point seems likely given the price of CCGT.
[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/hydrogen-and-ren...
This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever
To be fair South Australia is:
* Incredibly sunny
* Incredibly sparely populated
* Functionally winterless
Like it's the perfect setup for solar.
Somewhere like Denmark, Japan, even the US Northeast does not have those.
Imagine a city-sized solar panel array, sitting somewhere very shiny in the North African region.
A long, not insurmountable, cable strings its way across the gap and into Europes tender bits, i.e Spain and Turkey/etc.
Electrons, once redirected/collected, can be redirected far.
Heck, at scale, probably a lot of it could be done with microwave, anyway ..
If only these nations weren't in such constant conflict with one another. Those with all the energy could turn their deserts into paradise. Those with paradise already, could use their free time to find new ways to collect energy, better.
Instead, we drive to work.
Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.
France's reactors became successively more expensive as the need for more layered safety features was exposed. The first generation (CP0, CP1, CP2) was quite inexpensive, the P4 and P'4 designs were already more expensive and the N4 was yet more expensive.
At this point I think if you want inexpensive nuclear, you just have to accept some risk. Going from 99.9% safety to 99.99% adds just too much complexity to remain economically viable.
Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
> Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
Those arguments typically assume Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage, which is a completely clown argument.
I've yet to see any serious engineer make the argument that Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage. I've more often seen it used as a straw man argument against renewables.
I've seen the argument made plenty of times. Even nuclear engineers from MIT basically made this argument!
You can say anyone who makes this argument isn't serious, but that sounds like a No True Scotsman argument.
I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
> Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
From what I've seen, some countries have renewables comparable to nuclear for baseload power, at least for now, but in no country is new construction nuclear cheaper.
Those countries where nuclear does best will be energy ghettos in the post fossil age, as they will be competing with countries (typically sunny places closer to the equator) with cheap renewables.
One can account for those with more detailed optimization/simulation, and if you do so you find nuclear still doesn't compete.
I've seen calculations for Denmark that has a great offshore wind power potential[1]. They indeed don't need nuclear. The lowest cost mix is offshore wind power (66%), combined cycle gas turbines (26%), and solar PV (8%). The costlier carbon-neutral option is offshore wind power (84%), solar PV (13%), and biomethane CCGT (3%).
Solar photovoltaic is so low thanks to its intermittency. The more solar you have as a percentage of the total production the more costly it gets. At the limit of 100% solar its SLCOE is about 4 times higher than nuclear (Fig. 3).
So, the availability and the quality (offshore wind is less variable, causes less backlash and so on) of wind power resources play a big role.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Yes, thank you. Eroi ist the only thing which matters from a hard physics stand point.
That’s just not true.
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
30 years is generally the guarantee for some minimum output so it's the floor too... could still be outputting 60-70% of original spec for 50 years
Sure but all the residual stuff needs als be considered.
as with every system, yes
Yes but with RE it is the major cost, because they are not firm energy.
That is not how RE works at scale.
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
Sure labor amount is strongly correlated with EROI
Why use a bad metric when one can use the actually relevant metrics?
I see this from nuclear advocates when they talk about "energy density". Energy density (or EROI) are only relevant insofar as they affect cost. Why not just use cost? (The answer is that cost isn't giving the nuclear advocates the answer they want, so they have to lie and use some substitute metric.)
Huh? Cost vs EROI differences show potential for improvements. You can never cheat bad eroi of RE grid.
RE grid doesn't have a "bad EROI". The EROI of renewables is quite acceptable.
Not if you factor in all the residual. Adding to fossil or water based grid is okay, running on its own with all the necessary residual it gets way worse.
Yes, even if you factor in "all the residual".
EROI cannot be bad, since energy is only a small part of the cost of manufacturing. If EROI was unacceptable, then overall cost would be too.
EROI of 5 means 20% all energy goes just to preserving current status. As wind is limited this gives hard limits to what is sustainable in northern countries. These problems completely disappear with nuclear.
EROI is a lot higher than 5.
No
Profitable compared to what, that provides base load?
If energy prices are too high, industry suffers. If you let the price rise, maybe China just eats your lunch.
What's the option value vs risk of gas price rises? Gas sets the marginal price of electricity in Italy today for 60% of the year [1]
[1] https://www.terna.it/DesktopModules/AdactoBackend/API/direct... "However, the electricity system remains significantly exposed to gas price volatility, which in 2024 determined electricity prices for more than 60% of the hours."
Neither nuclear nor gas or coal will matter any more in a few years. It took California only six years to install 41% of the battery capacity goal it has for 2045[1]. As batteries are becoming part for new solar and wind installations, they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.
[1] https://www.emi-bg.com/en/battery-storage-in-california-has-...
> they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.
Unfortunately, this probably won't work everywhere. Particularly in Northern Europe winter is tough as there's very little sunlight (manageable) and often very little wind (not manageable,as it lasts longer).
Nuclear is an expensive way of solving this problem, but it's carbon neutral which is super important.
Even that would be manageable with enough solar panels and batteries, no? Or is it certain that too much surface area would have to be covered with panels?
Batteries work for 1-2 days right now. These wind breaks can be 1-2 weeks.
Like, to be fair, batteries have improved so much in the last decade that this may be solved, but I'm generally sceptical of one thing that will save us, as I reckon we'll need multiple things to ensure resilience (which is really, really, really important when it comes to core needs like electricity and heating).
Okay, so scaling batteries up would work, got it.
> Okay, so scaling batteries up would work, got it.
Maybe? Only if there are pretty large breakthroughs in storage, so we need a backup plan.
Is the need for "pretty large breakthroughs" based on realistic calculations, or are you just guessing? I know that most people subscribe to your position, but I can't say I've really seen convincing analyses that show the numbers:
- What thresholds of $/kWh, charge speed, power density etc. do we need to reach before scaling becomes viable? What are those thresholds based on?
- Where are we now on those metrics, and how did they evolve over the last 2-3 decades?
People seem to forget that we've already been making pretty huge breakthroughs in storage for decades: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
Still, everyone seems very confident that scaling is non-viable now. But IMO it should be possible to demonstrate the non-viability using the approach above - even if the exact numbers are wrong, the orders of magnitude should be good enough, right?
Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling and maintenance over their lifespans making them a poor fit for base load without extremely costly redundancy in a small country.
A couple points. No, entire plants aren't taken offline at once typically, individual reactor cores are, and modern designs work to minimize that. They still maintain extremely good uptime, especially if you're comparing them to intermittent renewables. Secondly, Italy isn't super tiny, and you need redundancy for outages and such in any grid regardless of its components.
A large fraction of all nuclear power stations only have one reactor.
> maintain extremely good uptime
Not from a capacity planning standpoint.
> Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling
CANDU reactors, for one, can be (and are) refuelled live:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_refuelling
Every few decades they do need to be refurbished though.
Cutting out the “and maintenance” bit is misleading.
It’s commonplace for maintenance issues at non CANDU reactors to extend the “refelling” downtime. So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues. The major benefit is when manufacturing plutonium due to shorter fuel cycles, but overall CANDU reactors are less cost effective which is why adoption fizzled out.
> So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues.
There are several situations:
* refuelling occurs
* maintenance and/or inspection needs to happen
* refurbishment may be desired
Some of these things take downtime, some do not, depending on the design of the reactor and other factors. A blanket statement of "refuelling forces a downtime" is incorrect in many situations. Depending on the maintenance (or inspections) needed, this may or may not need downtime. Refurbishment generally means tearing things apart, so usually means downtime, but if a site has multiple reactors they can be done one at a time, e.g.:
* https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1006993/ontario-delivers-...
Eh, again, I disagree. As an example: Many CANDU reactors have insanely high availability. Example: Qinshan CANDU Unit 1 only had a planned outage of less than 27 days in 2023. There are many other examples. That is crazy uptime in the world of electricity production. And to be clear, if you come at me with "Oh, what about the major maintenance required every 10+ years?". Thermal (coal/gas) has the same issue.
Your average hydroelectric power station measure yearly downtime due to maintenance in hours.
Moving the goal posts?
Not at all.
You said 27 days of planned outage is crazy uptime in the world of electricity production. Hydro routinely beats that by an order of magnitude.
I had a discussion with ChatGPT about this concern. When comparing a modern EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) to a modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant, the required maintenance cycles look fairly similar. For the nitpickers/tomato throwers (I see you!): I am using EPR because it is state-of-the art for nuclear power, and I am specifically using the term "modern" for thermal power plant because the newest ones (China, Japan) are nearly at the frontier of efficiency possible for that type of electricty production.
Roughly: EPR runs for 18 months, then requires 1-2 months of maintenance (which includes refuelling about one third of its fuel assemblies). A modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant runs 12-18 months, then requires 1 month of maintenance.
Next, I could not resist as other commenters already mentioned it. You wrote: "small country". As the Aussies say: Yeah, no. Italy is 300,000 sq km. That is not small. If compared to the United States, it would be the fifth largest state.
Finally, why does it seem that all discussions about electricity production on HN always devolve into the "Base Load Wars"? For me, it is starting to feel like a meme. (Are there LLM troll bots trained to enter HN discussions and make a bunch of "base load" arguments?) Seriously, can someone please create a text-based role playing game that revolves around a future society locked into eternal "Base Load Wars"? (See: PhD Simulator[1])
[1] https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html
But is this the intended maintenance duration, or the actual one? Because the construction of every EPR project has been a disaster. Construction took 20 years in Europe and 9 years in China.
Well, there are only four EPRs in the world. It is too early to say. Frankly, as a non-expert "armchair observer", Finland was dumb for starting the EPR project before the design was finalised.
From what I read no further EPRs are planned and they fully want to go ahead with a streamlined EPR2 design.
I think the problem of the Finns was that they really wanted energy independence and tge inly ones that were on the market were the french. No doubt the frenched used much diplomatic muscle to attract them as a first experiment.
> That is not small.
There are 70 countries larger than Italy, Russia is more than 50x the size.
America the 4th largest country is still 20x the size of Italy.
Profit is not everything.
> That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Spot on. That, plus... peak oil.
Peak oil was supposed to have happened decades ago but current projections put it well past 2050. Demand for oil is going to fall due to electrification long before we run out of sufficient oil production capacity.
It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.
Yes. There's all kind of hydrocarbons that aren't economic or barely so, like oil shale or shale oil, with is rock with a stain on it.
Interestingly, Venezuelan extra heavy sour crude oil is not profitable to use at $55 a barrel, the price before the Iran war, but is profitable when it's over $90 a barrel.
It's easy to make money when someone else pays the costs but you get to keep the revenue.
This is wrong. The peak of conventional oil is documented around 2007. Since then, Europe's economy has been slowing down (if you look at physical indicators like how much is transported by trucks or what surface is being built each year, not artificial ones like the GDP).
Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).
Peak oil was initially believed to occur due to depletion - I believe that’s what the GP was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Still we had a peak of conventional oil in 2007, I don't get why I'm getting downvoted for that fact.
> we had a peak of conventional oil in 2007, I don't get why I'm getting downvoted for that fact.
I don't think you were downvoted for that; instead, I think you were downvoted for saying "This is wrong" when GP commenter claimed the peak oil has been predicted decade after decade. GP also just said "peak oil" not "peak conventional oil" so I'm unsure why you brought up that distinction?
A better reply might have been "Peak oil has been wrong decade after decade, but current projections are somewhere between 2025 and after 2050. Additionally, if we restrict it to only specific geographic regions, or to only a subset of oil extraction, it occurred in the mid-2000s instead of the original global projections of between 1922 and 1960."
I'm not the one that downvoted you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).
The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.
- https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...
- https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-d...
It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
The 138€ is under pessimistic assumptions. Min profitability limit on the other hand is 9ct/kwh. But nobody denies fla3 was a failure.
You didn't understand the electric cap in France. It's a cap on profits. If edf sells at certain thresholds above 70€ due to market, the state will take extra profit. It's sort of like double CFDs for renewables except edf has no minimum compensation
> It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
It was nationalized because it had suffered record losses in the previous year and was struggling with a ballooning debt mountain of 65B euro. The French government didn’t need to nationalize it to control its strategic direction - it already owned 84% of it. That was the press release claim in order to present the bailout as “strategic”.
And the point was to address the gp’s claim that nuclear was profitable. Profitable enterprises don’t lose 18B a year or suffer financial instability due to a debt mountain on their balance sheets.
> You didn't understand the electric cap in France.
I don’t see how you drew that conclusion - the reactor needs to earn €138 per MWh (that’s the middle estimate not the worst case which is €180 per MWh). But the most it can earn is €70/MWh due to The cap? You’re just restating what I said. This reactor will be deeply unprofitable for its entire life.
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Just after your quote:
> EdF responded that it "assumes full responsibility for the technical and financial aspects of dismantling its nuclear plants," and noted that it was currently decommissioning nine reactors, so had a good basis of experience. It also pointed out that its funds set aside for decommissioning were audited by the Ministry of the Environment, Energy and the Sea the previous month.
And, a little bit earlier, the article author's assesment:
> There are well-developed plans for dismantling these (which have been shut down since 1990 or before) and work is progressing.
Please don't cherry-pick articles.
There’s tons of costs associated with coal, oil, and natural gas extraction, processing, and use, which are neither priced into up front costs nor the price that customers pay for the product. If those were priced in, then fossil fuels would have to become more expensive. Those costs currently get diffused into various other areas and paid for by a wide net of payers, including both the customers and non-customers, and a big one is the government (taxpayer).
> The reliability of french electricity
Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.
Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
France net exported power this summer every single day and hour.
France net imported in 2022 less vs Germany net imported in 2024 in business as usual situation
Edf also announced yo add cooling towers to bypass old environmental laws, especially for Golfech
> Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
Palo Verde is right next to the Sonoran Desert and has been running for forty years in Arizona heat:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
There's no technical reason why nuclear plants can't run in low/hot water situations.
So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens. And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.
Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.
That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable
There were also issues recently where low river water levels forced reactors to reduce output and even shut down.
This has been happening for decades. It's pretty common in summer, which used not to be an issue since peak use is during winter.
This may come as an issue if air con develops fast, though.
Check out data this summer and tell me how many hours or minuts did France NET import power in all 3 months?
Until the rivers run low.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
> Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.
Hungary and Romania made a mistake by not diverting earlier more river flow. France net exported every single day of summer
You know when rivers run not-low? In winter when we need to heat all those freezing homes. Crazy how that works. Yup, it's not ideal in a summer heat wave... but that's precisely when solar can shine.
We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.
> We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.
"Solar and nuclear are the only two options" is a false dichotomy, lol.
Of course it becomes a dichotomy if you add "only"
“We need both” implies both are needed, yes? That no other options satisfy said need?
>I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable.
This is comparing to the base case of fossil fuels. But those have tremendous negative consequences.
Yeah but they get to dispose of their waste for free.
Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?
Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.
Many countries do not have the raw materials to build solar, wind turbines, and batteries so it doesn't solve the sovereignty issue.
Once you have a solar panel you can't be cut off from using it. It's not like oil where you need regular deliveries forever.
You als can't be cut if you stockpile uranium for a decade or 2
Sure, but when your existing ones break or you need more you can have issues.
> when your existing ones break
They last 25 years. Enough time to spin up domestic manufacturing if you're really paranoid.
> or you need more
Lots of countries manufacture them today.
I'm not talking about manufacturing. I am talking about raw materials for chips, battery cells, etc. You can't be sovereign if you have the capability to build something but don't have the resources to build it
If your electricity usage isn't growing like crazy, existing batteries can simply be recycled to make new ones.
What chips are you talking about?
Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
> What chips are you talking about?
Electronic chips in wind turbines, hydro stations, etc.. Believe it or not but all of these use chips...
> Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
I am not holding renewables to it. The person I was responding to made the erroneous claim that you would be sovereign with renewables. "Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue." I am just pointing out that most countries wouldn't actually have sovereignty and would still be reliant on other countries.
I am the one holding the consistent standard since I believe most countries wouldn't be sovereign regardless of them using fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
No one meets the ImJamal Standard of Sovereignty. It's completely useless.
Might as well go with the source of energy that pollutes the least and allows you to be import-free for the longest amount of time - solar, wind, and batteries.
The US, Canada, Russia and many other countries could be sovereign with oil and coal.
China, Brazil, Russia and other countries have a lot of rare earth minerals to build electronics for turbines and other sources of power.
Australia, Canada, Russia and other countries have a decent amount of uranium.
So, yes, some countries meet the definition of energy sovereignty.
So you think oil and coal doesn't use electronics?
They use exactly the same stuff. Nearly all power generation is just spinning magnets, obvious exception is PV. There are no particular electronic components you need for wind turbines that you don't also need for a coal or gas fired power plant. Everything uses electronic control systems.
Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
We had electricity from coal and oil prior to electronics... Or do you think we had electronics in 1900?
Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
We did have electronics in 1900: Kirchoff's circuit laws date from 1845, the first semiconductor device (crystal detector) is from 1874 and the first vacuum tube is from 1904. What we didn't have is transistors and the miniaturization technology that gave us integrated circuits and microprocessors.
The conversation was clearly about more modern electronics since I was talking about rare earth minerals which were not used in the devices you are talking about.
You are able to drill and burn oil along with transmit the electricity without technology that requires rare earth minerals which are the electronics I was referring to.
You were able to drill and burn oil without modern technology. These days, pretty much all those easily accessible wells are drained and the only oil left is in harder to access wells that you'd never even find without modern technology. That's why we're fracking and messing around with oil sands and building offshore oil rigs etc.
We also had windmills long before we had electricity. And the west has plenty of rare earth deposits, despite the name they're not actually that rare. They're just expensive to refine and the refinement process causes a lot of pollution. China does it cheaper, polluting itself in the process and that's why we don't do it. If they were to stop giving us access to these minerals we could restart our own production. It's not just used for electronics by the way, it's also used for magnets which are a key component in electric motors/generators, so without rare earth minerals you're not generating electricity regardless of having oil.
This whole argument of yours is asinine.
If you think all those countries are ImJamal Sovereign you don't know what you're talking about.
I'm not saying they are currently sovereign, only that they could be if necessary.
That's like saying oil-producing countries aren't sovereign unless they also manufacture oil drills and pumps and pipes and tanks.
The sun is an oil well. Panels are drills or pumps. Batteries are oil tanks.
Not having oil drill and oil tank factories in your country isn't a critical energy sovereignty issue.
They don't need to make things themselves, they just need to have the capability to make it themselves to be sovereign.
If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil? If you want sovereignty then it is critical to have the ability to make drills, tankers, etc in your country if you rely on oil.
This is no different than solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc when it comes to renewables. If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go. If you do, then you need to be able to handle everything yourself otherwise you are always going to be reliant on other countries.
> If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil?
Your existing drills and pumps might work long enough for you to stand up a domestic drill manufacturing industry.
Same for solar, except that panels and batteries operate for way longer than drills and pumps.
> If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go
If no one is sovereign then sovereignty is meaningless. Who cares.
> Your existing drills and pumps might work long enough for you to stand up a domestic drill manufacturing industry.
> Same for solar, except that panels and batteries operate for way longer than drills and pumps.
This is not about factories, but raw material as I said in a previous comment that you responded to. Most countries don't have uranium. A lot of countries do not have rare earth minerals for electronic chips.
> If no one is sovereign then sovereignty is meaningless. Who cares
The person I was originally responding to did and was claiming that you could achieve sovereignty with renewables.
An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors
I am not talking about manufacturing but the resources necessary to build them.
But they have the resources to build nuke plants?
I don’t understand the point
Nuclear requires the least amount of mining and materials vs alternatives https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-... So in both cases the argument makes little sense
The person I was responding to made the claim that renewables makes a country sovereign. I am saying it doesn't and it seems like you agree so I don't understand your point.
I never made the claim that nuclear would make a country sovereign. Only a small number of countries could have sovereignty with nuclear.
And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.
In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.
There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.
I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.
I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.
I've lived in Spain a couple years ago. I've seen the quality of its health care. Its easily 20 years behind the US and that's being charitable. The family that lived next to me had a man who had the exact same break I had had 20 years before. He had worse, more primitive care than I did in the US decades before. I had to explain to them why it was a bad idea for him to sit in his wheelchair all day because nobody in the Spanish system seemed to know how to care for a simple broken leg. You got what you paid for...
PS Spanish taxes are absurdly high...insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries. All that and an actual working economy and energy system.
> insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries.
If you are a white male. But what about suppressed minorities and women (and especially minorities women and nonbinary persons) that can't get job because of chauvinistic billionaires?
Sometimes it works — but the overall quality, speed, and care outcomes remain, on average, very poor when compared to the US.
The price is only good if you ignore the outcomes and what you’re paying on the backend through taxes.
>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries
I actually do since I'm Italian lol
Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant
This was at the Ospedale San Carlo di Nancy in Rome.
Understood, never had to deal with healthcare in Lazio region
Uhhh, some nerve damage, news worthy? Ho qualche dubbio al riguardo.
Fellow italian here, let's not act like our third rate ERs never leave people suffering for hours without caring that it may have lasting consequences. I understand it's partially due to understaffing, but this is the reality. My dad had this happen to him as well. Thanks
> I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.
> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance
The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me.
Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff's incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.
My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.
Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.
> The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.
And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.
The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to the cost of living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
> I’d rather be in the hole financially
You don't have the slightest clue what it means to be poor and in a financial hole. Like, it's impossible to explain to you.
Count me in. I'd rather be poor in the worst neighborhood (or village) in Nigeria but healthy than in a European mansion and unhealthy. Feel free to tell me all about how I can't understand, champion of the proletariat.
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Power is an input. If it isn’t profitable it needs to be subsidized from elsewhere.
Healthcare is the same. It just turns out subsidizing it from wages works because healthy people are more productive.
Profitability isn’t a hard limit. But if something isn’t internally profitable, it requires an external partner to get going.
Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.
Neither it is for nuclear. It fixes the externality
Healthcare is profitable like schools are, or roads, or public transportation, or sanitary systems: the goal is for us a society to live better.
When something is profitable in the sense that a few oligarchs make more an more money, I see it as a bug, not a feature.
If the nuclear power would not be profitable, then Germany would not have push nuclear phaseout through parliament in 2002. (Law: "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity")
The German nuclear phaseout, had as side effect a national security issue, increased dependence on Russian natural gas.
That's a bullshit Statement. Nuclear in Germany was phased out because of ideology, not economics.
It was cheapest firm power in german merit order. Instead the guy that was later hired at gasprom had other plans, together with greens. As result coal is still used. New gas plants approved this summer
Exactly, there were no economical reasons for nuclear phase out in Germany.
It was a political decision and in the end a very costly one: much bigger burning of coal then necessary, new gas power plants, increased dependence on foreign energy imports.
But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia
FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)
Why? Isn’t it in the national interest of a government to preferentially use foreign sources of uranium to preserve domestic sources?
It should be in the national interest. But every nation is determined to let Russia have the last resources in 30 years by boycotting Russian oil and gas.
As we hear downthread though, we'll have warp drives by then.
there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision
Mining isn't a great argument against nuclear. Uranium fuel has an incredibly high energy density so a relatively small amount of high grade ore can be converted into a large amount of electricity so even when compared to the one time input from mining required to produce all of the components that go into making a PV installation it can still perform favourably. Uranium mining is also transitioning away from open pit mines to using in-situ recovery where a liquid solution is injected into a uranium ore formation to dissolve the uranium before recovering the solution, about 55% of current uranium production uses this method already.
Mining uranium in Spain would destroy environment and involve legal slavery?
Slavery is obviously not an issue in a country like Spain, but any kind of mining operation here seems to be heavily opposed by the people that live around the potential sites, for environmental reasons.
The only alternatives to nuclear are coal and LNG
Or starting with solar more 20 years ago.
Again bullshit. Nuclear requires least mining vs any alternative https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...
And in situ mining is one of the best environmentally
canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too
has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it
Canadian reactors don't use enriched uranium. Also many countries have centrifuges - Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, and of course all the nuclear armed states. Further, enrichment plants can be built anywhere.
Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.
Plus you can stockpile it super easy.
Nuclear power plants refuel on yearly cycles.
That's plenty of time to source alternative uranium supplies presuming you haven't stockpiled.
Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.
Uranium is not rare. You can even extract it from sea water.
Russia's is just cheaper.
But it accounts for 5% of the cost of a produced MWh, so if it had to be generated otherwise, we'd know how to do it.
Wrong uranium you can easily stock for 10years inadvance
Maybe don't keep it all in one spot, though.
Refueling nuclear power plants only happens fairly rarely. You hold your customer hostage a lot less if you say “ha! Next time in 8 years time when you need to refuel, we won’t sell the goods to you!” as compared to literally turning off the gas tap.
You can easily store 10 years worth of uranium, unlike gas and oil.
Many is how? Why are people spreading such bullshit? Only a subset of plants, mainly VVER are dependent on Russia, albeit that'll change too.
Russia is ore importer itself and Orano+Urenco have enough capacity to satisfy most of Europe, both expanding.
Decentralized is not guaranteed. You mostly deploy ren in productive areas, see northern offshore, or that most of Ukraine's ren were in the South. Guess what happened to that. France has a decentralized grid too- many plants scattered around the country, each with multiple units
Why does it have to be profitable? Not everything is a publicly traded company with quarterly earnings reports.
You do things with it's output that are profitable instead.
I’m curious why profitability is the concern here? I was under the impression that abundant clean energy would be of higher concern than profitability of energy companies - unless you mean that profitability concerns will reduce the willingness to invest and develop more nuclear?
I guess we could argue that these sorts of operations should be state owned?
It's not. This whole discussion is confused because it's based on a misunderstanding of how electricity markets work. When states charge a captive customer base whatever nuclear project costs turn out to be, profitability is not a meaningful measure of economic attractiveness. Levelised cost of energy, or system cost of energy, under different regulatory and market regimes, is the relevant benchmark.
Even if they are state owned, they should break even at least somewhere on paper. Explicit and bounded subsidies are very different from implicit, open-ended ones.
TVO in Finland seems to have managed that.
https://www.tvo.fi/material/sites/tvo/sijoittajasivut/pwmzkr...
So profitable yes. Would the owners/investors have made more money if they just bought random stocks based on some index? Probably. But not a loss.
Technically as a Mankala principle company TVO will never make any profit or loss. Profit here is some imaginary “how much money would they have made if the energy was sold directly to the nord pool”
Not to detract from your point, but France had a good run with nuclear energy throughout the 70s, no? They built them on mass, built them reliably and quickly, learned from project to project and had economies of scale.
And if I am not mistaken then for a long time energy prices in France were smaller than that of neighbouring countries.
But to be fair, it is difficult to tell what "profitable" means because a primary motivation has always been the development of nuclear weapons, so the true amortization is across industry and national security.
China is the only country on Earth that I would trust to build, manage and maintain nuclear power plants.
The point you're touching on is that nuclear power is expensive, so much so that not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the world without significant government subsidies. And even then the LCOE cost is basically the highest amongst all electricity sources. And it only gets that "low" by them pushing out the lifetime of the power plant, at least on paper, to 60 years.
As an example, Hinkley Point-C ("HPC") has that 60 year lifespan, a cost that has doubled since it was approved and a contracted electricity cost that is among the highest in Europe but I believe that contracted price only lasts 35 years. So what happens then? Likely because of increased costs of plant maintenance the costs are going to go way up.
But back to China. China is building over 30 nuclear reactors currently. It has largely standardized on two designs (rather than a unique design for each site). It owns the supply chain and the IP. And each project is getting cheap credit from the state (under 2%). All of this is going to make the end result far more cost competitive.
I cannot stress enough how much standardization matters here and China has proved this time and time again, for example with trains (both long-distance and for metros). A time-consuming and expensive part of any large capital project is procurement. Every city in the West that wants to build light rail has to put out RFPs for the rolling stock. That process is time-consuming and you get no economy of scale. China basically says "this is what you're using" and it saves years and billions off any project. As an example, there are cities in China that had no metro system 20 years ago that now rank in the 10 largest metro systems in the world by track length, number of stations and ridership.
Any private nuclear power plant in the West is going to try to raise profits by cutting maintenance. We see this with every private utility in the US. Even with oversight by the NRC, the NRC itself is subject to budget cuts.
There are large, unsolved problems with all of this too. Processing the fuel, processing the spent fuel and the transportation and storage of spent fuel are all unsolved problems, despite what the pro-nuclear crowd like to say.
I am generally of the opinion that nuclear power is not justified on the basis of base economics.
But I thought South Korea made a good swing at it, but I haven't kept up on things much
And I’d argue if you’re saying we need to take complete end to end costs into account, oil isn’t profitable either.
If oil companies are ever on the hook for climate change, the bill will be measured in trillions.
This is false. Nuclear power plants are very profitable, if streamline the regulations that are choking them to death with bureaucracy and no safety.
And you're basically telling bullshit. French nuclear is profitable and made profits pretty much every single yearexcept 2022. Swiss data is open too https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
Such statements can come either from ignorance or malice
It is usually people parrot-repeating (like GenAI?) whatever intox Grennpeace and the likes (e,g, the German government under Merkel) spread.
What exactly does it mean for a powerplan in china or russia to be profitable?
The same thing it means anywhere else?
Any argument that environmentalists run amok is the sole cause of nuclear's failure to launch has to address the fact that these two places, where environmentalists are a lot more likely to get a club to the head than a say at the table, are largely not expanding their nuclear power that much versus, say, solar in China.
The power trading market in the US and the markets in Russia and particularly China are not the same, at all.They are rife with tarrif pricing, state-set prices, and state-owned players. The whole idea of profit is only tangentially applicable.
In any case, your premise doesn't hold. China is hugely invested in nuke and continues to build as fast as they can. Theyve got 58 reactors operating (about 56 GW) and 33 more (over 35 GW) under construction. Theyve consistently been approving at least 10 new units a year. It's literally in the current 5 year plan.
> They are rife with tarrif pricing, state-set prices, and state-owned players.
This is the case in the US, too, as public utilities.
> Theyve got 58 reactors operating (about 56 GW) and 33 more (over 35 GW) under construction.
They added 315 GW of solar in 2025 alone, so we agree.
I'm not sure if you think the two are equivalent ...
Yes, while we’re looking at expenses, add the military to oil.
I am not sure what you mean by profitable here?
no country had made road or water profitable either
This is wrong, Germanies Konvoi where immensely profitable. The greens complained about these as money printing machines.
China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…
…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.
China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).
They’ve been building out every form of power generation they can. Nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. It’s all skyrocketing.
The talking point that they’re going green doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
China can be going green while also refusing to constrain it's economic growth on the short term.
When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.
All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.
At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.
Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.
That link is out of date. China's coal share fell under 50% this year (your link says 58%), and their CO2 emissions dropped 1% the first half of 2026.
So yes, it can be reasonably claimed that China is greening. "greening", not "green" -- 49.7% coal is still a lot of CO2.
https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/china-pushes-coal-...
To add to this, China’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have been flat or declining for a couple of years now: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
Your own link says the following:
> After the first three quarters of the year, China’s CO2 emissions in 2025 are now finely balanced between a small fall or rise, depending on what happens in the last quarter.
And then goes on to describe how the largest drop (3%) is happening at a time when it just happens that fuel is increasingly expensive and scarce, shipping is increasingly expensive and slow, and the global economy has spent months grinding increasingly towards a terrible outcome.
People might as well brag about their incredible weight loss journey through amputation.
That's 50% of electricity, but not 50% of energy. Coal still provides ~80% of energy IIRC (roughly 10% is carbon-free and growing faster than the US). China burns so, so much coal, while much of the world has shifted to natural gas, which has much less carbon per energy.
You don't recall correctly. Coal is also 50% of energy. It's used a lot for heating, but that is dropping rapidly. It's used in manufacturing, but that is also doing rapidly, except for steel. It's not used for transportation.
You're closer to right. I was remembering oil+coal=80%. Coal is 60% today and oil is 20%.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
Bit of a shell game as usual unfortunately.
https://clintel.org/chinas-massive-coal-to-liquids-expansion...
Maybe emissions fell because industrial activity fell instead? Maybe oil and gas have been used less because the cost has risen. Maybe that explains coal as well depending on how it is used. I’m speculating coal might be used in the production of steel - what if that product is highly tariffed in the US and EU so China had to cut back?
China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal. If it was they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
Oh you're correct, the same thing is happening in India without any of the nonsense fanfare.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/span-...
You can see the same dips hit at the same time for the same reason.
In terms of Chinese coal though there's a reason boosters always talk about percentages and not absolute number... one goes down, but the other keeps rising. Even if China continues on the current course in terms of tonnage burned they won't reach "peak coal" until at least 2030.
> China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal
Why does the "why" matter? Tons of carbon are tons of carbon, right? That's what people say when you tell them about per-capita emissions.
> they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled.
What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
> Why does the "why" matter?
Well it doesn’t entirely matter but we should just acknowledge that it’s a geopolitical strategy and not really something they are doing for the planet.
> You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled. What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports for example due to alleged “dual use” as they continue to apply military pressure on democratic Taiwan? I’d encourage you to read up on these restrictions with respect to Japan for example who is alarmed by Chinese and North Korean provocations.
You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels. For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies. It’s not just the US, by the way. The EU is tariffing China too.
They are entitled to pursue these strategies but we are also entitled in the west to recognize them and combat them how we see fit.
> not really something they are doing for the planet
If it doesn't matter why do you feel the need to acknowledge it?
> Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports [to Japan] for example due to alleged “dual use”
How do these restrictions prevent Japan from using Chinese PV and batteries in their grid?
> You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry
Translation: they gave the world a ton of deeply discounted goods. And you said they didn't do anything nice for anyone!
> so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels
Other countries are free to subsidize their own solar and battery industries. Godspeed to the ones doing it right now. But also is it really that amazing an industry to have? Low-margins, constant price wars, undifferentiated commodity product without much of a moat. Rich economies tend not to have those industries anyway.
> For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies
Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
> The EU is tariffing China too.
There are no EU tariffs on Chinese solar panels or grid-scale batteries or heat pumps. They are considering tariffing heat pumps right now.
> If it doesn't matter why do you feel the need to acknowledge it?
Just to make sure nobody is ever confused. Why do you feel the need to defend China?
> How do these restrictions prevent Japan from using Chinese PV and batteries in their grid?
It limits Japan from developing their own home grown market or utilizing technology for what China considers dual use?
> Translation: they gave the world a ton of deeply discounted goods. And you said they didn't do anything nice for anyone!
Other translation: Those cheap goods weren’t worth the cost to the environment or to empower an autocratic regime.
> Other countries are free to subsidize their own solar and battery industries.
When that happens there can be retaliatory measures against countries who are in for example the WTO or have other trade agreements. You don’t just subsidize products in a vacuum.
> Godspeed to the ones doing it right now. But also is it really that amazing an industry to have? Low-margins, constant price wars, undifferentiated commodity product without much of a moat. Rich economies tend not to have those industries anyway.
You’re focusing on solar panels but that’s not all we’ve been discussing.
> Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
That doesn’t follow from what you quoted.
> There are no EU tariffs on Chinese solar panels or grid-scale batteries or heat pumps. They are considering tariffing heat pumps right now.
They are tariffing other products/industries and working on additional ones.
> Just to make sure nobody is ever confused.
That a country is acting in its own interests? I don't think that's news.
> Why do you feel the need to defend China?
I think climate change is the biggest problem of our lifetime. China's output of green tech is our best chance. I think useful idiots for the fossil fuel industry demonize China to transitively discredit renewables (i.e. not for "lofty moral reasons" like democracy). There's a genuine double standard.
> It limits Japan from developing their own home grown market
Drill deeper. How does this prevent Japan from "greening" today? That's the topic we're discussing.
> or utilizing technology for what China considers dual use?
Why can't Japan source "dual use" rare earths from somewhere else? They aren't actually that rare. Japan could invest in mines and processing facilities in Africa or the US or Canada.
> Those cheap goods weren’t worth the cost to the environment
Cheap, abundant PV and batteries that can decarbonize the world? I'm ok with localized damage to one country's environment, done voluntarily, for that. Climate change will wreck the global environment.
> empower an autocratic regime
Describes most oil-producing countries. This is virtue signalling.
> there can be retaliatory measures against countries who are in for example the WTO
How did China do it then?
> You’re focusing on solar panels but that’s not all we’ve been discussing.
Ok what else then? You want battery manufacturing? Motors? Has China somehow restricted countries from building their own industries?
> > Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
> That doesn’t follow from what you quoted.
Ok what is the US doing for renewable energy under this administration?
> They are tariffing other products/industries and working on additional ones.
We're focusing on renewable tech here. That's the focus of this thread.
> That a country is acting in its own interests? I don't think that's news.
You changed the topic though, that wasn't what we were talking about.
> I think climate change is the biggest problem of our lifetime. China's output of green tech is our best chance. I think useful idiots for the fossil fuel industry demonize China to transitively discredit renewables (i.e. not for "lofty moral reasons" like democracy). There's a genuine double standard.
That basically proves my initial point lol. That's why it's important to make sure while the effects may be good for the climate, it's not done with any intention for the planet's benefit and specific tactics that are being used are harmful to other countries.
> Drill deeper. How does this prevent Japan from "greening" today? That's the topic we're discussing.
I'd challenge you to do the same thing. How can Japan "green" when China has restricted exports of rare earth materials to Japan because China and its junior partner North Korea are engaging in provocative military activities near Japan?
If your version of "Japan can green by buying China's products" you're being immature in your understanding of international relations, the importance for countries like Japan to maintain their industrial base, and how the environment is an important consideration, but just one of many.
> Why can't Japan source "dual use" rare earths from somewhere else? They aren't actually that rare. Japan could invest in mines and processing facilities in Africa or the US or Canada.
Well Japan and western allies and democracies are working on it, but the problem isn't the location of rare earths it is the ability (as far as I understand) to process them. It'll take time for those capabilities to be stood up, and they have to be subsidized or benefit from tariffs because China has built up so much excess industrial capacity that other countries can't build their own without such policies.
> Describes most oil-producing countries. This is virtue signalling.
Norway is an oil-producing country and not an autocracy. Your point was disproven.
> Cheap, abundant PV and batteries that can decarbonize the world? I'm ok with localized damage to one country's environment, done voluntarily, for that. Climate change will wreck the global environment.
That's your opinion but it's not the opinion of others. I disagree, for example.
> How did China do it then?
You want me to explain the history of the World Trade Organization, the US advocating for China to do it under the guise that China was going to liberalize and democratize, and then how China used most-favored nation status, a regime of state subsidies, and artificially depressing its currency to boost exports? If you're not aware of this stuff, are you sure you should be speaking on this topic without even the basics?
> Ok what else then? You want battery manufacturing? Motors? Has China somehow restricted countries from building their own industries?
Already explained above.
> Ok what is the US doing for renewable energy under this administration?
Idk? We'll have a new administration in a couple of years though.
> We're focusing on renewable tech here. That's the focus of this thread.
Ok then you can stop replying to me since that's not the only thing I'm talking about. I'm focused on more than renewable tech and that's of little concern to me in the grand scheme of things including climate change.
> > Describes most oil-producing countries. This is virtue signalling.
> Norway is an oil-producing country and not an autocracy. Your point was disproven.
Are you somehow unfamiliar with the definition of the word "most"?
> That basically proves my initial point lol
I don't know what your "point" was honestly because you yourself conceded it didn't "matter much".
> Ok then you can stop replying to me since [green energy is] not the only thing I'm talking about
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821986 that's what you were talking about there.
> If your version of "Japan can green by buying China's products" you're being immature in your understanding of international relations
Japan (and most other countries) are already "not green" by buying oil from other autocratic nations. Like I said this is all virtue signalling to avoid going renewable. The fossil fuel industry loves it.
"Rare earths" are a strategic necessity for defence, and China won't sell them for that reason - fine. Countries who still need them can nationalize processing capacity and run it at a loss for the sole use of defence industries. No need to participate or compete in the market at all. China's subsidies and the WTO don't matter.
> Are you somehow unfamiliar with the definition of the word "most"?
Your point was still not great, but I apologize as I misread what you wrote.
> I don't know what your "point" was honestly because you yourself conceded it didn't "matter much".
If you don't know what we were discussing why are you arguing about it?
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821986 that's what you were talking about there.
Industrial output falling because of tariffs for example would be aligned with my initial post. You're being argumentative here for no good reason. If you just want to talk about the engineering technology I don't have much else to say about it. But if you want to talk about the important stuff, why it's not being adopted, why some countries are adopting it and others aren't, I think that's an interesting conversation to have.
> Japan (and most other countries) are already "not green" by buying oil from other autocratic nations. Like I said this is all virtue signalling to avoid going renewable. The fossil fuel industry loves it.
Well they're stuck between buying oil from autocratic nations (China also buys oil from autocratic nations) or buying green technology from autocratic nations which are also threatening them or stopping exports of the technology or industry. Saudi Arabia (or insert whatever country here) doesn't for example stop oil exports to Japan for example if Japan also does their own oil drilling or exploration. China does stop exports of certain technologies or even processed rare earth minerals.
> "Rare earths" are a strategic necessity for defence, and China won't sell them for that reason - fine. Countries who still need them can nationalize processing capacity and run it at a loss for the sole use of defence industries. No need to participate or compete in the market at all.
No lol they'll subsidize them and refuse to buy China's products to protect domestic industries and capabilities to build the products themselves. It won't be limited to defense. Plus as I have pointed out a few times China itself restricts exports because of the threat of dual-use (which is in response to Chinese provocations) so China will in effect stop the export of defense-related products even when they can be used by consumers.
> China's subsidies and the WTO don't matter.
That doesn't make any sense.
I never claimed that China is "going green" (whatever that means), merely that they're gradually reducing their dependence on imported fossil fuels.
Fossil is flat or declining. Everything else is skyrocketing.
China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market.
They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.
You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.
Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments.
Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.
Quite telling, but then so is climate change and it's not exactly hard to understand the motives of those who want(ed) to deny it for power and profit. We should be listening to their wise advice on this topic... why?
If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities.
It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)
It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?
Even if China is the number one in installing nuclear power, the installed capacity dwarfs compared to solar. China is "betting" on anything that produces electricity that doesn't depend on imports, and if that is nuclear they go for it. But it is clearly not their main bet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Pr...
Wind overtook nuclear production in 2016, Solar FV in 2022. Today both more than double it.
Tables in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Ch... are also very telling. Total power production: 15% wind, 17% solar, 5% nuclear. Nuclear is almost stagnant, but they will probably finish what they are already building, or have planned. That is the way they work. But they are slowing the rate of nuclear installations, it took 5 years to go from producing 400 TWh to 500 TWh, while wind in the same time went from 500 TWh to 1.1k TWh and sun from 260 TWh to 1.2k TWh. These growing rates will drive nuclear from being ~5% of production to be irrelevant in 10 years. But you will read from pro-nuclears that they "plan" to double nuclear output in those 10 years, even when they barely put a +20% in last 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised it they pivot to solar, wind and batteries suddenly (a very China thing to do), abandoning all nuclear that is not already almost finished.
IMO China is not betting on nuclear. Just before solar was economically sound (c. 2015), they believed nuclear could be a solution for their dependency problems, and bet on it. As of today, they are no longer betting on nuclear, or at least the bet is crawling to a halt.
No nuclear debate without Germany. This is my opinion: Germany actually is winning. Not a lot, but their current situation is far from the catastrophe some predicted (massive blackouts! outrageous electricity price!). Nuclear was quickly replaced with solar and wind after an initial coal and gas spike. But now coal usage is going down, and gas is stable. Dependency from Russia is less than 10 years ago. OTOH, France is having serious problems to 1) increase their nuclear production and even maintaining what they have (average reactor age: 35 years, younger reactor: 18 years) and 2) to deal with the install of cheaper energy sources because their base load is so high and can't be easily phased out.
And please, stop with the "bad press" tune, as if everyone that doesn't blindly believe nuclear is the future is dumb and can be manipulated with ease, meanwhile pro-nuclear are very smart and impossible to manipulate. Do you think there is no nuclear or fossil lobby also releasing "bad press" about everything else and selling nuclear as the only solution? It only causes high friction unproductive debates: it is like Democrats firmly believing that Republicans are dumb, and vice versa. Either you accept that you are also being manipulated by the nuclear lobby to support them, or stop accusing others of being manipulated. Italy is running without nuclear power for more than 30 years, but only recently, when it makes absolutely no economical sense to start new nuclear plants if you have your production-demand figured out (not booming like China), some politics, not at all "manipulated" or "bought" by the nuclear lobby, plan up to 10 new reactors against people will (94% of voters against installing new nuclear in 2011). Yes, people are dumb, politics are honest and smart. That is the only possible cause.
I would imagine that China not having a world wide market for selling/dumping their reactors would have some relation too.
I have no horse in this race but anyway, I hope Europe goes back to nuclear, and then get nukes enough to wipe out anyone in the world some 35 times if needed.
Europe is already heavily nuclearized. Even the nuclear lobby recommends a "10% nuclear power in the mix", which many countries en Europe already meet... or way more than that. On average 24% (varies between sources) of European mix is nuclear. Yes, there are a couple of countries (Germany and Italy) that banned nuclear, but there are also the most nuclearized country in the world (France, 60% nuclear), and countries like Slovakia (60% nuclear), Hungary (40% nuclear).
Europe produces almost no uranium, and France has a historical problem with uranium mining in Africa, is not like Europe is giving up a free-of-trouble energy source. Honestly, sometimes it feels that some pro-nuclear won't be happy until 100% of the base load is nuclear. They are asking for more nuclear than the nuclear lobby does.
People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder.
If not, reading a list of this helps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
But sure, oil leaks can be bad as well. Solar leaks on the other hand seem bearable.
I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did. Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.
Did I imply anywhere anyhow that I am a fan of coal?
I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong.
Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).
Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories.
We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.
"We don't have time for perfect solution"
Exactly. You can buy and deploy solar, wind and batteries as much as you want now. If you care about strategic independence, build factories for them.
But a nuclear reactor takes a long time to get build. And is likely way more expensive. If italy manages to do it fast and cheap - other countries will follow, but I believe it when I see it.
And China is importing some of their reactors from France, Russia and USA. It is not like they become fully independent (maintenance and parts). More independent than oil and gas imports, but can't depend forever on these three either.
I am someone who knows, hence my disgust. Time to learn about the radioactivity of coal fly ash and how carefully that’s managed.
Oh, I know and am in favor of shutting coal down asap and before nuclear. But you seem to imply handling radioactivity is not a big problem compared to fossils, but I believe it is, considering how faulty and corrupt individual humans are, or corporations or government bodies doing the oversight.
why is profit the right descriptor?
wouldnt you instead count the net benefits to the whole economy from having that cheap and plentiful electricity?
This statement is kind of wild.
If your trying to argue that 417 operating reactors and 377 GW of operating nuclear capacity at end-2024, producing roughly 2,600–2,700 TWh/year, about 9% of global electricity isn't profitable at all and that somehow all that money is just lit on fire not generating profit/value? Bold claim -- the ecosystem is about $300-500 B/year globally per isn't profitable?
How can the scientific progress of developing nuclear power + medical isotopes and the entire value chain associated with that development, incredibly long lived assets, nuclear fuel development not have been profitable? The fact that you have baseload generation that supports the entire grid?
What part of the equation are you talking about - at what part of the project life cycle? Are you trying to say they were built and weren't profitable the minute the switch turned on?
Off topic, but this guy on youtube is a knowledgeable (pro-nuke) resource.
https://www.youtube.com/@tfolsenuclear
Why does electricity need to be profitable? Are roads, justice systems, or armies profitable?
Most electricity and infrastructure is profitable. But not after carving it out in a way that looks at it in complete isolation. Just like train infrastructure creates a lot of business around the area of the train infrastructure, even if the train itself may seem not self sustained.
They are not profitable. They add taxes to gas so that it pays for it.
Sure, but then that's not "profitable" in the direct sense of "makes rich oligarchs richer".
I'm all for improving the quality of life for society. In the end the goal is to live well, not to destroy our living conditions for a few oligarchs to make more money. But "profitability" is not generally optimised like this, unfortunately.
I'm fairly sure that the total economic value that we get out of roads far exceeds the cost it takes to create and maintain them, yes. A similar argument can probably be made for justice systems and armies.
If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.
I think that for your analogy to work, you also need to consider the total economic value that we get out of electricity as opposed to just revenue from electricity bills...?
If every government had subsidized and pushed forward a transition to ~100% nuclear power back in the 70s it would have effectively solved climate change. Electricity, industry and heat production account for >50% of CO2 production.
Then there's all the other effects of not having a high demand for hydrocarbons including less Middle East entanglement, less mining and drilling, more abundant and cheaper oil for uses other than burning it, etc.
> If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful.
There is more than money. There is stability (not depending on foreign oil, peak oil, etc), there is climate change, etc.
Notice how for roads you compare the total economic value of all roads against the cost of them. But for electricity you compare a single power generation system. You are not comparing the same thing. A fair comparison would be the total economic value of having electricity against the cost of all electricity infrastructure. Sadly this fair comparison is irrelevant in this thread.
Profit is the best way to measure that economic outputs exceed economic inputs, which is the whole point. But profit doesn't work so well as a measure when the outputs are hard to measure per individual beneficiary. Inputs are generally always pretty clearly measurable, but outputs aren't always, as in the case of roads and bridges - although even there often you can.
Electricity is super-duper easy to measure the individual benefits of, so profit is a really simple and easy way to measure the overall effective economic benefit. It's not perfect though - there are external costs to consider which aren't paid for directly, but we have lots of experience with that across all sorts of industries and usually solve for that via taxes and regulation, which become part of the profit equation.
It does not. But there are so many sources that can be. And easily at that. So why go this route?
A lot of countries consider energy security national security, and national security always bats last.
A lot of countries also use it to help subsidize (or help cover up the costs of) their military nuclear programs.
That's just not true. Event is PWR reactors take their root in the nuclear program for plutonium generation, that's not the case anymore.
Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?
There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.
Emissions.
Batteries and solar and wind are a lot cheaper, faster to deploy, and scale a ton better.
Nuclear is far too slow to solve our emissions problems, there's no chance of us being able to scale the nuclear industry to be able to confront climate change on the time scale necessary.
In contrast, batteries, solar, and wind are scaling on their own, without the massive government subsidies that would be needed to deliver nuclear too late to help.
Nuclear is actively negative-value too, because it discourages investment when people know that government-subsidised competition is coming.
Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.
So the alternative is relying on solar panels made by a quasi-hostile country, because for some reason we can't produce them economically ourselves, or continuing to burn fossil fuels?
Countries just can pretty easily make solar economically themselves, it’s no great secret. But they don’t because china makes them a bit cheaper , you keep them forever and we’re not in a war. You think all the billions of parts and steel in a nuke will all be locally built too? For eg Go look up who owns almost all the foundries in the world that are required to build large pressure vessels for reactors.
So, option a sounds great to me, but you clearly have some kind of agenda here, that maybe you could make clearer
The costs for generating electricity needs to be paid for somehow.
Having the consumers of the electricity pay for has a lot of advantages!
Not sure about profitable but the lower the cost is the generate electricity, the better off the world will be. Cracking energy is, to state the obvious, a huge unlock.
Because in their wisdom the politicians have created energy markets.
SMR makes no sense. It never did. It's a program to fuel academic empire-building and to siphon government money in the form of research grants and investment.
You see this pattern a lot in academia. Education is a great example. We know what works when, for example, it comes to teaching literacy. It's phonics. But over the past few decades we had a fad with "sight words". The evidence has come in that this has been a disaster. So why did it happen? Because nobody is going to get prestige in their education PhD by pushing an existing idea. They're incentivized to reinvent that wheel to shape themselves as an expert in the new wave.
That's exactly how SMR came about. It takes the idea of scaling by going small and repeating what you're doing rather than doing what you actually need to do and that is to standardize large designs. Larger reactors are just more efficient and that's physics.
I bet I could come back to HN in 10 years and SMR will still be exactly nowhere yet people will still be promising a bright future for it.
Yeah but we are su subsidizing so much stupid stuff in the world, that dont need to be. Safe and clean energy is on top of my list of things i am very much ok with.
So you won't mind if I prefer (some of) my tax dollars go to subsiding reliable energy production.
If safe is your metric, nuclear power kills fewer people than roof top solar.
Solar/wind made reliable is still cheaper than new nuclear (which also requires some add-ons for reliability/leveling.)
yeah, works great for germany compared to france :) new nuclear price is skill/regulatory issue...
also great fosil things happening with backup plants
At the current cost in France for building a new nuclear power plant, renewables would be much cheaper. The existence of legacy plants there doesn't change this. Realize also that much of the cost of those plants was off the books, involving subsidized financing. That a government can fund something at lower interest rates doesn't mean that isn't a subsidy; it's just that the subsidy is concealed.
I am very pro nuclear :)
Are fossil fuels net profitable after subsidies, wars, and externalities are considered?
Oh boy, they are sooooo profitable that there are wars around them.
Does it need to be profitable without subsidies? Governments run a lot of stuff at a loss as a service to citizens. For instance highways, trains, post offices etc.
Where is most of that future power going? Where are those power plants going to be installed? What need does those particular nuclear reactors would fill?
Do not get me wrong: I am not anti-nuclear per-se, but my main concern is that it would have made sense to have a long term strategy including phasing out of nuclear not directly shutting down in the 90's as the Italian did, but progressive phase out with upgrades to existing plants... Now it seems to be going a bit backwards.
Also, to contrast and put in context, in Belgium, Nuclear power plants were build by the state and therefore paid by the tax payers, raising taxes in order to afford them. The underpinning idea was that you pay a bit more and then once paid off you can get cheap energy.
This is not what happened, the power plants got privatised and the gains went to the new operators, leaving tax payers with the bill...
I agree with that, in Italy the telephone lines, highways and trains were privatized the same way, but that's just because politicians are corrupt and they were able to convince people that public companies had to make money like they were private and operating at a loss was bad.
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Why not subsidizing? What's the problem with that considering both renewables and fossils are subsidized?
Most sound smr is Canadian BWRX which is already under construction
> without counting subsidies
Every energy industry has subsidies. Believing that one of them should work "without subsidies" simply misses the mark.
Does it really matter if it's profitable? We're destroying the planet. Heaven forbid we lose money on something that gives us a chance.
Yes, because profitable enterprises are able to grow faster than unprofitable ones. If you think something is good, and want more of it, making it profitable is conducive to your goals.
Do you mean nuclear isn't profitable compared to coal, whose costs are externalized, or compared to other renewables?
> other renewables
Nuclear power is not a renewable power source in the technical correct meaning of the word. Fission material is "only" abundant, in that we can win nuclear fission material from many sources, including recycling spent nuclear material, but it is not available and spent without human intervention (otherwise we could argue fossil fuels are renewables, too).
As an aside, nuclear fission power differs from renewable power in many other ways, too. It is not clean, it is not easy to harvest, it is not safe, it is not cheap, it is not a mass job engine, it is not low-maintenance, it has less utility, and it has less flexibility.
IF the world got its primary energy from today's kind of light water reactors, uranium available at up to 3x the current price would only last for about five years.
A fully nuclear-powered world (including all energy use, not just grid electricity) would need breeding of some kind; otherwise the uranium just gets too expensive. So when you hear people claiming nuclear is cheap, ask them if that cheapness includes the technologies that would actually be needed for nuclear to do the full job.
If we needed more nuclear fuel we would be producing more of it. Comparing current production to a world where we use a thousand times more of it is ridiculous. Uranium is not that rare, and spent fuel rods still have well over 90% of their potency so they can be recycled.
Nuclear energy could easily power the entire planet for thousands of years.
Sure, we could produce more. It would have to be from much lower grade ores, and so would be much more expensive and disruptive. This is why breeding would be needed, so the cost of the uranium would not make nuclear even more unaffordable than it already is.
The argument about affordability is quite ridiculous in a world that is becoming uninhabitable as a direct cause of the "affordable" alternatives.
We could easily afford to use nuclear, and we wouldn't have to rely on it entirely - we have many alternatives such as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal etc. I'm also quite confident that economy of scale would improve the fuel cost, and the higher investment would make breeding and other nuclear technology advancements much quicker than they are and have been. Not to mention fuel cost is quite insignificant in nuclear energy.
We can however not afford the consequences of fossil fuels. We are already severely impacted by global warming and it will get much worse very quickly. I think this chart conveys the severity of our situation very well: https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
Affordability most definitely figures into which avenue forward should be taken. It cannot be used to justify fossil fuels over nuclear, but it can be used to justify renewables instead of nuclear.
Nuclear doesn't have a "get out of economics free" card just because fossil fuels are to be eliminated. I understand the desire of nuclear fans to pretend otherwise.
I'm not a "nuclear fan", I'm a "don't destroy the planet fan". I'm not saying we should build nuclear instead of renewables, I'm saying we should build it instead of fossil fueled generation. It seems you agree with this, so I'm not sure why you seem to be arguing against it.
Until the day that we stop burning fossil fuels entirely, we should be building nuclear to replace it. If it's more expensive that's fine, I don't think it would be, at least not significantly, but I can't prove it and I don't care either way, it doesn't matter. What matters is replacing fossil fuels as fast as possible. It's probably already too late, and the powers that be don't give a shit anyway so none of this will actually happen but this is what we should do.
That's why I think lifters are really the only true path to cost reasonable nuclear power... They "burn" almost all fuel and have separation procedures for the other fission products, and I believe they can consume nuclear waste since it's a breeder reactor.
Any commercial venture will just become dominated by compounding interest payments on debt. Keeping so much capital tied up for so long without revenue is just too expensive.
I agree with the sentiment of your post. In short: "I'll believe it when then finally build and operate one."
About decommission: (segway first) When the United States Navy decommissions nuclear submarines (and there are a lot!), they basically chop out the nuclear reactor whole, then seal in a giant steel box, and bury it in an open trench. It called "Trench 94" at Hanford Site, Washington (state). You can read about it here[1]. The photos are weirdly dystopian. You can also see it on Google Maps here[2].
How do small modular reactors (SMRs) plan to decommission? Can they follow a similar route as the US Navy? Honestly, I don't know if the size is comparable, or if "sealed in a big steel box" will also work for SMRs.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a46065875/trench-9...
[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/JJSQXzdiA4qTyYZt5
In most sunny places a decentralized per-home solar policy is cheap, sustainable, and more robust to severe local weather events.
While fission reactors are still the cheaper initial energy choice (like a future cancer patients love of cheap cigarettes.) Small Modular reactors are a fools errand for most places, as they have all the same security, labor, and maintenance issues of full sized installations. Thus, instead of repairing one of four turbines every few years, the contaminated components must now be reprocessed or safely hidden away on mass.
Maybe fine for submarines or aircraft carriers, but for massive infrastructure it is trivial to prove it causes major long-term problems.
Anyone that has ever purchased a property with an old leaky heating-oil tank nasty surprise site-reclamation cost... will understand the initial unit price never covers the actual clean up cost. =3
Also, dealing with the nuclear waste can be problematic. Even if you recycle it like France, it still costs to re-enrich it and still produces waste itself.
oh the irony...
In France, which has the most nuclearized electricity, 13% of the electricity bill is actually a tax to finance the subsidies to solar and wind power plants.
Nuclear is highly profitable, if you compare prices for 24x7 electricity (i.e., if comparing with solar, factor in the cost of energy storage at grid scale, or separate power generators able to provide for peak demand).
They didn't because the taxpayers will finance that and no politician would be able to sell this.
Treat power plants as public infrastructure. No need for high returns or insurance of every risk.
That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.
In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.
We’re at the point now where this has to be a problem for the future.
Yes, it is part of Trump's tariff deals forced on e.g. Japan:
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/us-japan-in-smr-deal/
Italy should be buying proven French technology instead.
Which proven French technology?
Given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and that the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 fleet are ruinously expensive France is unable to build competitive new nuclear.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Look up Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, it was 14 years late and (depending on whose figures you believe) cost nearly 10x more than the original estimate of €3 billion, bankrupting Areva in the process.
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Solar and wind aren’t profitable either if you count the entire lifecycle including bill of materials, production, transportation, maintenance, and teardown for replacement.
At least it is greener and cheaper. Especially Solar cells have become incredibly cheap now. Combined with battery storage, it's far safer and cheaper than nuclear.
And in a territory affected from seismic activities, I would avoid nuclear at all
You can't power a modern country like Japan with green energy. Please educate yourself.
I'm Italian and I'm super happy with this.
The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.
Curiously enough, some Italian town signs still have a small sub-sign reading "denuclearized municipality" (example: https://live.staticflickr.com/1421/712461235_e46a2c7db5_z.jp... )
As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.
Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:
Some recent ones:
Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power.
And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).
Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.
My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.
I love renewables, especially solar with batteries, but I definitely see the tail risks of not having some amount of independent base load, for which nuclear seems like the best fit. The tail risk could materialize from different sources; could be an asteroid, nuclear war, weird weather patterns etc. nuclear would chug along in most of these conditions. So if I would be a policy maker or decision maker, I would definitely invest in nuclear and maintain an industry regardless of the initial cost. I would try to make it as cheap as possible.
This is having decided that we must waste money and resources on new nuclear, and trying to rationalize it.
We fix tail risks when we encounter them. Not by envisioning your pet ones to make your solution fit.
> We fix tail risks when we encounter them
You're suggesting to start fixing the issue after the blackout happens?
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Building the only dispatchable source of zero CO2 emissions electricity is not a waste of money.
Valcoe paper is written by the founder of antinuclear movement in Denmark(which led at ti becoming one of the highest coal burners), has wild assumptions about hydrogen getting basically free for firming
Australia's weather is different from what we got in Europe. And let's not pretend many of aemos estimations are already obsolete due to increased costs of transmission and hydro storage that are huilt.
Dk still has worse emissions vs france/sweden, just like SA
If you don't like nuclear, you'll have gas peakers, like Germany
Germany made their electricity both very expensive and high CO2 per joule.
German gco2/kwh are dropping but it could have been so much better with nuclear similar to France
It is still very high, especially when you consider how expensive it is.
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> Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper
Cheaper for how long? And in what conditions?
What happens in a post petrol world? What happens when china stops exporting panels/batteries/inverters (aka a good 50% of the current supply)?
Until one day a volcano wakes up and decides no one can have sunlight for a few months.
Edit to add: heh, the CSIRO eh? That bastion of truth.
Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues? Or the majority of the Eastern European due too hot or low rivers? Or half the Swedish fleet multiple times the last couple of years?
Please do tell what is wrong with the CSIRO GenCost.
There are scenarios where either can fail, that’s why it’s smart to have a multi pronged energy strategy. Maintain strong industries for being able to do both renewables and nuclear in house so you can hedge the tail risks of either of them. Not everything needs to have the most economically efficient model. As we’ve seen with the supply chain problems they happened during Covid, some things are more important than absolute cost.
"Multi pronged" works when different technologies complement each other. The problem is that renewables and nucelar power competes for the same slice, a battle nuclear loses with a mile. Any grid will include emergency reserves. But those optimize for lowest possible CAPEX and higher OPEX. Since they sit idle most of the time.
Nuclear power has the opposite spread of ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.
I would say the pandemic shows that you do not need to account for every possibility. Humanity is amazing at adapting itself and finding new solutions to the problem at hand, rather than wasting all our resources trying to prevent the next made up disaster.
This is why we model with 10 year winters, X00 year floods or similar. Fix reasonable problems, leave the tail risk as tail risk. The worst that happens are rolling blackouts until the grid adapts, which is no different than any other outage due to grid maintenance or someone cutting a cable with a digger.
> Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues?
It mostly happened because covid hit at the same time.
I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.
Because what is true for these 3 countries is not true for all countries. There are counter-examples where nuclear is cheaper.
In most countries which don't have the advantages of Australia or Finland, you do need a mix as the OP was saying
What is Italy lacking? Sun? Wind?
Usually comes down to industry energy needs.
OP (ViewTrick) is very well known in the online nuclear energy community. He is the moderator of the NuclearEnergy subreddit where he regularly bans people for saying positive things about nuclear energy.
I didn't downvote but it's nonsense, nobody can sustain a winter with batteries and other storage.
I only checked the first paper and it doesn't seem talk about what would happen if a 3 weeks bad wind event would happen in winter, and a rough look at the figures makes me think it just wouldn't work at all. I didn't check the other papers.
And the proof is in the pudding anyways, if it's that cheap and feasible to do, well let's see who's doing it.
It is Simon Michaux that throws out the figure that you need 2TWH of storage to make it through he worse of Winter.
https://www.ecoshock.org/2024/02/why-renewables-cannot-power...
I think he points to a valid point but completely over plays his hand. Everyone that has argued these kinds of points have brought valid arguments but have completely under estimated the pace of change.
Do keep in mind that Michaux is a fan of being a little contrarian. He likes the attention it being to him.
He might be right, and him pointing to the issues may actually be something that helps us avoid these issues. Generally, knowing about a problem is a much better position than being slammed by something you didn't anticipate.
I tend to think long term we are going to a much lower energy world, that we made the mistake of building a world and our expectations to the paradigm of fossil fuels. But I also think that we are not going back to the stone age and that renewables will do better than the pessimists. Good chance we will hit a reasonable mid-ground even if it means living standards change, possibly a smaller, slower but more intentional world. It may be nice even if it means you can no longer get a slab of Coke for an hours wage.
I think the complete opposite, we are going towards a high energy world, I expect the current electric grid to be multipled by 3, both to replace petrol and add new usage on top.
Which makes the whole "we'll build renewables and storage" sounds even more unrealistic
They just model the weather hour by hour. But you’re made up scenario is of course impossible to cover.
Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Thanks for sharing those links, very interesting.
I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.
Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh
You can also check the report from RTE (French grid operator) that models several scenarios and mentions this security of supply thing
https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/publications/ene...
I wonder why China has brought 27 nuclear reactors online in the past 10 years, with another 36 actively being developed.
If it's actually inefficient, there's no need to have laws against it.
I don’t follow that logic. Because there was a law against its efficient?
The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.
Countries should definitely evaluate LMRs (Large Modular Reactors) too. Most countries need large amounts of carbon free energy, not small amounts. And nuclear power plant economics have profited in the past from making larger, more powerful reactor units.
But yeah their most modern nuclear power plant was a BWR 4 with Mark II containment, which would probably not be worth modernizing instead of building a new GenIII+ PWR from scratch that lasts a century.
Aren’t SMRs essentially unproven? I think only Russia and China built some working facilities, and the rest is still under construction.
I mean anything could happen but seems like a long shot
In a nutshell, yes.
The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.
What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.
That doesn’t mean they won’t have a use.
Yeah, the issue isn't knowing how to build small reactors, it's whether you can do so with enough economy of scale and learning to make it cheaper than conventional nuclear.
And I personally have switched from bull to bear on that. I was rooting for NuScale but they're hitting the same thing as everyone else.
Meanwhile, battery storage has been on an insane cost reduction curve.
This is a key point to many things. Need to identify the difference between technically viable and economically viable.
It is the same argument I make for Starship. Technically, yeah it should work. The economics of of going to Mars, not so sure about that.
If they can get Starship reliable enough, it'll definitely be successful even if it never goes to mars.
But despite SpaceX's huge successes with Falcon, that doesn't prove they'll cross the finish line with Starship. Falcon and specifically the Merlin engine made just about every choice they could in favor of risk reduction rather than the best possible performance. It was a continuation of work that Tom Mueller did while at TRW.
With Starship they're in more uncharted territory, especially the re-entry concept, and the engine has been designed under the opposite philosophy of trying to push limits.
They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.
Gotcha - yea I think it’s a good idea to try out these things. I just hope it doesn’t become a ideological fight to make something work at any cost to fit a certain narrative (same goes for renewables of course)
About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.
Fair - but using new (unproven) technology imo only increases the cost/time/risk overall?
Then just build GenIII+ PWRs like most other countries.
Two words: base load
And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)
Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime
Where do you live? Kinda hard to compare!
Italy is extremely energy poor, it even lacks coal. It does have significant hydro storage though
Okay yeah as expected some people seem to be too fucking dumb, so I’ll expand a bit, in case someone bothers to read this later.
There are several different concepts being collapsed together here.
“Baseload is a myth” is mostly a semantic dodge. Base load is simply the minimum demand on the system. You do not need a special category of plant called a “baseload generator,” but you absolutely need enough firm capacity and energy to meet demand continuously, including when wind and solar are producing very little.
“The grid can handle peak load, therefore it can handle base load” confuses transmission capacity with generation availability. A grid capable of carrying 50 GW does not produce 50 GW. The engineering problem is having enough generation available at the exact hours when it is required.
And batteries do not make that problem disappear. They are excellent for frequency response, peak shaving and moving solar production from noon into the evening. But a battery is an energy buffer, not an energy source. During a prolonged shortage it can discharge only what was previously stored, and then it must recharge. Once the problem lasts several days rather than several hours, the amount of stored energy required becomes enormous.
Germany provides a very useful real-world example.
Germany began its nuclear phase-out under the 2000/2002 agreement, briefly extended reactor lifetimes in 2010, then accelerated the shutdown after Fukushima in 2011. The final three reactors closed in April 2023.
In 2008 German nuclear plants produced roughly 149 TWh of electricity. Germany subsequently built huge amounts of wind and solar, and those renewables have unquestionably displaced a great deal of fossil generation. But Germany eliminated its existing firm, low-carbon nuclear fleet while it was still burning very large quantities of coal and gas.
And then there is the problem Germans have an excellent word for: Dunkelflaute.
This is not some hypothetical edge case invented by nuclear advocates. Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur defines a Dunkelflaute as a period of at least 48 hours during which combined wind and PV generation remains below 15% of installed capacity. Low-wind periods are recurrent; analysis of four decades of German weather data found roughly a five-day period with average wind output below a 10% capacity factor in a typical year, with substantially longer events occurring less frequently.
Germany got a particularly good demonstration in November and December 2024. During two Dunkelflaute episodes, renewable production collapsed while demand remained high. Germany’s own Bundesnetzagentur says that almost the entire controllable power-plant fleet was brought into operation and that substantial electricity imports from neighbouring countries were required. The regulator concluded that Germany urgently needs additional controllable generation capacity for future Dunkelflauten.
That is basically the entire argument in one empirical example. When there is plenty of wind and sun, Germany can have extremely cheap electricity and sometimes negative wholesale prices. When the weather changes, the system suddenly needs the plants that supposedly became obsolete.
And the price swings are spectacular. Germany’s average day-ahead wholesale price in 2024 was about €79/MWh. During the November and December Dunkelflauten it exceeded €300/MWh for dozens of hours and reached approximately €936/MWh at the peak. The Bundesnetzagentur investigated whether those prices resulted from market manipulation and found no such explanation; the underlying condition was very low renewable production, high demand, extensive use of controllable thermal generation and limited remaining dispatchable capacity.
At the retail level Germany also remains one of Europe’s most expensive electricity markets. In the second half of 2025 a typical German household consuming 2,500–5,000 kWh paid €0.3869/kWh, compared with an EU average of €0.2896/kWh—about 34% more. Germany had the second-highest household electricity price in the EU after Ireland.
Those retail prices cannot honestly be attributed entirely to the nuclear phase-out or to renewables: taxes, levies, network costs, fuel prices and the consequences of the European gas crisis all matter. But neither can anyone point to Germany as evidence that a wind-and-solar-heavy system has somehow made firm generation economically irrelevant. Its own regulator is saying the opposite: when Dunkelflaute hits, Germany needs controllable generation and imports, and it says additional controllable capacity is urgently required.
What supplies that capacity today? Coal and gas remain substantial. Germany has zero domestic nuclear generation, yet it still burns coal and natural gas and participates in a European interconnected system containing large quantities of French and other nuclear generation.
So the actual German experiment is considerably less impressive than the slogan. Germany spent decades building an enormous renewable fleet while simultaneously destroying an existing fleet of firm low-carbon reactors. It succeeded in greatly increasing renewable generation and reducing coal use over the long run, but it did not abolish the requirement for firm generation. When wind and solar disappear together, Germany burns dispatchable fuels, imports electricity, draws on reserves and watches wholesale prices rise.
Which brings us back to the original question.
Once you accept that an electrical system requires firm energy during prolonged periods of inadequate intermittent generation, the menu becomes fairly obvious. Hydro and geothermal are excellent where geography permits them. Storage, transmission, demand response and renewable overbuilding all help. Countries fortunate enough to possess enormous reservoirs, geothermal resources or exceptionally strong interconnections can lean heavily on those advantages.
Those countries are not a universally reproducible model. A solution intended to work in most industrial countries has to survive winter demand, multi-day wind lulls, minimal solar production, droughts, transmission constraints and simultaneous weather patterns across neighbouring regions.
Under those conditions, you need some combination of renewables and firm generation. At present, for most countries without exceptional hydro or geothermal resources, large-scale firm generation means principally nuclear or combustion, with storage and interconnection reducing how much of it must run.
So yes: build wind and solar. Build batteries where they make economic sense. Build transmission. Use demand response. Exploit hydro and geothermal wherever available.
But after all of that, somebody still has to answer the boring engineering question: what produces electricity on the fifth cold, dark, windless day after the batteries have discharged?
“Baseload is a myth” does not answer it. “Batteries” does not answer it unless you specify the required energy capacity and how it is recharged. And Germany, of all countries, does not answer it: every serious Dunkelflaute demonstrates why it still maintains dispatchable fossil generation and depends on the wider European grid.
Thank you for this very detailled and instructive post
The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.
lol because nuclear reactors are so damn stable: https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/13/france-shuts-down-nuclea...
"France's largest electricity producer said the move was required to comply with environmental regulations."
This is a policy decision, not a technical limitation. Palo Verde has been operating in the Arizona heat for forty years: nuclear can handle situations of low/high-temp water.
Even while that was happening, we never stopped being a net exporter of energy.
The system worked as designed.
Can you use more than 2 words in your explanation next time? Reciting known talking points offers little.
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base load is a myth
"base load is a myth" is a myth
Six words: base load generation is economically obsolete
It doesn’t matter what you think. What does the data tell us?
Won’t it also take decades and cost billions to roll out renewables to the extend that they can even put a dent in total energy usage? So I don’t see how that is even an argument.
Because both are needed if you don't like gas. Fossils take even more billions so it's ok
can you link to data to prove the economics are bad?
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It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
"as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill.
US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.
It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se.
The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x.
For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.
And is it reasonable to get their doses that low?
Where in Italy would you put reactors?
https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-i...
Sardinia?
For a point of comparison, I understand the Fukushima plant survived the mag 9 earthquake just fine - but got damaged by the ensuing tsunami. Specifically, the water flooded the diesel generators for emergency cooling - and it went downhill from there.
Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?
Just like with skyscrapers in Taiwan, we can and have built earthquake-resistant nuclear power plants before. Fukushima only failed due to the tsunami water shorting transmission lines and the emergency generators. It withstood the earthquake itself fine.
That doesn't look good, and that's before you filter by proximity to a large river (that doesn't run dry in summer).
I would say near Pisa, on the Arno River.
Scroll up. There was one in Trino, Piedmont, which I imagine will be among the first sites to be considered.
Judging from the map, Piedmont, Liguria, Trentino, Tuscany and Basilicata have good sites.
I think that there are plenty of blue areas on that map
wow, seems like Italy and Turkey are few places where you _would not_ want to go back to nuclear. Wild. I guess the old geezers approving this wouldn't even live to see the first meltdown anyway.
Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.
I'm Italian, too. A country with a weaker energy infrastructure is prone to being controlled better.
Italy lost WWII, and became a de facto protectorate/colony of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if behind the nuclear referendum in the 80s there way to gentle hand of US services.
In my country, we also have a dormant nuclear plant because of Chernobyl and political reasons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/world/asia/philippines-ba...
we had a referendum in 2011
Right after Fukushima
Wow
China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485137
Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47961319
Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48634585
Its important to remember that nuclear needs water and is not immune to climate change. France and Switzerland shut down nuclear power plants amid scorching heatwave: https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
And maybe unknown future costs. Government awards $45B to company treating over 50M gallons of leaking radioactive waste: 'One of our nation's most important environmental challenges': https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/hanford-nuclear-s...
Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memo: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
> France and Switzerland shut down nuclear power plants amid scorching heatwave
Spain's reactors were fine. Regulations of cooling water discharge temperature are what are limiting the reactor output. Adding cooling towers to the power stations leads to a poorer condenser vacuum than river water, reducing electrical output by a few percent, but still a possibility. Whether it is economically worthwhile to retrofit cooling towers is another question.
and for France, we're talking about 6 reactors voluntarily paused, out of 56.
It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?
> I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar.
Solar is 15% - a lot but not yet dominated. Solar works at day and demand is also highest during the day so solar should not be an enemy of nuclear.
It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.
This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.
Citation:
France's EDF Warns Solar, Wind Surge Straining Nuclear Fleet Costs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037839 - February 2026
https://web.archive.org/web/20260217122120/https://www.edf.f...
Related:
Wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener... - January 22nd, 2026
> Wind and solar overtaking fossil fuels in 2025 can be largely attributed to a staggering rise in solar power. Solar grew by more than a fifth (+20.1%) for the fourth year running. It generated a record 13% of EU power in 2025, above both coal and hydro. This trend was widespread: all EU countries saw growth in solar generation compared to the year before, amid a huge expansion in EU solar installations. Solar provided more than a fifth of electricity in Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands. Renewables provided nearly half of EU power (48%) as unusual weather conditions caused hydro generation to fall by 12% and wind by 2%, but boosted solar generation. Wind remained the second largest EU electricity source at 17% of EU power, generating more than gas. Signs of a structural shift are clear across the EU, as wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil sources in 14 of the 27 EU countries in 2025. Over the past five years, wind and solar have experienced massive growth (from 20% in 2020 to 30% in 2025). Fossil fuels have fallen from 37% to 29% in the same period, while hydro and nuclear remained stable or slightly declined.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (installed solar energy capacity goes brrr)
> certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.
> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.
The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).
So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.
Nuclear fuel rods get used for 1-2 years before they need to be replaced. This is much longer than it takes to burn a shipload of liquefied natural gas, though it's much shorter than it takes for solar panels or grid scale batteries to need replacement. Both nuclear energy and renewable energy are less sensitive to supply shocks than fossil energy, even if Europe doesn't reduce the percentage of its energy needs that depend on imports.
Yes, but the parent was implying 50+ years of nothing to worry about once a plant is built.
It would cost a bit more is the worst case if you had to build your own centerfuges, uranium is not all that rare. And a single ship could carry a decades worth of fuel (not that I recommend a decade of fuel on a single ship), so even if shipping was costly it would be cheap compared to the actual fuel refinement. You couldn't Hormuz a uranium fuel supply because it doesn't take thousands of ships or miles of pipeline to deliver.
So maybe not worry free, but if you are able to run nuclear reactors for power to start with, obtaining fuel for them in any scenario shouldn't be impossible. You got atleast a year or two lead time between refuelings, and it might be able to be stretched a little longer in an emergency. And even more time if you hold some in reserve.
Australia and Canada are top producers of uranium ore, and uranium ore is a small fraction of total lifecycle costs. Given a ~2 year refuelling cycle and the possibility of stockpiling uranium, this is very far from an interruption to oil and gas flows - which you need a continuous supply of. Security isn't just a function of autarkic raw material supplies.
Idk we can import uranium from lots of places; i think currently mostly from Canada.
But I just don’t get why it’s being discussed at all - its obviously so much more expensive and time consuming to build than the alternatives
There are many more deposits to explore, like Sweden. And we can start doing purex+mox recycling to extend operation further
Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.
Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.
>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,
That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.
The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.
Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
>t's that or buying gas from Russia.
Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.
And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?
> Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident. Pollution from coal plants running normally causes 1 million premature deaths per year. The deepwater horizon spill was a $100 billion disaster with an environmental impact greater than any nuclear incident. The Centralia fires in PA are still burning after over 60 years and lead to a town being abandoned. Nuclear is not uniquely risky by any rational metric.
>The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident.
The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding. Estimates range from 26000 to 240000 people dead, but rationally one has to assume the typhoon would have caused some damage in these areas even without the dams.
So claiming this was a single hydro dam causing 250 000 dead is hardly rational.
If you live in a narrow valley downstream from a dam you are aware of the danger. You as an individual can take action to protect yourself. If you live upstream by even 10 feet you are in no danger at all from the dam.
With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.
Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also it wasn't a power plant, not even indirectly as oil is mostly used for transportation, not electricity. Chernobyl and Fukushima were power plants.
So again, there is just no comparison between nuclear plants and any other power plant. Nuclear really does have a unique level of risk.
Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood, and for nuclear the consequence is immense. Meaning effort has to be spent keeping the likelihood extremely small, in order for the risk to be low.
This has to be accepted and considered in any discussion about nuclear power. Pretending it doesn't exist is not rational.
> The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding.
So we're not counting natural disasters that cause power infrastructure failure? I take it you don't consider the events of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to be a nuclear accident then.
> With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.
And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China, and will be until the world stops burning coal.
> Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima.
It was much worse in terms of environmental impact, particularly the area impacted.
> Also it wasn't a power plant
I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.
> Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood
I was being generous in only looking at consequences without considering likelihood. The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives, but the likelihood has been astronomically less, hence Nuclear has been the safest power source ever utilized by mankind. So yes, in a way nuclear's risk is unique - uniquely low. I fully agree this should be accepted and considered in any discussion.
>So we're not counting natural disasters that cause power infrastructure failure? I take it you don't consider the events of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to be a nuclear accident then.
Of course not, if I did that's 20 000 dead from a "nuclear accident" right there. But that would be dishonest and silly, and I aim for rationality.
>And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China
Not even if you assign all the blame of global warming to chinese coal plants would this be even remotely true.
>I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.
You responded to a claim that no other power plant represent as great a risk at a nuclear power plant.
Maybe you should have created a new thread saying something like "a nuclear plant is not as bad as the entire fossil fuel industry worldwide"? ;-)
>The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives
You completely ignored the facts that clearly tell you that the consequences are orders of magnitude worse.
That's no way to convince anyone. Just saying.
So you are in a phase where coal is safer than nuclear? Sorry but that's bullshit. German early nuclear phaseout did already cause due to pollution half of total nr of estimated deaths from Chernobyl per UN assuming LNT is true at low doses. It's you that are ignoring facts and spread literally fossils fuel propaganda to justify your antinuclear position
>So you are in a phase where coal is safer than nuclear?
The permanent truth phase yes. Coal is so much safer than nuclear that a comparison is hardly meaningful.
Let me put it this way - If coal power plants were run with as much security as nuclear plants they wouldn't kill mosquitoes sleeping in their chimneys. If nuclear power plants were run with as little security as coal plants however, we would not be here to have this discussion.
You seem to be well aware of the dangers of fossil fuels, but you come across as entirely ignorant of the dangers of nuclear power. Good decisions need knowledge of both.
I'm as anti coal as I am anti nuclear because both are terrible ideas. Renewables, batteries, e-fuels and other storage options are here now. They're better, faster, cheaper, safer. Let's do that.
It's cheap to operate. See https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
The statement about getting 70% from Russia is total bullshit
What non zero chance of millions of casualties? Chernobyl, a shit design that weren't allowed in the west even then is estimated to kill about 4k in total. In Fukushima the number is zero or 1 deaths from radiation due to low dose. And that's old gen2 reactor striken by tsunami and earthquake
I've seen what antinuclear europe does to remove the weakness of renewables - subsidies for new gas peakers in Germany
>It's cheap to operate. See https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
It's not, the estimated production cost for existing swiss nuclear plants is 4-6 centimes per kWh, which is already expensive electricity and frequently higher than the market prices today. That is also the self-cost price, meaning whenever the market pays less for electricity, ch nuclear plants lose money.
And as always, swiss taxpayers cover that loss so you won't ever see it in the operators financial reports.
Also worth noting is that EDF in France sells for 7 cents after being bailed out when sellng at 4 cents. This is not cheap electricity.
> What non zero chance of millions of casualties?
Just to take one trivial example:
If nobody is able to refill the water in spent fuel pools at any nuclear plant, they will catch fire. Assuming a radial spread of the fallout it will be near guaranteed lethal for at least 50 miles, probably lethal for some 500 miles, and you "won't want to live there" for even further than that. And this will remain the case for millennia to decades, depending on weather and distance.
So basically 500 miles radius, uninhabitable for several generations if you run out of water.
Then consider that Switzerland is covered by a circle of some 120 miles, and has a population of several million.
Do you think the 4-6 centimes per kWh covers a scenario like that? I don't. Good thing Switzerland has lots of water...
4-6ct/kwh is dirt cheap. It's so cheap that even curtailing renewables to let it run more instead of using gas peakers is cheaper
And it's far from being higher than avg market prices today in Switzerland, where did you get this nonsense?
The price includes their profit margin. Even if they sell at lower, they'll still make profit, just less.
The claim about swiss taxpayers is bullshit, please stop spreading it, there's no proof to this whatsoever. Swiss nuclear plants operation is not subsidized.
Edf was not bailed out. It was renationalized (albeit state was always majority owner) to push for construction of epr2. EDF debt to EBITDA is healthy. It made profit pretty much every single year despite arenh, except 2022. EDF could definitely operate their npp more profitable but that's another story.
But even if we assume that 9bn transaction was a subsidy, do you realize it's merely half of what Germany is spending for EEG alone EACH YEAR?
"If nobody is able to refill the water in spent fuel pools at any nuclear plant, they will catch fire. Assuming a radial spread of the fallout it will be near guaranteed lethal for at least 50 miles, probably lethal for some 500 miles, and you "won't want to live there" for even further than that. And this will remain the case for millennia to decades, depending on weather and distance."
Please refrain from spread utter bullshit again. Not only you don't comprehend under what conditions used fuel catches fire or that if by some absurd reason nobody can cool the spent fuel to avoid boiling, something much more terrible happened, but catching fire/melting doesn't mean it'll be a fallout. It's clear you are antinuclear person and enjoy fossils. You don't need to invent bullshit to firm your position.
Land is not uninhabitable. Heck, even in freaking Chernobyl animals are thriving. Try saying the same about german coal mines
>And it's far from being higher than avg market prices today in Switzerland, where did you get this nonsense?
It's not nonsense but you made a different statement than I.
Switzerland doesn't use market prices. Electricity in Switzerland is regulated so they pay vastly more than the european market at most times.
This Sunday for example, Germany enjoyed spot wholesale prices of 2 centimes per kWh while Switzerland had 12. You can verify the German prices on nordpool and an equivalent swiss energy market site.
Citizens in Switzerland pay much more than wholesale, averaging over 20 centimes last year. They are forced to do so by regulations.
When you force your population, aka the taxpayers, to pay 5-10x as much for electricity as it costs in the open market you using taxpayer money to subsidize electricity.
You follow?
>Edf was not bailed out. It was renationalized
Thats synonymous, and it was actually the second time EDF were bailed out, France had to pay for the overruns on the plant in Finland too. Lucky Finland!
The mechanism varies by country, but the bottom line is that taxpayers always have to pay for nuclear. They have no choice.
There is no option to walk away, you can't leave it, it has to be taken care of. Every other power plant you can shut down and walk away but nuclear is, again, unique in this respect.
When all the swiss nuclear operators go bankrupt, the swiss will still have to pay people to operate the plants, or decommision them, and then store the waste, for longer than Rolex has existed as a company.
Nobody else will. So it's the taxpayers, always.
>by some absurd reason nobody can cool the spent fuel to avoid boiling,
Absurd reasons are not that uncommon. War for example. Also, landslides, earthquakes, terrorists, pandemics, sinkholes. Stupid politicians. Lots of things. Non-zero.
>something much more terrible happened,
The spent fuel fire will be the most terrible thing that happened that day, unless the cause was an actual nuclear weapon strike.
Or well, since it's Switzerland I guess CERN could have come up with something worse but I can't imagine what. ;-)
Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.
It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.
To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.
What if we just skipped the certification?
I dunno, China seems to be doing exactly that
Perhaps the self-induced costs can be volontarily reduced and not inflated ?
How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.
It's not.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Orano and Urenco are European and have massive enrichment capability.
Canada, Australia and Namibia have massive Uranium reserves.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Conspiracy hat time: I think this is the main reason it's being pushed so hard. The US and Russia feel threatened by the rise of renewables and will do anything to get countries dependent on them again.
This isn't right, in fact one of the main reasons for building nuclear power plants is independence from politically unstable places like Russia and the Mideast.
From where does uranium come?
There are some better mines in different areas of course, but it is available across most of the planet. Processing it is way harder than finding a source of it, but that is also a solved problem, you just gotta put in the capital to build it.
Making an already uncompetitive energy source even more expensive.
But it also secures your energy needs independent from anybody else and still scales. Solar lasts a long time, but not nearly as many countries have the minerals for building more panels and batteries as they do uranium refinement.
What? Solar panels last virtually forever. The oft-quoted 25 years is for a 30% efficiency loss, they actually last way longer.
Any country that can figure out uranium processing can figure out solar panel production, and they are made entirely from common materials with advanced processing steps. Silicon is literally the most abundant element on the planet; other main ingredients include glass, aluminium (or any other support material) and copper (or any ither conductive material). The most obscure material you'd need is some kind of dopant, of which you have several alternative choices if you don't have access to the best ones for some reason. Solar cells are literally sheets of treated silicon sandwiched between conductors - they're not like microchips.
I'm not sure about batteries though.
As example Canada and Australia
It's really a conspiracy. Ore is available in plenty of countries. Enrichment is done locally by orano+urenco amd fuel elements made by framatome
It would also not make sense considering china is the largest builder and they also sell most of vre
> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment
... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
> and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
It's perfectly figured out. Just entomb it in concrete and store it on site. All spent nuclear fuel to date combined would quite comfortably fit in an average Walmart parking lot. It's a complete non-issue. And if we'd get really desperate, the spent fuel could be re-enriched.
Opex is low. Storage is figured out. See onkalo or hundreds of others for forever toxic chemicals
Oh it has tons of cons:
1. It's the most expensive form of electricity;
2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;
3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);
4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;
5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;
6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;
7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;
8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;
9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";
10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and
11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.
> No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost.
Do fossil fuel plants pay co2 costs, or insurance costs for killing the planet? Well, it wouldn't make any sense, since it's not accidents that kill in that case, but the steady state.
The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
About waste: somehow, this is a solved problem (at scale) ? Fast breeder reactor, half life ~= 30 years (IIRC)
From your message, I understand that your country fails to build nuclear plant in a timely fashion but that other (china) can. Seems like a lack of skill/willingness to me, not a technical issue.
We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.
I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
> I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
I mean, you need to radiation-harden your structural materials and electronics for both fission and fusion, and some hypothetical antimatter reactor is probably using an evolutionary version of EM confinement techniques from fusion.
But, yes, fission reactors are ultimately kind of ooga-booga (put a pile of metal in some water and run a steam engine) that's hard to characterize as on track for something sci-fi like an antimatter reactor.
> Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Trivially. If we push hard, more than three orders of magnitude are possible (even for overall energy use, which is itself around an order of magnitude more than electricity), even without launching anything to orbit.
IMO it's much better if we go to space after the first of those orders of magnitude, rather than pursuing K1 on the ground.
> I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
Solar is as likely as fission to lead to either of these things. Each of the four is a different beast.
Solar is also the only way to scale up to a K2, which would trivially obviate both even when the ships' primary propulsion is solar (laser) sails.
> upgrade civilization to the next level
Why?
If you're asking why we would want to progress as a species, I suppose that's a rather subjective question. I like the idea of materially improving the lives of humans. That includes scientific discoveries, curing ageing and other diseases, space exploration and interplanetary colonisation, material abundance like unlimited food, etc. We don't achieve this unless we make major technological advancements, and this requires major new sources of energy.
Civilisational levels are defined by orders of magnitude in energy use.
Says who?
Why shouldn't our civilization be defined by how efficiently we use the energy we gather? Or the lifespan and health of our citizens?
Claiming that the sum of a civilization is how much energy it controls is just a meme from the 50's. It's a shitty, short-sighted metric. One that would consider building a nuclear reactor and dumping the power into a bank of resistors as contributing "more progress" than growing abundant food, or protecting the ecosystem.
It's our civilization, we can define progress however we want.
Practically, at the current rate of CO2 emissions we’re going to be needing that electricity to do carbon capture eventually
OP has literally been playing too much civ and believes that tech trees are destiny.
What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?
> upgrade civilization to the next level
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?
I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams.
Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.
Getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue.
I would not want to walk in pajamas on a sterile spacecraft and deal with new aliens every week.
Only a tiny fraction of the Federation's population is part of Star Fleet. There are only a few thousand star ships scattered over thousands of light years. Crew complements are rather small, so at most a single-digit million people are on Star Fleet ships. That's comparable to the size of just the current US military personnel but the Federation has hundreds of planets and many billions of people.
Star Trek is a socialist society.
Getting the tech without the social change first (e.g. what Musk et al are going for) gets you a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a post-scarcity utopia.
You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.
It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged.
I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.
You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.
Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true.
The industrial revolution begot the labor movement, which is what caused greater freedom.
It could do that because of the dependence on labor for production, or in other words leverage over the ownership class.
If we accelerate technology to the point where we sever this dependency, all those freedoms will no longer have the leverage required to extract them. Our lives didn't become not worthless because of the steam machine. They became not worthless because of leverage over capital reproduction, and once that's gone they may well become worthless again.
Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
> Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
Technology drives and makes possible changes in social relations.
Indeed, that is what I'm saying. But whether things change for the better or the worse isn't up to technology, it is up to social dynamics.
I think you're both right in different ways. Some labour movements were not dependent on technological advancement. Some technological advancements materially and independently improved the lives of people. The contraceptive pill gave women much greater control over the timing of pregnancy. [Its diffusion substantially affected women's investment in professional careers and the timing of marriage.](https://www.nber.org/papers/w7527) Medical and reproductive technologies played an important role in increasing married women's ability to participate in paid work. Those are changes in actual individual choice brought about, in significant part, by technology.
However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.
> However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.
This is somewhat overstating the case, though I currently agree "the abundance must come first".
Capitalism, as it was understood when the Communist Manifesto was written, i.e. laissez-faire, basically doesn't exist any more. A large subset of what the Communist Manifesto called for is now so widespread even in "capitalist" nations that the absence of those things is considered a sign of being a failed state.
Yes, there are three primary examples of Communism absolutely failing, hard: Four Pests, Holodomor, and Pol Pot.
The Communist Manifesto was written during the famous potato famine. Less famously, the impact of the blight hurt the Irish much more than other places that were also using potatoes as staple crops, and the British Government of the era (which controlled Ireland) was pursuing laissez-faire capitalism at the time.
Similar (that a capitalist regime was in charge) can be said about subsequent famines in India before independence.
Some say that Communism ended with the USSR, that while modern China uses the name "Communist" for their one-party state it is really state-capitalism. By this standard, capitalism (as the term was understood by Marx et al) ended gradually, with most of the change roughly in the era containing both Roosevelt's New Deal taking root in the USA and the UK's Labour Party replacement of the Liberal Party's position in Westminster.
So I think abundance completely changes the game and I think we can all agree on that.
I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
Labor will no longer be required for their productive needs, so that handful of people that controls the abundance machines will no longer have any incentive to keep the rest of humanity satisfied, or even alive for that matter.
In other words, if we don't change social relations before we get to this state, we will end up in a world where the Musks, Bezos and Zucks of this world control all material production, with the rest of us reduced to being dependent on their charity.
Personally, that sounds like the worst dystopia imaginable.
I will give you that prior attempts at socialism weren't necessarily successful and a lot of people died, however, I also think that argument requires holding one eye shut.
People are dying from capitalism right now. There's a homeless guy in SoMa that is breathing his last breath as we speak. There's entire villages in Africa that can't afford clean water while Nestle sells it in plastic bottles that pollute our planet. The status quo is not without its own violence and I think that is a point that too often gets swept under the rug.
Either way though, I think even if I were to concede that capitalism historically had better outcomes (which I have not been fully sold on! it's positives have just been more articulated imo, but that's another debate.), we are in a critical moment right now.
If we really believe we're to transition into a post-scarcity world, we need to make sure the right social relations are in place before that happens and whatever we have right now is locked in forever.
All criticism of socialism's supposed productive ineffectiveness becomes irrelevant once the transition is done anyways.
> I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
It's a valid concern. We use democracy right now to address inequality. Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
Perhaps this is more of a regional risk? There are some nations which culturally value individuality. I'm not sure the U.S. would build national abundance machines.
I think I broadly agree with your thesis, however. Abundance is going to force massive social change. If goods and services are effectively free, most jobs disappear. So too does their income and consumer demand, which destroys the entire premise of capitalism. You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
When Middle American manufacturing jobs were offshored to China, Hilary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." I fear many more people whose jobs are lost to AI will be met with similar derision. It is only when things get very bad that change will occur. The Star Trek timeline describes this collapse between 2020s-2053.
> Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources?
Even though I'm not too concerned about that specifically, that is clearly a plan they have. [0]
> To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
> You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
I, too, am worried about the transition, but for different reasons. I believe Elon when he says he believes capitalism will end in a few decades. However, I don't think he has prosperity for all in mind and that end state won't just naturally happen by itself.
I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
That, to me, is the core transition risk we need to manage. We need to make sure abundance machines aren't just a device for completely centralizing power in the hands of a few.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%B3spera
> I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
I understand. I place less weight into this risk. The current AI supply chain is so globally interdependent that it has effectively distributed itself beyond centralised control. China has received the full weight of global chip sanctions and still somehow manages to provide competitive coding models using either grey imports, offshore cloud compute, or locally produced chips. It would be very difficult (and I would argue almost impossible) for a nation and especially an individual/company to seize ownership of the entire supply chain and prevent everyone else in the world from producing their own AI/chips/abundance machines.
> I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
No doubt many people in positions of power are megalomaniacs. This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.
> This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.
I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
You see both of these in action right now. Think of Elon Musk actively defying Brazilian rule of law [0] or him literally being put into a position where he can neuter the institutions designed to hold him democratically accountable with the DOGE appointment.
To quote MLK - "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
I think fundamentally one cannot disentangle democratic control of political power from democratic control of the economy, because economic power can be converted into political power and as long as we let economic power concentrate in the hands of a few unelected oligarchs, they will continue to use it to exert political power as well.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/starlink-tells-brazil-reg...
> I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
I agree there is a risk, and I think defence of democracy should be at the forefront of fighting against the future you fear. I do not think the risk appears at the end of a gun. Rather, via propaganda and corruption. We know how effective propaganda can be, starting with Goebbels and all the way through to social media today. The problem here is that there is no clearly defined solution. Some people prescribe state control of information, which has historically resulted in catastrophic outcomes. Some people prescribe uncensored information to the greatest degree possible, and to the degree we have that today, it's also not working out very well. Perhaps this will be the great question of our time.
For the record, re DOGE, I see that as the people getting what they voted for. Musk campaigned clearly on his intended actions, and for better or worse, a plurality of voters voted for that. We should be careful not to criticise democracy just because voters chose a different direction. However I think this is partly influenced by what I describe above.
And 30 years ago you could still afford a house. Tech helped people up until the internet, then it started to enslave them and make them poorer.
All new energy initiatives should be nationalized and out of the hands of the tech robber barons.
> And 30 years ago you could still afford a house.
It is the people, who had build houses 30 years ago, and who set a price for those houses. Then came the government and start to regulate, redistribute, optimize and improve housing. And We live with the results.
What's my life worth now?
> Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit.
And as a drunk, who got to this stage in the aftermath of WW3, which was definitely not post-scarcity at this point because of how hard it was to "scrounge together enough titanium for the cockpit".
And immediately after the test flight, some pointy-eared vegetarian space Buddhists landed and said hi.
> It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
TOS is very much "space is an ocean". NCC-1701 is very obviously a shoe-in for CVN-65, the "colonies" and other locations they visit are scaled more like Pacific islands than planets, the episode with Romulan cloaking device is classic submarine warfare filmography including getting people to be quiet (so the space sonar wouldn't pick them up?)
TNG kept a lot of this, but was also "families on board" from the get-go.
Are you really going to keep on trying to defend the notion that the human society portrayed in Star Trek is not socialist? (In The Next Generation, no human investors, traders or financiers are ever depicted, and human society did away with money. Socialist countries have militaries, too.)
The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.
Wow, that comment went from quite reasonable to taking a very strange turn in the second paragraph.
I regret publishing that second paragraph. I knew (or would've known if I had been paying sufficient attention) it would offend many in this audience, and I should've held my tongue.
But I really do believe that Star Trek, specifically the parts that Roddenberry personally oversaw (namely the original series and the first four seasons of The Next Generation) had a very negative effect on the world.
In addition to making some viewers more committed to socialist ideology[1] Roddenberry's Star Trek made many committed to the ideology of technological progress.
Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
[1] In a (private) debate with me, a committed socialist asserted that a successful transition to socialism would result in a society much like the one depicted in Star Trek. Since it is very unlikely that he engaged in many debates about socialism before his debate with me, the reason he believed that that assertion might make me warm to socialism is probably because it had contributed to his own warming to socialism.
> Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
I think you may have fallen victim to a common misconception of how ideology actually functions.
The most affected by ideology aren't the ones consciously committing to a cause. Ideology is strongest precisely when you think you're outside of it - when your ideological commitments have become so normalized that they are completely invisible to you.
There is no such thing as being unideological, whatever you perceive as such is just a reflection of your own ideology.
If you'd like to delve deeper into the theory of ideology and how it functions, I'd recommend the works of philosophy legend and ideology expert Slavoj Zizek.
There's his seminal work, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which goes into this at depth, but is a very dry and academic read. If you'd like something a bit more digestible, I would recommend the movie The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which uses a more pop-sci approach of dissecting popular movies to demonstrate their ideological function.
I'm pointing at a different thing in the world than you're pointing at.
One reason I know they're different is that the thing I'm pointing at is vastly less influential in some people than other, so much so that it clearly makes sense to call some people "unideological" or if one is being tediously precise "almost completely unideological".
Everyone is strongly influenced by their language, their culture and the family they grew up in. Not everyone has even a weak commitment to an ideology.
I'm willing to switch to a different term for the thing I'm interested in, but I haven't been able to come up with one.
Thank you for this comment. I liked how well you explained the unideological flaw. I will read your recommendations
That’s not what I said. I said that the human society portrayed in Star Trek had warp drive before it had socialism. Viewed charitably, it reflects how society might plausibly be structured when technology renders questions of resource or capital allocation largely moot.
You're right. I had something I really wanted to say, which would have fit into the conversation if you had said something somewhat similar but actually quite different from what you actually said, but I overlooked the difference so that I could say what I really wanted to say.
In other words, I sacrificed the quality of the conversation (namely, I introduced not only a tangent, but also a tangent rooted in a confusion) so that I could express some thought that had risen to salience in my solitary mind. My doing that made the conversation worse, and the conversation is what matters, not whether I got to express myself in a way that is quick and easy for me.
Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
> The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.
Some of us don't share your faith in technological progress.
And sometimes I think Star Trek did more damage to the world than Das Kapital did.
This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.
We should be able to call out bullshit if we see it.
You are.
There is no incompatibility between "calling out bullshit" and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .
There is, however, an incompatibility between GGP's rhetoric and the guidelines.
It isn't about space travel. The AI boosters use it as a pretext for powering more data centers.
And the nuclear power boosters, especially the SMR fans, are riding in the data center slipstream. All kinds of debunked ideas have seen a chance for revival in the AI bubble.
I'm no fun because I've spent a lot of time doing critical path analysis in projects. A lot of planned data centers will never power up because the lead time for gas turbines is a few years now. You can't expect the first SMR to power a data center to come online with in 10 years. And while Bloom has done impressive work making a credible methane fuel cell, they have only a slim chance of scaling up their production to power the big Oracle data center in New Mexico.
There is an exasperating amount of BS to call out on this planet even before we get to wild promises of what's going to be put into orbit or on the moon or on Mars,
Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.
I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.
> It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.
People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.
That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.
And nuclear has still sat there being too expensive and solving nothing, proving the point, but apparently this is evidence of the opposite.
My argument was that while waiting for renewables to become cheap, we could have built nuclear instead of fossil capacity and avoided a shitton of emissions. The Messmer plan being an existence proof that such a thing would have been possible.
We did try to build nuclear. Massive subsidy programs were created, it just didn’t deliver.
Renewables passed nuclear a long time ago. If the economics of renewables weren't making sense, the economics of nuclear were worse.
Wether we like it or not power generation at this scale is political. And whilst the culture war stuff is rubbish we can't escape the fact that these questions exist on dozens of different dimensions and include things like economics, politics, emotional, human factors, the environment etc. ultimately the argument needs to be won rather than settled.
It can happen like in Sweden with proper guarantees
Time and demographics are also a component. Italy is old, has worker shortages for living wage work (and is currently issuing ~500k work visas over three years to attract labor to the market), and a new nuclear generator takes at least ten years to build. Each year, an additional 1TW of solar will be deployed globally. Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/italy/
> 49% of Italy’s electricity was generated from low-carbon sources in 2025, below the EU average of 71%. As of 1 January 2026, Italy was aiming for 69% of renewable electricity generation by 2030. For the country’s latest renewables targets, see our 2030 Global Renewable Target Tracker.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/IT/fifteen_minutes
Record 2026 summer heat impaired nuclear generation in France, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, so I'd be curious how they intend to solve for that as the climate continues to warm (reduced capacity factor from reduced output due to cooling constraints impairs the economics).
France to Upgrade Heat Wave Modeling After Record Nuclear Curbs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790006 - September 2026
Europe's Heatwaves Are Putting Nuclear Power Under Pressure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49466909 - August 2026
Bulgaria's Nuclear Plant Plans First Output Cut Due to Low Danube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376860 - August 2026
Record heat is drying up Europe's major rivers, as these striking images show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283344 - August 2026
Bloomberg: Hungary Casts Doubt on Nuclear Plant Expansion After Danube Low Levels - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/hungary-c... - August 13th, 2026
Italy to issue half million non-EU work visas over next three years - https://www.reuters.com/world/italy-issue-half-million-non-e... - June 30th, 2025
Nuclear power plants are uninsurable in the private market. There is no natural investor base for a product that is uninsurable. Unless you are an imagining a culture war where real capitalists are fighting corporate welfare queens, it's not a culture war issue.
[dead]
People usually do not include the costs of actual insurance into those calculations. If you do you end up with much higher prices per kWh for nuclear.
Additional cost estimate in numbers per kWh
Numbers:
Germany: + 0.139€-2.36 €/kWh
Japan: + $0.22–5.78/kWh
I could not find numbers for the US, but you guys have the Price-Anderson Act that limits the liability of nuclear operators.
Sources:
https://www.versicherungsforen.net/schaden-leistung/berechnu...
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/12/1301
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1082...
The German study is not undisputed, but the opposing side was funded by nuclear industry, while the original study was done by insurance providers and aligns with the Japanese results.
Neither study considered terror, or hybrid warfare as additional risks.
Given the amount of sabotage we see in Europe at the moment, premiums would probably be even higher.
Are large hydro dams insured for the total costs of catastrophic flood event?
A typical third-party liability insurance cap for large hydroelectric dams ranges from $50 million to $100 million per occurrence, with major facilities stacking excess liability layers well beyond that.
Dam failures can cause very large costs. The 2015 Fundão tailings dam breach:
" On 25 October 2024, mining companies BHP and Vale signed an agreement with the Brazilian government to pay nearly US$30 billion in compensation over the Mariana Dam collapse. The terms include $18 billion in funding for public authorities and $5.6 billion in additional compensation, resettlement, and environment restoration. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_dam_disaster#Governmen...
1975 Banqiao Dam failure, Deaths 26,000–240,000. Property damage: 62 dams collapsed, more than 5 million houses collapsed, 10.75 million people affected
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
For sabotage in Europe, I would be much more worry about security of hydro dams, chemical facilities and water supply. They are much more weakly protected then nuclear power plants.
https://www.nrc.gov/regulations-legislation/fact-sheets-broc...
In Ukraine a large dam was destroyed, you can see it from space. Terrible, but things moved on.
Things would not move on as smoothly if Chernobyl containment was bombed.
There was not only massive amounts of ecological damage due to russian destruction of the Kakhovka Dam (which was a war crime), but also at least 59 people died. This would be impossible at Chornobyl because nobody lives around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Kakhovka_Da...
I'm not saying destroying the chornobyl sarcophagus would be great, but it wouldn't cause the same amount of damage.
It was bombed, and things moved on even more smoothly.
No, it's included and is dirt cheap. German nuclear provided for about 5ct/kwh, similar to Switzerland https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... or other countries.
In Germany liability was covering 2.5bn+ full assets of owners. I still find it funny how germans are concerned about nuclear when each 2y the same nr of ppl die as total estimation for Chernobyl (if we assume LNT is correct at low dosages). Yet nobody demands full cars ban. Even funnier considering Germany is still burning coal and approved subsidies for new gas peakers
Your document shows 10.9 ct/kWh normalised production cost for 2025 (roughly double the ~5 ct of a normal year, because the plant was offline half the year). That shows how exposed such a plant is when it's offline; and running an existing, paid-off plant built in the 1970s, like the one you linked, is a very different thing from building a new one today.
Burning coal sure is stupid, but so is being stuck in the outdated idea that we need either coal or nuclear for baseload. Solar, wind and storage are much cheaper, more flexible and far faster to build (a year or two, not 15+). IMO that's a much better answer than starting some SMR pipe dream now. 10 or 20 years ago it would have been different, but there's no point clinging to a solution just because it made sense back then, and was rejected for the wrong reasons.
So you see that avg opex price is cheap, thanks for acknowledging. That was the statement, not that in new plants power is more expensive because they need to repay loan (which is balooned due to delays)
We need firm power. This isn't outdated. That's also why Germany approved subsidies for new gas plants, which were recommended even by Fraunhofer ISE
Basically either you build a mix like france/nordics and get very low emissions or you are stuck with vre+bess+gas combo like Germany.
Or, if you are convinced VRE are enough, provide an estimation/simulation for German grid based on existing data of last decade (capacity factors/demand)- how much vre+bess is needed to ditch firm fossils fully
I agree with everything you said but want to add some more about the Price-Anderson Act. It does a few things:
1. It caps the liability for an incident at a single reactor. It goes up with inflation and I believe it's currently $500 million;
2. It establishes an industry-wide secondary self-insurance fund for broader incidents and caps liability. I believe the current theoretical value is $15-20 billion; and
3. In the event of a wider incident, the per-reactor liability cap is lower than (1). I believe it's $150 million.
So who pays if an incident exceeds these caps? The government does. These are either entirely or largely privately owned. Why exactly are we subsidizing private providers this way while enjoying none of the profits?
Now go and look at the cleanup costs of either Chernobyl or Fukushima. The latter is going to take decades, possibly a century, and the costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Chernobyl is probably higher.
Yet these get hand-waved away by nuclear advocates despite there being 2 major events when fewer than 700 nuclear plants have been built (and I believe that includes non-power plants).
Now do the clean up costs of fossil fuel power generation
Which we are replacing with renewables? Trying to shove fossil fuels into the picture seems like a false comparison?
Crude oil has been leaking in to the oceans on and off for millennia.
You know what happens to it?
It breaks down.
Interesting take to trivialize oil spills.
Take coal, then. The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But you focus on one single thing: Oil spills. The grandparent comment talks of fossile fuels. What about co2?
Co2 has been leaking out into the atmosphere for many years. You know what happens to it? It stays around basically forever, kills enormously (directly and indirectly), and in fact causes a spiralling effect.
Ah yes, The Carbon Dioxide Boogyman.
It’s literally in our blood, but couldn’t possibly serve any purpose in the atmosphere.
Yes, we must destroy ourselves in this singular focus of forcing green renewables on everyone at any cost.
Remember when governments weren’t to be trusted, and we were taught to question things? No? Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
Climate Change isn’t an existential threat.
Green energy isn’t.
Renewables are not.
Not always- sometimes it - forms a street:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt_volcano
In my opinion the best argument for nuclear power is not money, but environmental.
The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But also: What is the cost of non-nuclear's raising of co2 levels and climate change?
The environmental argument would be to reduce coal as quickly as possible.
Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.
> The environmental argument
Which is an economic argument, too. It's merely not been priced in yet.
Yup. I guess we still disagree if nuclear is needed long term for Dunkelflaute, and for countries with darker winters.
It's one thing to use storage for overnight. Another if it's for a couple of weeks. And yet another for 6 months.
And take Sweden: Lots of hydro power yes, but where it can feasibly & economically be built, it already has. You can't expand it. And that's not even mentioning that all you need is a drought in winter, and you can no longer rely on it. Currently Sweden is backed by coal plants in Germany. But we need to plan for it being Dunkelflaute in Germany and Italy, at least enough to not have surplus for the nordics.
As for "it's always sunny somewhere", sure, but you need to get it there, somehow. Transmission is why electricity prices in Sweden can be "more than infinity percent" more expensive in south of Sweden compared to north. (electricity prices in the north has gone as far as negative), and is why data centers are built near power plants, or at least it's part of DC location planning.
If transmission costs were negligible then we wouldn't need to take power into account for DC placement. I have some rants about this related to how some DCs are away from population centers to save money on power, noticeably sacrificing latency to the actual end users.
The zonal pricing differences in Sweden are mostly a mathematical mirage. The cheap zones 1 and 2 are combined together only a third of the demand of zone 3.
If you waved a magic wand and combined them with infinite transmission for free the price in the expensive area with all the people and energy demand would barely move. (It would disproportionately rise in the cheap zones).
So any sane approach wouldn't spend money shifting the small amount of surplus power from the cheap region but spend the same money on say offshore wind feeding into the expensive zone. This is basically the pitch for zonal pricing, it tells you where demand and supply are needed. Building lots of transmission until the price is the same everywhere defeats the purpose. Building lots of offshore wind was the actual plan but most of those got rejected on bogus national security grounds.
The rejected wind farms would have doubled the entire country's generation.
As long as the overall strategy has a plan for dunkelflaute which isn't just "oh then we'll just import (German coal power)", then sure.
> bogus national security grounds.
Nobody would sabotage energy infrastructure in or near international waters, you mean?
For China, coal power generation is the bedrock of electric production. They have plenty of coal reserves and are building a plenty of new coal power plants.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
The share of primary energy in China in 2025 was: coal 56% , oil 20.8%, gas 9.8%, nuclear 3.2%, hydro 3%, solar 2.6%, wind 2.5%
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-primary-energy-b...
But there is one positive change. 2025 was the first year in history of China when solar energy production increased more then increase in coal, gas or oil energy production.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-primary-ene...
> https://www.versicherungsforen.net/schaden-leistung/berechnu...
From google translate """ Depending on the probability of such an event occurring, the annual premium varies between €0.01 and €305.83, based on a mean total insured sum of approximately €6,090 billion. If the entire insured sum were to be provided over a period of 100 years, the annual insurance premium per nuclear power plant would amount to €19.5 billion. """
No mention where the 6.09T EUR (presumably 2011) cost comes from. Given the stated insurance premium of 19.5B EUR power station per year I would naively expect such a cataclysm to happen perhaps once every 300 years. The global reactor fleet has been running for at least 19,000 years (https://www.ans.org/cdn/policy/statements/docs/ps51.pdf); the two IAEA INES level 7 accidents relating to nuclear power stations were Chernobyl and Fukushima, and cost nothing like 6T EUR. Therefore the numbers in the insurance study do not align with what is observed.
And I would question the "accidental" nature of Chernobyl, given than the power plant has voluntarily been pushed out of its boundaries.
...and yes I know, then design flaws stroke. But the initial spark was not accidental at all.
We also don't factor in a carbon tax for the fossil-fuel power plants.
Yet their CO2 will remain for 10'000 years on the atmosphere, affecting even remote populations.
>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.
>The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.
Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.
I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?
I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.
Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that.
France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.
We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.
They were already safer than coal...by several orders of magnitude. A Chernobyl level disaster every single year would have killed fewer people than coal power. The level of safety you are describing has literally killed millions of people.
Commoditizing the existing reactors of 40-50 years ago would have lead to a dramatically better world than we currently live in, with cheaper power, essentially defeated climate change, better air quality, and fewer premature deaths associated with that air quality.
The designs didn't evolve, the requirements did. That's going to happen to SMBs too.
You build 10, someone is concerned about a flaw, you build the next 90 differently. Oops!
> France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer.
That's because French nuclear power plants are designed to be directly cooled by river water instead of using cooling towers.
The biggest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona) is cooled by evaporating the treated wastewater, in the desert.
All these extra methods of preserving water adds cost, to a technology where paid off plants are struggling. Let alone ruinously expensive new builds.
They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them.
You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.
If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Evidently they are not free.
> If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them.
Pretty much all the new thermal power plants are (including biomass-burning plants), except in places where cool water is not scarce.
It's weird to glomp onto that idea, as if it's some kind of a fatal flaw of nuclear power.
At least these installations don't need to deal with radioactive material directly, so they will have the same financial infact as similar improvements to, say, coal-fired power plants.
> We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.
Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.
> Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.
It is not. There are roughly 200 >1GW reactors.
The US just doesn't want Chinese reactors and vice versa. The same problem will haunt SMBs.
You can in theory build a SMR next to a data centre, so I guess we’ll find out
You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.
You absolutely can. Read up on the French nuclear reactor fleet!
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...
There are minor variances locally, but you can make enough components common to benefit massively from economies of scale.
Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on.
There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.
New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs
Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer.
The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.
Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.
Floating nuclear plants next to a city sound like a recipe for disaster
It will reliably cost only 10x, and it theory it will roll of a production line.
The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle were explicitly marked for the modular construction as a key selling feature, which would reduce time and cost. It came out 20B over budget and 7 years late.
It's a great story: in theory you can produce modular components of a full scale nuclear power plant in a controlled environment. In theory.
In practice the production line wasn't as controlled as it needed to be and ended up delivering modules that needed significant rework. That caused modules to be delivered and ready out of order. In other words they bought a lot of project management complexity that was hidden behind the theory of modularity.
SMRs are turning out to be even more expensive than conventional nuclear power plants, which are so expensive compared to renewables that even without a risk premium they are uncompetitive.
Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements
AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.
Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.
Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.
Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units.
> Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C
Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late.
These are terrible results.
That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun.
The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.
That is why even Flameville 3 was cheaper than Hinkley point C, not that it was cheap.
Flameville 3 is the first reactor for France in 21st century and suffers the frequency problem I am arguing. It was a path finder therefore only one was ever ordered. EPR2 is 6 under construction and France does have a track record of doing it consistently at scale for cheap(by nuclear standards).
The Asian giants all do it for cheaper because they build regularly, Japan (post Fukushima policy direction notwithstanding) and South Korea achieve overnight numbers of $5-6M/MW or less, so does China.
Regular construction is key, to the industry having a chance, without SMR that is never realistic anymore.
The most annoying thing about Hinkley Point C is that after all the delays and investments, the electricity it generates won’t even be cheap. £133/MWh!
Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind farm is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.
Look at the proposed EPR2 subsidies. It is interest free loans and €100 per MWh on top of that, while assuming large learning effects.
They are admitting Flamanville 3 like costs before they have even started building.
Overnight costs do not get impacted by guaranteed purchase price or subsidy for it neither does it include interest rates. It is a specific aspect of the TCO.
Nobody is saying nuclear is cheap it is not - we will be building a plant once in while for pure strategic reason no matter the cost anyway. The point is construction cost comes down per MW with higher frequency of plant building, and this is the case SMRs, we can get cheaper construction both Per MW and overall TCO in absolute dollar terms relative to large plants with SMRs.
A theory with a lot of leaps that is in no way guaranteed. But it’s a nice idea
There is no economic case for SMR that you couldn't make for a larger one with a massive benefit of economies of scale. SMRs are - in my opinion - a dead end, larger reactors could work well but will be delivered later and likely will still not be profitable on a KWh basis when compared to an equivalent installed base of solar and wind and will most likely be deliver much, much later.
Wright’s law is the only way to reduce costs. It’s a generalization of Moore’s law. The more of anything you build the cheaper it gets. Most products get 10% - 20% cheaper every time total production volume doubles. The most obvious example right now is rockets - launch costs are going down exponentially because we (SpaceX mostly) are doing so much of it we are finally getting economies of scale. SMRs will too, but only if they become popular. It’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but the economics are clear. If lots of people start using SMRs they WILL get cheap. And it’s a form factor where it’s plausible lots of people will.
That's another interesting theory, but Wright's law doesn't mitigate many other disadvantages of SMRs: the need for multi site security; the need for on-site technicians at more sites; the need to build grid hook up to more locations, etc. There's a reason reactors grew to a certain size, no smaller and no bigger. Ignoring that lesson has a high price.
Main idea: license once, then repeat and repeat. Scale. The cost to produce energy from one single SMR is higher than fomr a classical PWR (diving output per full buidling cost) but that cost is reduced once you start scaling (all the costs associated with initial license are amortized).
Prefab & faster construction possibilities would be a big one.
Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.
In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.
This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.
I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.
Because Trump is pushing SMR on all "allies", UK, Japan, Italy:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzevzwxwro
I couldn't find immediate investments from Kushner etc., but will dig further.
I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.
>massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather.
Italy has all that right across the pond.
And no energy source can beat solar on the speed of build out. And when it comes to the energy the next few years is all about build out [for AI]. Countries who get it right - like China, look at their solar and new datacenters getting powered by it, may be US if the required thinking wins - are going to lead the world in the near to mid-term future, the rest are going to be struggling seconds.
Building nuclear today in the energy field is like building tanks in military whereis solar is like drones - i.e. we have choice between 2 classic paradigms - very limited vertical scalability with extremely costly units vs. unlimited horizontal scalability of extremely cheap units.
When it comes to Italy however, nuclear does not fit that niche of a plausible technology.
Finland? Sure! Italy has far better, cheaper, routes.
nuclear is a great option for ice breakers & submarines.
in a connected grid nuclear cannot economically compete against solar (which pushes the cost of daytime energy to effectively 0€) so it has to be heavily subsided, which raises the cost for everyone. a euro spent on nuclear is a euro not spent on batteries or hydrogen production
Great, now how about countries where solar is a non-starter?
because certain political parties have made energy technologies part of their identities, which is... stupid.
115 $/MWh.
Thats what EDF's stating their NUWARD SMR (up to 400MW) will cost in France, just as comparison. Not cheap for the taxpayers in Italy.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-plans-10...
That's about half of the average cost right [1], so literally it will make electricity cheaper. Also, it will be cost that will not go up willy nilly when someone decides to do something absolutely stupid
1: https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/electricity-price
I doubt that number but it would be an improvement: the MW in Italy is far beyond 200 USD/MW in wholesole market.
Btw, it is not completely about price/MW but it is also about sovereignty and... No, there is no U mines in Italy but a commodity market is much more managable than the oil market.
Italy is hugely dependent on natural gas for electricity, so it actually makes economic sense.
South Korea has a lot of nuclear power for related reasons - they can't risk being too dependent on LNG imports, lest some of their more volatile neighbours capture the shipments.
Italian here. I seriously doubt this thing will lead anywhere. If something slightly more concrete than this will appear, there will be an insurrection. NIMBY is very strong in Italy (after decades of attempts, we are still without a spent fuel depot for this reason).
Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way. As soon as popular opposition will manifest, the politicians will forget the whole issue.
“Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way.”
Public opinion can change very quickly, and it usually it does not need to change significantly to have a big impact (see Brexit).
40 years ago public opinion was heavily influenced by the Chernobyl disaster, the last major nuclear accident (Fukushima) happened 15 years ago and it is quite far from memory.
Much more pressing matters today are energy costs and independence, so I expect a new referendum would have at the very least a much closer outcome.
I don’t agree. I’d bet Italians would kill nuclear power again, if asked again now about the matter.
To be fair, the referendums for Nuclear were so poorly timed. Just after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I don't know if this was a deliberate choice of the governments leading the country those years (the tinfoil hat in me can see big oil pushing for those referendums at those particular times) or pure bad luck. Anyway, public opinion was highly biased which led to "No" winning with fair margins. With that said, I believe NIMBY is a contributing factor and not the whole explanation.
It wasn’t a government initiative. In Italy, citizens can request (500k signatures needed) a referendum to abrogate a law. This is what happened in this case, the law being the one that allowed nuclear reactors.
Hopefully Germany will follow next. It’s absurd that they rely on fossil fuel and coal when they can build modern nuclear plants that can provide stable energy for the energy heavy industries.
It would take 5-10 years to build the power plants and maybe with Chinese aid even faster
I don't think that nuclear projects of any size could pass current environmental impact assessments.
Only a severe energy shortage could motivate politicians enough to temporarily skip these, like they did for the LNG terminals. But you can't build a nuclear power plant of any size within a single legislative period so its just not going to happen.
Where in comparable countries (= in europe) did new reactors take less than 10 years (from scratch even)? So we are at at least 10 years. But more realistically, taking recent megaprojects into account, its 20 years. In that time, batteries are way ahead and you can overbuild _so_ _much_ renewables and people even do it without subsidies (strangely, nobody builds nuclear plants without subsidies).
regarding the "stable energy" point: germany has one of the most (if not _the_ most) stable grids in the world and that is even with 50+ % renewables. And given it sits in the center of europe with grid connections all around, it's far cheaper to buy from whomever has the most favourable weather anyways (and sell to them if they don't). Thats why one of the biggest issues right now is not nuclear, but grids.
No thank you, we will happily continue with our investment in wind, solar and battery storage.
It takes five years to build a wind turbine in Germany. There is a snowball's chance in hell that you can build a nuclear power plant in that time.
False dichotomy
hopefully not
Fun fact: in the 60s Italy was after the US and UK the county with the most advanced nuclear energy plants. These days still North Italy produces key parts of nuclear reactors in other countries.
Exactly! Italy during 60s was building nuclear plants, launching satellites, computing and pioneering in several advanced fields
Good times.
Countries can also buy Uranium from their favorite fossil fuel country.
Saudi Arabia discovers 110 million tonnes of uranium-bearing ore in Medina: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-arabia-discove...
Partially true, the largest uranium mines are in Canada, Australia and Namibia, but it is a commodity market and it is way more managable than oil market.
Also, you can stock pile uranium and forget about the market for ten years. Oil strategic reservers requires large infrastructures and usually last only few months.
As an Italian, I know exactly how this playbook plays out.
Nuclear energy is a big business for intimates friends, so on the trend that it's a green tech (apparently no carbn footprint, but what about the depleted fuel?) they approved the reopening of this technology.
Why going for SMR?
Well, it's the penalties business model and SMR is ideal because they are on paper, no valid proven commercial implementation. A company wins the contract, in this case i'm not sure if they'll go for a open bid, the contract include research, design, building and so on. At some point the political wind changes, contract canceled and hundreds of milions in contractual penalties to pay. It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends, with zero obligation to ever break ground.
It's from 19th century that they are thinking about a bridge between Sicily and mainland. The last time the project was revived, the playbook went exactly as described above: years of studies, cancellation and massive state penalties paid out to contractors for a bridge that still doesn't exist (Sicily and mainland are on different tectonic plates).
No mention there is no national deposit for nuclear waste, especially in a highly sismic territory.
>It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends,
I agree completely and would go so far as to claim that presently in 2026 that money-transfer mechanism is the real motivation for any nuclear project in any country. Renewable options are the better path now from a technical point, but politicians and their buddies can't easily make as much money from that.
Analisi molto lucida.
There should be a shared EU nuclear consortium, a public version of Airbus but for nuclear energy spearheaded by France.
The enduring fascination of isotopes and neutrons zipping in and out...
Taking a look at the costs (not to mention genuine safety and sustainability in the long run): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
In the current landscape—with the costs of solar and wind power steadily falling and storage technologies emerging, driven by the expansion of electric vehicles—I really don't know what kind of commercial future nuclear energy has (in terms of delivering lower energy costs).
Brace yourself, every large nuclear accident has been preceded by the Italian considering nuclear again. (Well at least Tchornobyl and Fukushima, ”which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice”)
I just don't get people saying how terrible climate change is going to be for the world and then refuses to support nuclear.
If climate change is such a critical problem, then let's try everything to get this solved even if it costs more to do it. If you are only willing to do some solutions because it is cheaper then I don't believe you when you say it is important to solve.
And frankly, we don't know the full impact of climate change, so having as many alternatives as possible just makes sense. Hydro can be impacted by droughts which will be more common. Solar may be impacted if there are increased storms. Wind may be impacted due to stilling (slowing of wind due to an increase in co2).
Why not throw nuclear into the mix to ensure we do not run out of power?
> Hydro can be impacted by droughts which will be more common
You did read the news this summer? Like https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/03/europe/hungary-nuclear-pl... ?
Most of the environmentalists will tell you that it's dumb to shut down nuclear, but building new plants just takes too long and is too expensive. Why then not just put the money into things that are cheap now and will get even cheaper tomorrow?
Hedging against downtime is comparatively easy, just diversify by location and improve the grid, which is way less expensive than building out power plants.
Every source of power has pros and cons. They all have risks and benefits.
If there is a push to do a specific clean energy I think we should go for it regardless of the cost. If you think the climate issue is going to be a very severe issue then you should take every option at our disposal and encourage every push for an alternative to fossil fuels. Since you are refusing this, then I assume you don't think it is severe.
Large countries may be able to hedge against downtime, but smaller countries can't. Also, like I said, we don't really know the impact of all of this which is why we should diversify as much as possible. One of those diversifications should be nuclear as well as solar, wind, and hydro.
It's simple: They're based on emotion and/or social consensus (i.e. express the opinion seen as OK to express)
HN is full of solar salesman.
Because having a solution would put the climate change organisations out of a job.
Has there been a single SMR deployed and working yet? There were lots of talk about GE BWRX-300 and Rolls Royce SMR but none of them seems to have even started construction.
There are! But not in Europe yet. Both are in China and russia. (China's HTR-PM at Shidaowan and Russia's floating Akademik Lomonosov). Check the full fleet (operating, under construction, etc) at the bottom of this post: https://reactoratlas.com/en/wiki/smr
Can someone explain me like I’m a middle age person why Italy, and France, bet on nuclear fission?
It’s not competitive on cost anymore and we don’t have a good track record.
Nuclear is a sane, qualitative and working solution to a real problem
The only solution known yet
Is there anything more to say ?
Most likely: Corruption in one way or another.
> after voters *twice* rejected it in national referendums
Democracy is just lovely.
Have your citizens answer to a straightforward question on a topic twice, have them reject it, both times.
And the government will still go its way.
I'm not against nuclear per se, I'm just baffled at the "democratic" process.
The referendums were in 1987 and 2011, respectively. Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.
It’s much less frequent than the usual democratic election cycle, where people are also allowed to reevaluate their positions.
> Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.
But nobody asked, there hasn't been a third referendum.
It doesn't work that way in Italy. A popular referendum can only abolish an existing law, partially or fully. The general public cannot vote to adopt new legislation.
The government was elected by the people - if they disagree with this decision it will have consequences in the next election.
I think the public opinion and sentiment has changed quite significantly since 2011 when the last referendum was held.
The current Italian government is massively populist so they wouldn’t do this if they thought people would disagree.
I don’t see any problem with the democratic process here - sure it’s a flawed system but I believe it’s still the best we came up with so far
I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.
The referendum is obviously legally binding, the laws they were about were abrogated as the vote requested and it's been 15 years since the last one.
Since then politics shifted, technology changed, the geopolitical situation changed, 10 million people died, 9 million people became adults that weren't before
If people are still against nuclear the same mechanism to call for a referendum to reject this law still exists and there's elections next year anyway.
Shouldn't people be allowed to change their minds?
A party can lose three election, and if they win the fourth, they still get into power.
Mind you the referendum vote was held only 2 years after the Chernobyl incident
This is somewhat strange. Italy has a lot of sun, and a lot of mountains for these pumped storage hydropower plants. It is way harder to store output from PV on Great European Plain.
Sweet. Minimum 20 years and $20Billion before any electricity is produced.
I wonder how much solar, wind and batteries you could get for that, and how quickly it would be deployed
Even if it passes, you'll see the first nuclear power plant not before 15 years.
And it will not pass before the next legislature in 1 year.
We are currently running nuclear at a capacity factor of around 91% in the US. Solar is somewhere around 24%.
1GW at noon vs 1GW forever. The area under the curve is what matters. Not the peak of the curve.
How much more would you be willing to spend to get 4x the nameplate capacity and to also get it whenever you need it?
The economics of a single plant are irrelevant in comparison to the requirements of the grid that it operates within. If someone could invent a source of power that magically scales exactly with the duck curve in Texas, I guarantee that would fetch a premium on the market, even if other economic characteristics are not competitive.
The solution to nuclear is to standardize the design and deployment process. France has demonstrated it can be done. Perhaps their engineers should be in charge of some new global standards body.
Really good news for Italy and for the whole of Europe (if not the world)!
The atomic revival of Europe
Yeah, good for them. The main thing is to follow proper safety procedures and keep improving them. Other than that, nuclear power is a great source of energy.
David Sacks had an interesting stance on SMRs on Oct 19, 2024, before the election. Notice how he stands up for the downtrodden, poor population:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye012kzWJ3A (1:10:10):
"I'm virtue signaling because I'm Pro nuclear yes it's a luxury belief you're promoting something nuclear power is a luxury belief you heard it here first because they're going to put these things in poor communities and so it's never going to affect your life they're putting them next to Data Center in like Oregon like it's easy for you to say oh I support nuclear look how Progressive I am look how smart I am you haven't internalized the downsides [...]"
Sacks' image polishing agency is unhappy about pointing out gross inconsistencies. Do not question your betters.
Nuclear power is a smart choice going forward but renewables are approaching good conversion efficiency - in solar 25-30% was unheard of a couple decades ago
I wonder how much of a factor is that nuclear plants are effectively "unbombable". Ukraine's thermal plants have taken a beating, but their nuclear plants are still generating.
Voting for it is easy and I hope it catalyzes innovation. But still, completing a damn reactor without insane budget overruns is the problem.
Enrico Fermi will stop spinning in his grave
he's only half spinning in his grave
Anyone found a permanent repository, yet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
We should do what we do for fossil fuels: Permanent storage in the atmosphere.
Good thing that sanity prevailed.
Most of oil and gas money goes to fund terrorism. Boycott it as much as possible
Presidente Giorgia Meloni is awesome and it’s amazing to see a woman empowered by the democratic process and serving the will of the Italian people
https://youtu.be/sNhPplje7xM?is=h5VtnMe9wva-VKGM
* serving energy giants with subsidies.
About 139.000 workers employed in Italian energy industry by recent numbers, out of 24.000.000 employed population.
https://www.lavoro.gov.it/documenti-e-norme/normativa/di-tas...
Giants are people too.
Can someone explain to me why nuclear HAS to be profitable?
If a power source is profitable on its own, it can be financed by private investors. If it is unprofitable, it needs to be financed at least in part by the state, so it would come at the cost of the taxpayer.
Looking at the top comments in this thread claiming a bunch of false things I see HN is essentially fully captured by anti-progress populism at this point.
It’s sad to see, for a former community of “hackers.”
As an Italian… F-cking finally.
So their plan to burn oil and keep the AC mandated no cooler than 24°C in their homes didn't work out? Huh.
Good luck with that. No problem with investing some money , but it has to be commercially viable first and recent Western projects all over the globe have not instilled any confidence in that.
Nature is healing.
Why are so many of the top comments like "But muh, nukelaer energy bad" and when pushed to explain why , its "bad. very expensive"
Always funny to see how plutonium pilled hn is. Nuclear power in Italy is idiotic. They won't even be able to cool the damn reactors. Europe is drying out.
Italy is surrounded by water, do you think the Mediterranean Sea is going to just dry out?
His ignorance is on full display when he said plutonium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
the Mediterranean has dried up several times in history and it will dry up again, as the African continent collides with Europe. Currently, water flows in at Gibraltar with a very strong current to try to keep up with evaporation, making the Mediterranean saltier and saltier (than the Atlantic) over time. When the strait closes because Africa and Spain push together, the Meditteranean will very quickly dry up.
> When the strait closes because Africa and Spain push together
So really no danger of the Med drying up over the lifetime of a nuclear power station, conservatively 100 years.
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Maybe not them, but their children could do it. Italy's capability to assimilate is underrated.
Agreed on your second point, but why couldn't you make it without the blatant racism?
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