I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).
And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
It is expensive because of the regulatory burdens associated with making it unreasonably safe. By unreasonably safe I mean that harms predicted by radiation models are unscientific, and death rate expectations are far lower than alternative power generation technologies.
Nuclear fuel storage is relatively straightforward, and volumes have potential to be reduced 30x through recycling.
Nuclear power plants require international laws and international cooperation for insurance, because one serious incident, such as Chornobyl, can wipe a continent.
In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.
We can make nuclear safe (enough) but after one big incident nobody wanted the political career suicide to push for this. So we are stuck with criticizing stone-age level nuclear power because we never took it further. The West never stopped doing something just because the USSR didn’t do it properly.
If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking kills 7-8 times more people than cars every year (that’s 80-100 Chernobyls worth every year) and we still allow it.
The reasons are political not technically or financially insurmountable obstacles. We didn’t shut down nuclear in Europe for “green” reasons or because we can’t improve it, or because it kills too many people, but because enough Russian money went into politicians’ pockets to do this.
but comparing to solar / wind there you also have to factor batteries production, battery replacement, wind turbine replacement and recycling (they are not easily recyclable), cleaning solar panels etc.
Long build times are often the result of constantly changing regulations. Also it’s interesting that build times in Japan are almost 2 times smaller than in US.
Nuclear doesn't have a great record in other countries either. I might have the wrong figures but Hinkley Points C is over 2 times over budget and likely to be 5+ years late.
The exemption being France and maybe China?
France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well.
I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong
The average build time is currently 6.5 years. The median is lower at 5.8. The variations across both time and space of those average are neither large nor particularly systematic.
There have always been outliers, so if you focus on those you can "prove" anything you like.
We’ve had our share of anti-nuclear activists in France. The project got endlessly stalled, with shifting legislative grounds, and general opposition. Also, the general inefficiency and incompetence from Areva meant this was a match made in heaven (or hell, depends) to get nearly infinite delay.
I remember the anti-nuclear fever went viral in 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I think the correct lesson to be learned from that experience is not to built nuclear power plants in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters...and not to call for all nuclear power plants around the world to be shut down.
Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.
There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima.
Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons.
...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason).
Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.
When I referenced long lasting I mean that some nuclear power stations are no forecast to keep going for 120 years.
CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous to stand near for 500 years (without centimetres of concrete), and then dangerous to consume for an further many thousand. It is within our technology to look after the quantities we are talking about indefinitely.
Also, with current plants we could reduce the size of the waste by 30x if we recycled it. Other plant types would burn all the fuel and leave us with very low volumes of radioactive elements.
Wrt Ukraine you choose to focus on the potential for release around Zaporozhzhia Vs the actual destruction occuring from the circumstances of war in the rest of the country?
> CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Yes, we have problem with CO2. The solution is to use Solar + Wind + Hydro + Batteries + long lasting storage. Nuclear causes more problems than it solves unless it used to make nukes also.
See that's the thing, you're trying to argue rationally ;)
But the discussion around nuclear energy stopped being rational decades ago. On one side you have the old guard of the environmentalist movement which got started with anti-nuclear demonstrations in the first place and then had their "I told you so" moment in 1986, and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death number are completely overblown, the radiation was actually good for the environment or whatever.
Then I'm seeing that the latest European NPP in Finland was about 15 years late and 3x more expensive than planned (from 3.5 to 11 billion Eu) while wind and solar farms are just popping up everywhere around me without much fanfare, built by whoever has some money and a bit of unused farmland or roof space to spare. And I really can't imagine those same people pooling their money and starting to build nuclear power plants instead ;)
Gas isn’t climate friendly just because of its debatable attractiveness vs coal. And nuclear comes with catastrophic risks that require large costs to mitigate. Let’s not pretend it’s some panacea. Renewables are better than both.
A methane molecule is one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms. More than half of the energy released by burning it (53% according to [1]) comes from oxidizing the hydrogen to water. So it's roughly half as bad as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and does not have the additional problems of sulfur (acid rain) and soot.
Is it less climate unfriendly than the alternatives. Every form of energy generation releases CO2. Gas also has the benefit that it doesn't need all sorts of extras to make it dispatachable when needed (which also require CO2).
I forgot to say hydro is also great where possible.
Nuclear produces constant amount of energy (while consumption is not stable), Solar and Wind are highly unstable, with peaks not matching consumption. Adding gas (which is fast to adjust/turn on/turn off) for maneuvers makes whole system cheaper and more stable
The incentives of the regulators are not aligned with the public.
Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.
They only care about reducing the risk of an accident however minor happening on their watch while not appearing to completely annihilate the technology because that would open them to political attacks.
So the balance is struck at a point where nuclear power capital costs are absurdly high.
I suspect that trying to make nuclear reactors accident proof has always been the wrong approach. Instead they should have made it so an accident could always be managed - something along the lines of if something happens drown it in concrete and forget about it, because there are 100,000 more reactors. The only safety cost would come from making a meltdown slow enough or happen in a place no one cares about for it to become a balance sheet problem.
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants).
Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive.
> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
If the goal is 100% carbon-free energy, then we simply can't let economics get in the way. Otherwise we will always be stuck building some natural gas peaker plants.
And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically.
Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit.
It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage.
The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal.
I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.
Yeah, I'm just arguing that "baseload" should be understood to be a bad thing in my comment above.
If you want to argue that nuclear is affordable as non-baseload power, because the (non-economic) cost to the environment of the alternatives is otherwise too high.... well I'd disagree because of how far solar/wind/batteries have come in the last couple of years, but prior to that you would have had a point. And you still would as far as continuing to operate existing plants goes of course.
Nuclear power has a massive handicap that most R&D was abandoned back in the 80s because it was uneconomic. And another handicap that the R&D it did get was never that focused on economics, commercial nuclear power were always a side effect of the true goal (Small reactors for nuclear submarines and Breeder reactors for nuclear weapons). And to get the promised low costs, you really need to commit and take advantage of massive economics of scale.
I'm not arguing that when taking environmental damage into account, that nuclear is cheaper than current solar/wind/battery technology for any single power project. They have the advantage of massive R&D over the last 30 years.
What I am arguing is that focusing on solar/wind/battery might not be the best route to 100% carbon free power in the long term. Maybe it is? But we really shouldn't be jumping to that assumption.
And we shouldn't be disregarding Nuclear because of any argument that can be summed up in a hacker news comment.
... voters (or however we want to handwave preference aggregation) are very passive about carbon-free energy (and global warming and sustainability and economics and ...)
they either pick some pet peeves (coral reefs, rainforests, global South inequality, desertification) and usually start buying things (EVs, PV panels, heat pumps)
but when it comes to policy they usually revert to Greenpeace/degrowth/NIMBY cult members
Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed.
This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.
EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.
I obviously don't know about Norway, but in most developed countries, the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure. While I can't prove it, it seems too convenient that people suddenly care about "nature" right after they've fucked it up for so many other reasons.
While that's strictly true, there are a lot of people who wouldnt mind living across the fence from a solar farm. Not so many want to live next to a nuclear power plant. Irrationaly perhaps but still.
As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means.
But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.
It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]
The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.
Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]
just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60).
That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".
This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.
And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.
My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.
> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).
I guess, but this article seems misleading to me then. The percentages do seem to mean to constant 1GW supply, not a total supply.
So what’s the total supply?
LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.
I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.
The point is that a very mundane setup with small storage is nearly enough to create a flat baseload of electricity.
We both know that neither supply nor demand is that flat.
In reality we can also trivially add wind power, existing hydro, gas turbines ran on carbon neutral fuel etc. to the mix.
How will you force this house that is self-sufficient 97% of the time to buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity to not crater the capacity factor of the nuclear plant?
Because fast to deploy in theory fights quickly with permitting systems and NIMBYism. You need more permits, because a typical solar or wind farm doesn't come close to a nuclear plan's output, so the per-project bureaucracy multiplies. By needing more places, you also have more groups opposing projects for typical NIMBY reasons. You need battery facilities too, and more updates to the grid to deal with having less inertia, and the updates cost money, and the battery facilities themselves face more NIMBYism: Minimum distances to places where people live and such. So when you put it all together, slow bureaucracies just move at glacial paces, and the equipment you would have bought when you sent out the permit is already different than what you want to use when the permitting is approved.
Then we have the tariffs, as Europe puts tariffs on Chinese equipment that change the price quite a bit.
A country that took this very seriously and decided to put renewables as a top priority could go quite fast. But if there's anything one should learn about the last few decades is that modern democracies care too much about vested interest and NIMBY complaints to actually get projects like this done. Just look at charts showing power waiting to go online in most countries: You'll find very long lines, even after dealing with the rest of the the bureaucratic gauntlet.
Quote: The winters in Germany are often colder and the country's climate is generally more continental. The south of France enjoys warmer Mediterranean temperatures and milder winters.
One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters.
First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US.
The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.
I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism
Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you
Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill"
I went right up to a 2MW windmill once to test this hypothesis and all I could hear were cars on a road (100km/h speed limit) several hundred metres away.
The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.
It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
You need a reliable source for energy. Pumped storage is not. They are mostly good for dealing with the fluctuations of energy supply and demand. It crucially requires water to operate. You can't do much when there's a drought. Also, did some googling. The world’s largest pumped‑hydro storage plant (Fengning, China) stores nearly 40 GWh, delivering 3.6 GW for about 10.8 hours when full. Thats not even a day.
There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.
> Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
It's also the oldest storage tech and I doubt there's a single place in Europe available to build more.
> Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will).
However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons:
2. It will take longer
3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles
4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well.
Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.
Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
All around Europe nuclear plants are forced off the markets because the electricity prices are for weeks lower than their wear and tear and fuel costs.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a battery buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity from the grid when they can make their own?
”Baseload” is a title earned by having the lowest marginal costs. There is nothing fundamental about it.
Today renewables have the cheapest marginal cost at 0. They are the new ”baseload”.
This is not true. I assume you are talking about the french nuclear reactors and their abysmal capacity factors?
The reason for the french case is that they were required to reduce output to allow more space for other new energy generation types. Fortunately the French have realised the error of their ways.
When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be).
> Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Longer than nuclear to do what? I was replying to the above commenter who said the following:
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables
TTL for individual nuclear is obviously always much longer than for renewables but time to any arbitrary large generation goal is almost certainly shorter for nuclear (barring taboo).
China is proving this to be objective false. Their total energy production (not nameplate power) for wind/solar/hydro is growing substantially faster than their nuclear output.
You're wasting your energy on that user, I suspect.
> No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts
...is commonly a rhetorical pattern meaning "I've predetermined my conclusion, but I want to save face by appearing rational and casting those I disagree with as biased or incompetent in one fell swoop."
It's the "Aren't there any REAL men anymore?" of contentious topics.
There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables.
Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.
And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.
Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.
There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
This statement is very uninformed.
Other sources are intermittent, nuclear energy is not.
The problem about many countries not being able to produce fuel rods themselves is true, but the exact same applies to other energy sources.
Most nations depend on very few other nations for imports of oil gas etc.
Nuclear power plants only have a high upfront cost, which is compensated by their long lifetime of 60-100 years.
Other energy sources also have high upfront production costs + you need to spend additional money on infrastructure for batteries/storage.
I also don't understand your argument on military targets.
A NPP is a target the sane way a solar park, wind-park, geothermal facility or whatever would be a target. And to add to that, wile they are of course not indestrctible they are extremely robustly built. You can literally fly an airplane into them and it wouldnt result in a meltdown..
I do agree on your point on decentralization, yes.
Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures.
And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.
One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
> Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).
In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T.
Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
France has 58 reactors with combined power of 60GW. The audit in 2011 (after Fukushima) estimated their cost at 96B euros and the total investment into the nuclear industry since 1950 including research at 228B euros.
And that doesn't include the fact that for all these years electricity prices in Germany were higher than in France which helped to keep renewables afloat.
> But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
That's yet to be seen, doesn't really match the reality I observe so far. They are promised to be cheaper sure, but you end paying more and subsidizing coal power plants in China along the way.
> Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power.
Germany has just over 250GW of installed capacity. [0] indicates peak power is 75GW. Replicating the Olkiluoto EPR build for 75GW of capacity would have cost perhaps 500B EUR.
[1] speculates about what would have happened if Germany had retained its nuclear power stations and performed a fleet build-out.
And the CO₂ difference for electricity production, so the only part of the energy system where nuclear vs. intermittent renewable is currently applicable, is not 2:1. It is 10:1.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have.
I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).
Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system.
What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas.
The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)
1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year
1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.
Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.
Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.
Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
The answer to this is just "intermittent" : the higher the share of renewables, the higher the share that you have to make up for when you're at night without wind. This can be done through batteries, water storage, or interconnection, but that's the real cost of renewables.
1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).
2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.
3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?
4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost
Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election
ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space.
Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
How plenty is the supply that's not in some other countries control, that might make us dependent on them, yet again, like with Germany, gas and Russia.
In theory, you can replace nuclear with a massive buildout of renewables and storage and grid upgrades and overcapacity to handle intermittency. The challenge is that doing all of that fast enough
Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.
Someone pointed out in another comment that Iowa, USA has installed an incredible amount of wind turbines in the last 25 years. There is a whole Wiki page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa
I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear.
People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?
B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times)
You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear.
Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box.
Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.
It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear.
For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal.
There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...)
You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though:
Yes, this is the real answer. Nuclear, which is currently dropping as a percentage of global electricity demand and is now under 10% needs a miracle to reverse that and maybe reach 15% if everything goes well for it.
Meanwhile renewables are surging and every relevant expert suggests they'll dominate the future.
I expect that if I had to put numbers on things, I would be subject to the same biases as everyone else.
Or perhaps not, sometimes not being an "expert" in the traditional sense can remove the biases of an industry. Sci-fi author Ramez Naam had some of the most accurate forecasts in the past by doing the simplest thing possible: looking at the past curve and extending it. That is probably the simple type of projection I would make!
The IEA and EIA are two very respectable organizations that make comically bad projections, just absolutely awful. I know I could beat their projections!
Jenny Chase is a highly prominent solar analyst that has some great anecdotes about how wrong solar estimates always are, and she challenges that new analysts face, but I'm having trouble finding the podcast right now... in any case always read the Jenny Chase megathreads on the state of solar or her interviews in order to get some really great insights into what's going on.
In any case the rate of learning in solar tech far exceeds the expectations of most "energy" experts, and also usually exceeds the expectations of even the solar experts.
Which is entering emergency reserve territory. Nuclear power CAPEX to build an emergency reserve would seem to be utterly insane.
The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels.
Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run the grid without help for 14 days.
As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.
This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors.
For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons.
It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians.
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.
Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.
That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies.
It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.
> Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.
You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
> You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.
Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.
But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries.
So yeah. Regulation.
Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima)
3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore
Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully.
Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)
So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.
It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.
I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.
And then there's coal. The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills fewer people than coal kills as part of its normal expected operation.
The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills as many people right here and makes as much land uninhabitable right here as coal does in our enemy countries within its normal expected operation.
Not a commercial reactor but US lost 3 people trying to hand operate a small reactor with minimal safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
“On Tuesday, January 3, 1961, SL-1 was being prepared for restart after a shutdown of 11 days over the holidays. Maintenance procedures required that rods be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect each one to its drive mechanism. At 9:01 pm MST, Rod 9 was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize.”
The industry didn’t just randomly get so risk averse there where a lot of meltdowns and other issues over time.
Do stupid things and stupid things will happen. There are plenty of similarly stupid accidents on stupidly run construction sites and chemical plants all the time. Also lots of accidents with trains, lots of accidents with temperamental chemicals.
> In July 2007, three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured at the Mojave spaceport while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. An explosion occurred during a cold fire test, which involved nitrous oxide flowing through fuel injectors. The procedure had been expected to be safe.
N2O is very good oxidizer + it's a molecule that can fall apart (and turn into N2 and O2) in a very exothermic way if you look at it wrong.
Oops.
Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.
> The effort to minimize the size of the core gave an abnormally-large reactivity worth to Rod 9, the center control rod.
> One of the required maintenance procedures called for Rod 9 to be manually withdrawn about four inches (10 cm) in order to attach it to the automated control mechanism from which it had been disconnected. Post-accident calculations, as well as examination of scratches on Rod 9, estimate that it had actually been withdrawn about twenty inches (51 cm), causing the reactor to go prompt critical and triggering the steam explosion.
and:
> At SL-1, control rods would sometimes get stuck in the control rod channel. Numerous procedures were conducted to evaluate control rods to ensure they were operating properly. There were rod drop tests and scram tests of each rod, in addition to periodic rod exercising and rod withdrawals for normal operation. From February 1959 to November 18, 1960, there were 40 cases of a stuck control rod for scram and rod drop tests and about a 2.5% failure rate. From November 18 to December 23, 1960, there was a dramatic increase in stuck rods, with 23 in that time period and a 13.0% failure rate. Besides these test failures, there were an additional 21 rod-sticking incidents from February 1959 to December 1960; four of these had occurred in the last month of operation during routine rod withdrawal. Rod 9 had the best operational performance record even though it was operated more frequently than any of the other rods.
Meltdowns aren't physically possible if we're building newer types of plants, so there can't be a new Chernobyl or even Fukushima if we're using modern types of passively cooled plants.
There’s generally significant costs and asterisks around such claims.
You’re much better off paying attention to site placement than trying to design something to safety handle getting covered in several meters of volcanic ash Pompeii style.
I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all.
So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.
The costs of cleaning up Fukushima, including the wider effects on the Japanese economy, are estimated to exceed US$200 billion. That makes it a pretty EPIC disaster in economic terms alone.
Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.
Fukushima was partly an issue of flawed risk assessment. The tsunami that took down the plant was believed to be an incredibly rare even, expected to happen once every ten thousand years.
However, that was a result of faulty assumptions made when the plant was initially planned. With better data and methods, the event would have seemed a lot more likely.
It was perfectly fine because the operators stole the batteries from all the cars in the parking lot to run the control room. Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.
> Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima)
Don't put the emergency diesel generators in the basement where they are certain to be flooded if the tsunami wall is too low. Also, don't build too low tsunami walls.
> So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
> which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal
Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments on fuel matter.
> You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems, loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
> Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway. It’s also impractical for a bunch of other reasons.
> But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
No nuclear power plants has ever actually been required to carry a policy with that kind of a payout. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
However, the lesser risk of losing the reactor is still quite substantial. You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
> Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power.
But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems
These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.
> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.
> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.
> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.
Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?
> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?
> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.
Both of your posts contain very little self-doubt and curiosity. Many points don't seem convincing, and you're consistently not steelmanning the arguments you are replying to.
> it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source
This isn't how radiation works. Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source. Contamination refers to radioactive emitters being somewhere they don't belong.
> Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source
There is this thing called neutron activation.
But the elephant in the room is of course that coal plants emitted way more radioactivity than nuclear ones even taking into account every disaster on even non-power generation plants.
That’s not an economic problem for people operating the power plant.
Nuclear power plants need shielding to avoid their workforce being killed off very quickly. Obviously safety standards are much higher than that, but significant shielding is inherently necessary.
> You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
Nuclear is inherently vastly more complicated requiring more maintenance, manpower, etc per KW of capacity and thus has more operational costs. A 50+ year lifespan means keeping 50+ year old designs in operation which plays a significant role in costs here.
> 5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant.
A cooling tower isn’t dealing with any radioactivity and it’s not a safety critical system yet it’s still difficult to build and thus way more expensive per cubic foot of concrete than a typical surface road. When road projects get complicated they can quickly get really expensive just look at bridges or tunnels.
> You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day.
Hydroelectric dams have directly saved more lives than they have cost due to flood control. The electricity bit isn’t even needed in many cases as people build dams because they are inherently useful. Society is willing to carry those risks in large part because they get a direct benefit.
Wind turbines are closer and do sometimes fail early, but they just don’t cost nearly as much so the public doesn’t need to subsidize insurance here.
I consider myself reasonably pro nuclear, but this is just like some developer going:
“Oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard, I could probably implement that in a weekend”
Fact: hard complicated things are expensive.
There is no “just it’s just some concrete…”.
That is, translated “I do not know what Im talking about”.
Hard things, which require constant, high level, technical maintenance…
Are very expensive.
Theyre expensive to build. Theyre expensive to operate. Theyre expensive to decommission.
Theres no magic wand to fix this.
You can drive down the unit cost sometimes by doing things at scale, but Im not sure that like 100 units, or even say 1000 units can do that meaningfully.
…and how how are we planning on having the 100000s of reactors that you would need for that?
Micro reactors? Im not convinced.
Certainly, right now, the costs are not artificial; if you think they are, I would argue you havent done your due diligence in research.
Heres the point:
Making complicated things cheaper doesnt just magically happen by removing regulations. Thats naive.
You need a concrete plan to either a) massively simplify the technology or b) massively scale the production.
Which one? (a) and (b) both seem totally out of reach to me, without massive state sponsored funding.
…which, apparently no one likes either.
Its this frustrating dilemma where idiots (eg. former Australian government) claim they can somehow magically deliver things (multiple reactors) super cheaply.
…but there is no reality to this promise; its just morons trying to buy regional votes and preserve the status quo with coal.
Real nuclear progress needs realistic plans, not hopes and dreams.
Nuclear power is better; but it is more expensive than many other options, and probably, will continue to be if all we do is hope it somehow becomes easy and cheap by doing basically nothing.
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.
When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.
This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm.
A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
Well, no, that's more down to nuclear fans constantly using the worst possible comparisons, and creating false dichotomies. The better comparison are renewables or natural gas, not an ancient technology literally everybody (outside of it's investors) agrees is bad and should go.
The trouble with liability is that if your nuclear plant has an accident and the cancer rate in the area doesn't detectably change, everybody in the area who gets cancer will sue you anyway.
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
> This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years.
But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power.
Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated
Except for Chernobyl clean up workers, no one lost their lives taking a deliberate risk in any other nuclear incident. And Chernobyl clean up workers didn't die within months either - in fact the story of their health outcomes is quite nuanced, but yes they most definitely took high risks.
In fact Chernobyl is incredibly badly remembered, because the firefighters who died responding to the initial blaze died of sepsis related to beta radiation burns from spending hours wearing their firefighting coats covered in radioactive dust.
Had they been removed promptly and hosed down, those people would've survived because they would not have received essentially a third degree burn over their entire body. And that's the point: they died of sepsis related complications, not any type of unique radiation damage and the Soviet doctors who treated them did get better at it once the protocols were established.
> Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.
Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.
Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.
This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.
Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
I would happily live next to a nuclear power plant, the reason not to is mostly to do with "it's still an industrial site". But like, lakeside land where I'm up or down stream from it but can clearly see it nearby? Sure.
It's one of the rare forms of industry where if I was ever worried about contamination a cheap portable device will warn me remotely. Unlike say, Asbestos and heavy metals...one of which there's a bunch in my current backyard.
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.
I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.
My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.
I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off.
> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
it would be unwise to put all of ones eggs in someone else's basket.
having as much wind solar and nuclear as possible will ensure humanity has a bright future. 18% seems like a good number. how much storage are they investing in?
Which is kind of funny as they where storing energy from a hydroelectric power plant, so building a larger dam would have been way more energy efficient.
You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change.
And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.
There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.
Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.
If you did what nuclear fans did and tried to cover most/all of the load with nuclear, you would necessarily need to build more nuclear power plants, which esp. in Europe would automatically put them closer to population. That would automatically increase the lives lost from catastrophies.
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.
Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.
People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:
If one tries to quantify the value of those deaths, using the "statistical value of a human life" (somewhere around $12M/death), one finds in the case of both wind/solar and nuclear, using those numbers, the value of those lives contributes negligibly to the cost of energy. This is unlike with coal.
This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Etc etc.
Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.
Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1].
Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive.
The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.
The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022:
~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.
~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100
~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100
~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.
It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".
As an expert remarked way back in a time when the nukes were conveniently making plutonium, and kids got free comic books promoting them, and the plans for handling waste seemed sound :
"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."
— C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951.
(Hanford today, sitting on 56M gallons of leaking wastewater, is debating whether that newly-constructed vitrification plant should be allowed to operate, since it'll emit dangerous levels of toxic acetonitrile.)
Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production.
Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.
Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.
Regulation still plays a role in the final cost. Sure it has to be safe. But we need to draw the line. Nuclear is arguably way too safe currently (zero death for a long time). Some regulations could be relaxed to speed up the construction, and make the operations cheaper.
We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.
That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.
You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.
> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.
Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1].
For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year.
I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution.
On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins.
> For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year,
... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.
> power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does.
In the sense that you're using this, doesn't this apply to every power company?
Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.
To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?
All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.
> per capita
Did you continue reading and see how that's 200mg of long lived waste? France has 66.7 million people. For long lived waste that's 13k tons total. That's a bit shy of the trade waste per capita. So about 67 million times more. Or let's go back to full. For power reactor they only produce 60% of that 2kg, 1.2kg. So that's 80k tons of waste, total, per year.
Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate
> nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate.
True, but you also get large amounts of electricity in return.
You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99?
The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture.
I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated.
Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.
This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output.
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.
Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.
Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Refining gets rid of even more uranium before it gets to the reactor. CANDU tried to get around that by using unenriched uranium, but ran into other issues.
And that’s what pro nuclear people seem to miss, really smart people have been trying to solve this issue for decades there’s no easy solutions with well understood downsides. Let’s quickly build some new design isn’t a solution it’s a big part of why nuclear construction costs are so high.
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc
Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
> A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:
Exactly. What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise, where the engineering effort is concentrated in building economies of scale. To me it's clear that nuclear energy's pros largely outweigh the cons, and that it is a perfect complement to solar and wind power generation.
I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.
Injury rate is 6x other space vehicle manufacturers. If you were to slow them down by 6x they would pretty close to the 20 years it’s already taken to get SLS/constellation to do a test launch.
Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation.
To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade.
They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power.
Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out.
The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility company cannot, because for the Navy it's about having a necessary capability. There's no economic break even to consider.
I thought I'd mention that ship supplied short power has been a thing for ages. USS Daniel Webster even trained for this for new years eve apocalypse nothingburger. And its almost always been used for only powering something critical. Today's subs are <10MW. Nothing for utility scale. I can't imagine the economics are ever good. More of a: we've already got this boat.
Secrecy isn't the obstacle here. Naval reactors are optimized for combat performance, costs be damned. They aren't economically efficient for commercial power generation.
At least Russia is doing fine with SMRs, thought the fuel enrichment level is around 20%. They are building new reactors all the time and they seem pretty efficient. E.g. they have even floating nuclear plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.
Submarine reactors run on super high enriched fuel instantly one could instantly repurpose into a bomb. Lots of gen 4 and 5 reactor designs that combine low cost, compact footprint, and running on less expensive and carefully controlled fuel.
> If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale
You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times
A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.
Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward
You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.
Even if the storage got somehow compromised(extremely unlikely), the disposal sites are distant enough from civilization and the amounts small enough that the environmental harms would still be far below tons of other manmade events.
'Apart from terrorism ... or war, seismic activity, etc.'
I'm not sure where you're getting cheap from, or low-maintenance.
The above-ground stuff is locking future generations in for on-going maintenance for several centuries, perhaps longer. There's been think-tanks trying to work out how you just signpost such a place, given storage may exceed the expected lifetime of languages, and we'd want to be polite and at least contend with societal collapse.
It is hubris to observe that the many locations chosen now will remain 'distant from civilisation' for many centuries.
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.
I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.
If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!
A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh
> It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.
And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.
> I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.
And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.
I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.
I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned
As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
> At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.
I don’t follow. If nuclear initially costs more than coal, then the first effect as it decreases is displacement when the prices cross over. Then if it falls further you will notice consumer price drops.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
The places with worse sun conditions tend to have amazing wind resources. Or be such a tiny niche that caring about them is irrelevant, like the few people living in the wind kill of the arctic high north of the polar circle.
Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
> I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
> Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.
Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.
Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):
> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.
1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital.
2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab.
3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.
China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe.
Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles.
Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper:
> We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.
> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution.
That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.
That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.
Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.
If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.
However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)
That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.
Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
> ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.
Yeah. Due to armies of highly paid experts spending almost a decade of their life arguing if the design is up to the regulations. And also when because of these uncertainties you start building before full approval and then requirements change.
It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.
China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?
I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."
It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.
I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.
We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer.
Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns.
I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
Perhaps the are talking about Unions and the regulations around minimum pay and working conditions.
I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
Thats not the full picture. Aviation exploded in growth -- you can easily expand operations and work to smaller margins. The US shut down the nuclear industry intentionally from the 80s until the last 5 years from regulations.
It's a bogus talking point that the nuclear industry in the US was shut down due to increase in regulation.
The actual situation was that relentless 7%/year demand growth for electrical energy suddenly stalled, while at the same time a large amount of new capacity from cogeneration, made possible by the passage of PURPA in 1978, suddenly started to come on line. In this environment, and with the cost overruns and delays of the earlier nuclear builds, utilities could not make a case for new nuclear construction. High interest rates also didn't help.
I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.
This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.
Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.
A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing.
Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.
Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.
The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate.
However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.
We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China.
I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.
I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.
Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.
That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?
Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.
I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!
As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.
If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.
Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.
Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.
Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]
Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."
> Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.
It is not like nth of a kind Hinkley Point C, EPR reactor number 5 and 6, at $32.5B per reactor is going any better?
Also do note that no one knows the true cost of Olkiluoto 3. The $11B figure is from a settlement many years before it was completed as interest and construction costs kept accumulating.
Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action:
> and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.
It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."
No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.
What's the evidence that there's "flooding the market" going on? It seems to me wind turbine prices have followed a plausible looking downwards hill and there's no sign of dumping excess inventory or otherwise unsustainably low prices.
I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.
Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US.
China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it.
The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.
This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.
A big part of the cost is financing the project. It is capital intensive, and even few interest points more impact a lot the cost over time.
Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.
I can see a future where everyone can have free access to nuclear power.
I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station".
Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.
$50M is obscene, but not really a needle mover for rate payers. You could pay the whole executive team $0 and it would save the average residential ratepayer a few bucks per month, probably less than $5 per month.
Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.
It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.
The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.
A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.
The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state
Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.
>SVP vs PG&E
This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas
True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure.
Great idea to napkin math it, but I think you're off by a very large margin. CA energy commission shows PG&E's energy consumption to be over 70,000 GWh.
$2,500,000,000 profit/70,000,000,000 kWh consumed is ~$0.035 per kWh.
So not exactly the smoking gun that CA ratepayers are looking for.
What about long term environmental cost?
I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.
> if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard
What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation
Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"
Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs
Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.
People like you believe uranium is growing on trees. Have you actually looked up how it's retrieved? The costs are insane and the ecological damage unrepairable.
It’s always funny to me to see folks with the “HN leans _________” comments every few days with the blank spot filled in with every single political position one can think of.
Different people react to different topics. Some bring out strident autistic commies, some bring out psycho druggies, some bring out extreme capitalist dreamers (also likely autistic), some bring out furries and trannies (also likely autistic and definitely strident). They rarely all met in a single thread.
I don't think anyone wants to get rid of nuclear regs entirely. There is a popular perception (i dont know if actually true) that safety regs were built around first generation reactor designs which were designed in an inherently unsafe way, and for modern designs that are inherently safer, it makes sense to relax some regulations.
Advocating for deregulation in order to achieve innovation is the opposite of conservative.
It’s not a matter of being a for profit or not. It’s an also matter of technological development. Most of the early incidents in nuclear plants happened under the management of public or state controlled companies.
> Advocating for deregulation in order to achieve innovation is the opposite of conservative.
Not sure how it's the opposite of conservatism to remove unneeded government roadblocks to enable industry. That's pretty solidly in the traditional American conservative viewpoint (not to be confused with whatever viewpoint currently dominates the GOP).
No one is saying there shouldn't be regulations on nuclear.
But our regulations on nuclear are utterly insane -- every time I get someone to read into the reasons nuclear here has been so much more expensive than safe nuclear in other countries with more reasonable regulations around it, they come away shellshocked. It takes a while to understand what's going on, because it's truly death by a thousand cuts, but the unifying principle is the NRC's ALARA ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable") principle (with honorable mention going to the NRC's Linear No-Threshold harm model, which despite the evidence assigns a linear cancer incidence to radiation dosing).
Getting radiation exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" sounds like a nice idea. But there's no lower bound, so the costs scale infinitely, gutting the incentives to innovate and invest. If the prices of other forms of energy go up, regulators intentionally raise the costs of nuclear comparably by increasing what must be spent on reducing radiation exposure. New innovative plant design that increases margins? Guess what -- that's another opportunity to use the money to lower radiation exposure even further.
The lack of a lower bound results in absurd results, because we long ago decreased the exposure from plants to far below background radiation levels, and far below the levels at which we've been able to observe harm.
We need to replace the LNT model with a sigmoid model that aligns with the science on radiation harms, and we need to remove the infinitely-scaling ALARA standard. Doing these will not increase risks, but will decrease costs a large amount in the short run and even more in the longer-term.
I completely agree with you and I'm pro nuclear. But those regulations have to be streamlined and the regulator needs to have enough manpower so licenses aren't stuck in limbo for years.
It's also unacceptable that the regulations can change during builds and then you have to make large parts completely new before you get the license to load fuel into the reactor.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.
And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.
> The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge.
Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time.
We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.
You should fix your model of governance, because by that measure, any hope for progress is futile. The simple fact that we were better a few decades ago should be comforting. Enough of the shirt term profiteering sociopaths running the show, we can certainly cautiously swing back towards more technocracy and careful strategic planning.
Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant.
Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.
More people die every single year from the radiation parts of coal power (excluding accidents), than have died from radiation of nuclear power's entire decades long history, including accidents.
Yes, they should be made safe, but we need some perspective here.
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
Let's not pretend that the companies running those plants are being hindered by the government. They themselves have said turning them back on is a stupid idea.
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
Germany doesn't need to participate in the next. They need to participate in something though. They are too small to do everything alone. Even the US depends on a lot of other countries to make things work.
Could you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
The German car companies are struggling intensely against Chinese competition, everywhere outside of the US, and especially in China. The Chinese electric cars sell for 3 times less than the German ones in EU. The Chinese also invested heavily in e tech. The Germans? Not so much.
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.
Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
If AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)
Cool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.
Given how fast compute needs replacing, it's not much of a fall behind.
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
They can’t even use the products as a result of their obsession with government regulation. For example, Apple released a universal translator, literally right out of Star Trek, but the EU won’t be getting it either.
Well, not really. Investing in heating homes or powering light bulbs is, outside of extremely extreme situations, always a good investment, because people will always want to do that.
AI is also just super young, has apparently zero mote, requires insane amounts of hardware that basically becomes useless after a couple of years, and has promised, over and over, the AI revolution is just around the corner multiple times without ever delivering.
This is shortsighted. China routinely experiences large overcapacity in their electricity grid just to deal with the unknown unknowns of outages and other new demands. Suppose that the AI bubble burst and AI energy use is negligible, the extra capacity could be used for something else: retire your traditional coal fired furnaces for steel making and replacing them with electric arc furnaces; produce more aluminum; build more EV chargers.
There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.
Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
German people mostly just listen to what their leaders tell them. If their leaders change their mind then the German people will step in line and believe they changed their mind out of their own free will too.
Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start.
Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.
I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy. There must have been stronger political reasons behind it than simply « not liking nuclear ». I’d be curious to read something deeper on the subject and understand the reasoning behind those strategies since the Fukushima accident.
Nuclear is really unpopular with a significant part of the German electorate especially on the left. So, yes, it’s entirely political.
I guess sabotaging France by preventing it for exploiting the advantage its great strategy in energy should have afforded it is just cherry on the cake.
The historical data shows that France didn't have upwards trend in nuclear generation since early 2000s.[1] I wouldn't bet on it to change regardless of political climate.
Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
The EU is fining France because they don’t have enough clean energy in their mix despite France having the cleanest energy in Europe because nuclear used to not count. They are also forcing the French national energy company to resell their electricity at a loss to competitor moving money which should be used to invest into the pocket of private investors. And let’s not talk about the utter stupidity of the current discussion on the dams.
Then you realise that a significant part of France new debts was due to them shielding their population for the soaring prices of electricity despite France producing cheap energy, said prices being due to Germany brain dead strategy leading to a dependence on Russian gas and the obligation to go through the European market, and you start to see the double whammy.
Well, at least, the energy market is not as bad as the ECB rules.
You do know that a large portion of the energy crisis was caused by half the French nuclear fleet being online when it was for once truly absolutely needed?
I also note that you didn’t have anything to say about the EPR2 program and the absolutely insanely bonkers large subsidies needed to get it off the ground.
It was a nuclear + a renewable crisis. When the nuclear production dropped to 65% in France because of the offline plants, the wind production was hovering at 9% (bad luck) and the solar production at 5% (because it was winter).
That event was actually the final nail in the coffin for the all renewable policies of France, seeing that when the nuclear plants had a problem, the renewables failed even harder than the nuclear plants made it hard to make a case for all renewable policies
How so? Why is that a nail in the renewable coffin, but not the nuclear one? Nuclear is constantly sold as a miracle base load cure, but it can't even manage that.
Why isn't that instead a call for more storage, in general?
Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell.
Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?
The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
> if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
So basically, be the only energy source not subsidized? There are plenty of decent reasons to be against nuclear, and there's a discussion to be had on its price, but pointing out subsidies in the energy sector is like casting stones from your glass house.
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
electricity is only one power source - you not gonna use it for e.g. heating because its expensive. When you look at graph with energy consumption by source german situation is bad and solar provides less than 6% and wind less than 11% [1]. Now go compare with france where nuclear provides 37% of energy.
Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.
> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.
The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.
It is not. We’re discussing what coal is being replaced with for electricity generation. But let’s talk about it.
> high electricity prices
Let’s ask the obvious question: are high prices caused by wind/solar? No, they’re caused by the extremely volatile prices of fossil fuels: “high fossil fuel prices were the main reason for upward pressure on global electricity prices, accounting for 90% of the rise in the average costs of electricity generation worldwide (natural gas alone for more than 50%).” [0]
So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
> heat pump sales
From your own link: the lengthy and public political debate about the legal framework and subsidies for heating buildings has caused people to lose confidence”
> So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
So Germany is _deepening_ its dependency on natural gas prices by building more plants because it's... more volatile?
Just imagine if there was some other reliable form of energy that doesn't require fossil fuels.
> None of that has to do with electricity.
It has everything to do with electricity. The government understands that the grid can't handle additional load from heating, so the subsidies are not pursued vigorously.
Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.
> We still need to overturn national nuclear bans, unlock more funding, and push democratic countries to support clean energy development abroad: especially where it is most needed to compete with Russia’s growing influence.
We also need to figure out how to build reactors in months to years instead of years to decades to failure.
And to build reactors at a cost less than $10 to $20 million per megawatt capacity.
For anyone interested in the history of Sellafield and its role in reprocessing, "Britain's Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield" on BBC 4 at the moment is worth a watch. Presented by Jim Al-Khalili.
It is expensive because we choose to make it expensive. It is regulation pushing safety levels far beyond other industries, and far beyond science (radiation is far less harmful than regulatory models suggest)
You do NOT get to constantly taut the low mortality rates of nuclear AND call for less regulation at the same time.
But even from a very matter of fact point of view, I'd rather have 1000 people die every year for 20 years, than have 20.000 people die on a single bad day/week. The economic and social impact is far, far bigger when it can't be "spread out" over multiple years.
Your comment is just disinformation at this point. If nuclear was very expensive China wouldn't have built 30 in the last 10 years despite massive opposition.
In reality when you take all the costs into account there is no cheaper form of energy generation and there likely never will be, outside of cost decreases in Fission based nuclear itself.
LCOE does not account for the full (system) costs. Nuclear power plants have capacity factors over 90%, while PV/Wind have less than 25%. LCOE does not account for the added costs, such as increased transmission and storage/backup costs.
Berlin – According to a study, comprehensive insurance against the risks of nuclear power would cause electricity prices to explode. According to calculations by actuaries, the premiums to be paid could cause electricity prices to rise more than forty-fold.
"Nuclear energy is ultimately uninsurable," said insurance expert Markus Rosenbaum on Wednesday in Berlin. If an insurance company wanted to build up sufficient premiums for a nuclear power plant within 50 years, for example, the remaining operating life of a reactor, it would have to charge 72 billion euros per year for liability insurance.
The German Renewable Energy Association (BEE) commissioned the "Leipzig Insurance Forums" to conduct the calculations even before the Fukushima reactor disaster. "The true costs of nuclear power are ignored and, in the event of a serious accident, are passed on to the public," said BEE Managing Director Björn Klusmann.
LCOE refers to the price in MWh (produced electricity), so it takes capacity factor into account. Whatever electricity you produce and sell depends on your installed capacity multiplied with the capacity factor.
Similarly, you pay for the electricity you receive and this is priced as say 40$ per MWh. Obviously when you receive nothing the price is 0, you don't pay them to idle, they either produce or not. Thus when storage costs kick in you don't add the costs of both together. You either pay one or the other, not both.
You might average them out taking into consideration what their output is, but you don't stack the costs on top of each other which I often see people do.
Funny how all the nuclear chills forget the plethora of issues that come with that tech.
- who has access to nuclear power?
- what happens to nuclear reactors during war?
- where does the Uranium come from?
- how long does it take to build a reactor?
- how many long term solutions have been developed in the more than 60 years of this technology’s existence?
Not saying nuclear doesn’t have a place, but let’s not be blind to the long list of complications that come with it.
You suggest people forget that without considering that perhaps you don't know:
- We killed nuclear power in countries that can be trusted so that is not relevant.
- Nuclear accidents are not as harmful as people imagine.
- We have plenty of access to uranium resources in the west.
- the time to build a reactor is often in large parts regulatory burdens. France built out 10% of its electricity generation needs in a year, for a number of years. That is what is possible.
- Part of the reason there is no innovation in this sector is because regulation has strangled it. There are many innovative ideas in nuclear.
You mean western sources like the USA, that suddenly starts waving it's dick around when the wrong dipshit is elected? The USA that made a nuclear deal with Iran and then scrapped it for no fucking reason?
I read a lot of comments talking about „getting down the operational costs“ but i am missing someone talking about the costs of depositing the nuclear waste until it has no more risks. Am i missing something?!
Yes the cost of depositing nuclear waste is trivial, it takes a small number of large concrete structures underground in well picked locations.
The US produces about 1250 cubic meters of waste per year. For comparison the empire state building has a floor area of 208000 square meters, assuming a 3 meter floor height you could fit about 500 years worth of spent fuel inside it.
Yes. This. Nuclear waste storage is extremely cheap.
Also, we only "use" 3% of the fuel in current nuclear power station designs so we could just reprocess the fuel and vastly reduce the volume of waste too.
The EU may have a geopolitical interest in taking another look at nuclear. The dependance on Russian natural gas and expensive imported US natural gas is not good for their economic outlook long term. Honestly I am surprised Germany has not fired back up a couple of its plants considering its difficulties with Industrial output and competing in a world market.
This is just utterly and completely wrong. EVEN THE COMPANIES THEMSELVES say it would be stupid to reopen those plants.
And, of course, the idea that "dependence" on Russia is bad, but replacing it with dependence on other states AND with building a bunch of nuclear bombs in my backyard that are PRIME targets to literally take out my entire grid, is laughably bad.
We have plenty of uranium in Europe. Australia also has plenty. Lots of countries have plenty, both friendly and not so friendly (that we still buy lots of stuff from anyway). We absolutely don't need Russian uranium. Uranium is also easy to store long-term (years).
There is zero risk of a new stupid energy dependence on Russia.
Finally, France will be happy after years of being pushed back on this with the drive for solar and wind turbines, which sadly all got supplemented via gas on the back that nuclear was bad.
Sadly, with electricity becoming more reliant on gas and other fossil fuels when it is not so sunny in winter, or on those cloudy days with no wind, means fossil fuel usage ends up higher than if they had stayed and expanded nuclear - instead they closed many plants(Germany a prime example, in favour of....gas).
Then the whole over-dependence on Russian gas and oil really did whammy the energy price market, not just for Europe, but with a knock-on effect across the world. One we still pay for today.
> Germany, long a symbol of anti-nuclear politics, is beginning to shift.
err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
but no: there is no Endlager (permanent spent nuclear fuel waste site) in sight, the costs of dismantling used plants are outrageous and if it were not for nimbyism, we'd be essentially self sustaining on wind and solar within a decade.
matter of fact fossil and nuclear sponsored fud on wind and solar is the single biggest issue we face in Germany.
> err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
Is the lobby trying? Last I checked the head of RWE himself said that going back to nuclear in Germany was infeasible. It seems to be conservative politicians who had been keen on it before winning the election and before the industry pointed out that it's a bad idea actually.
> but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight
The Problem in Germany is that by law the state has to build a repository, while the operators have to pay for it. The operators did pay (~24 bln EUR), but politically either NIMBY parties (such as CDU/CSU/SPD) block it, or the Greens (under Habeck) block progress so they can continue to shout "what about the waste???"
In Finland the operators can build their own repository and they did it cheap and relatively fast.
Also from an even more anti-nuclear country (austria): Kernenergie? Ja bitte!
Finland is the world's first and only such facility so far.
the law to build it is pretty universal, the world has essentially agreed to not export nuclear waste.
associating the progressive innovative green party with blocking progress is an interesting turn, there was no progress in the topic for decades, and the reason is rather that nuclear waste is like toddler art: first no one wants to take it, trying to toss it is met with loud and hefty protest, and at the end nobody knows where to take it.
don't the alps have lovely granite areas for the Finnish model?
I propose we store it in your basement. It's really not a flame war, but people that consider themselves rational argue it's no big deal, so they should be prepared to store it in their immediate vicinity. I support renewables and don't have a problem with solar panels on my roof or even a windmill in my backyard.
State level NIMBYism is what's happening with nuclear. The state decides we won't have that in our back yard in the case of Germany.
Fear uncertainty and doubt is the only thing blocking nuclear power.
The irony is that the fud has been spread by "environmentalists" and has only managed to keep fossil fuels around for the last 20 years greatly exacerbating our climate change predicament.
Nuclear is more expensive and more geopolitically dangerous than renewables. For a short time, Germany was even leading in PV technology, it could've been our new sector we dominate in. But, as always, greedy investors and corrupt right wing politicians starved out any possibility of positive change.
And I find it horrendously hilarious that you believe the same people that work tirelessly against renewables would actually EVER build nuclear. It's about milking the status quo for cash as long as possible and then fucking off into retirment with that stolen money.
Btw, what's the german energy companies opinion on building nuclear? RWE a big fan? (They aren't!)
Whether you're pro-nuclear or not, this ruling feels like a turning point. For decades, nuclear has been stuck in a weird limbo. Fascinating how youth climate activists are now some of the strongest voices for nuclear. That would've been unthinkable 10 years ago
Asking because I don't know. How is enrichment governed? Say for instance if a country is only using it for energy vs defense/offense. And are there elements that can be specifically used for energy vs otherwise? Last I remember, having access to enriched uranium was grounds for a country to bomb another one.
The only way to ensure that a civil uranium enrichment program remains strictly civil is via transparency and monitoring. A country that has mastered uranium enrichment technology for fueling civil power reactors could use the same technology to produce bomb-grade uranium. It actually takes more work to enrich natural uranium into fuel for power reactors than it takes to further enrich power reactor fuel into bomb material:
This is scary. so the extra effort to move from, say, 20% to 85% is relatively small compared with the effort to get up to 20% in the first place. Might as well build a feature into the reactor so that it only works with <=20%
You should read the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as it addresses several of those issues. Possession of highly enriched uranium isn't necessarily an act of war by itself.
Natural uranium on earth is currently about 0.7% U-235; civilian power reactors typically need low-enriched uranium which is 3% to 5% U-235.
The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).
Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
You don't actually need enriched uranium for nuclear power. The design is easier if you enrich it, but there are reactors that would work on unenriched uranium.
The solution to these issues is just to manage the enrichment supply chain. If a country wants nuclear power but can't be trusted, supply then with at cost uranium.
Modern weapons use plutonium not uranium, uranium weapons can be constructed.
All it takes is the enrichment to produce the fissile material for a weapon.
As far as I know countries have agreed to not build weapons, with the exception of those that already have them, there is an international body that monitors enrichment sites, but checks are voluntary a country can choose to not accept inspections and/or build additional secret enrichment sites.
The fissile material is not sufficient for a weapon though, as I understand there is quite a bit of science that goes into making a bomb.
Additionally, first generation weapons are large and unwieldy, i.e it takes a bomber to deploy a single weapon with a very small yield.
Miniaturization, building a weapon small and light enough to put on a missile is a significant problem that took the current powers years to get over.
But that's about it, if you can figure out how to make a small bomb of variable yield, you can make bombs small enough to fit a large backpack, and thermonuclear weapons that fit in a ballistic missile as well.
IAEA inspections verify your claimed inventory and enrichment facilities. They are trying to detect if any nuclear materials are being skimmed/diverted. As for weapons, nuclear fuel is very low enrichment (usually under 5%). Iran surpassed 60%, which has no peaceful use, so that is why it was said they were perusing weapons.
Imo that's a pretty complicated topic. On one side if you just build LWRs you just don't need very highly enriched uranium or plutonium so posession of those is a red flag. On the other side fast breeder reactors are the ones which are able to produce the least harmful waste. But fast breeders and closed fuel cycles produce and handle plutonium which in turn can be used for bad things.
This page and organization, WePlanet, is a rebrand of RePlanet. They advertise as a grassroots movement, but are funded by a hedge fund with a significant investment in fossil fuels [1].
I think their whole schtick is prolonging the current situation and betting on slow and expensive nuclear is a good strategy to prevent real change.
Clean, mostly. With future? No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not.
Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source.
Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding].
And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in storing. Except for costly disasters in how not to intermediately store it, here in Germany.
If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful, why not make future generations happy by preserving it for them, and for now, limiting its use until we learned how to add to the initial price the full cost of long term storage, with further disasters as a learning experience for that?
Saving lives and being cost-effective in the short run might work, but every energy expert says in 50 years, nuclear will have to be phased out anyway. And fusion could provide clean, but also primary heat inducing energy. So even that will not save us.
Primary heat on this scale isn't nessisarially a bad thing. It has a very small impact on the global power balance with respect to the effect global warming.
There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.
I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.
>If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful
It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.
Well, good thing that we have no reason to build these reactors as far away from population centers as possible, right?
We already have enough heat for that, from industries. Distribution is the biggest factor, and in that, distance. It's really cool, but it's stupidly expensive up front. Not to mention, you need to require EVERYONE in the area to buy in and stay in to have any hopes of being worth it in the long run. NIMBYism strikes again.
It's so clean that you can swim in the reactor water. You can even drink it after running it through a water filter. No waste disposal required. It's that clean.
Oh well then the Oligarchs have spoken,let the world be green, glowing green. I'm not anti nuclear but the technologies used to date have been seriously flawed. But It is the Idea that people who really have no technical knowledge of this technology its supply chain issues or its real impact on long term health are so arrogant that they believe they alone can dictate to the world, that I find offensive. We look at immediate effect but a study by a Japanese researcher after Fukushima shows the effect of irradiation may not show for multiple generations after exposure.
The problem with all kinds of "green" movements and such is that they only _demand_ solutions without being involved. That also means they might have very little idea if their premise is even valid, they just put all their energy towards organization, making signs n stuff and are very emotion-driven.
People thinking fission reactors might randomly explode like nuclear bombs Simpsons-style and so many green parties in Europe being anti-nuclear has held progress back too much. Minimal climate activism isn't bad, but they really bit hard in to the fork on this one.
All the smart people of my generation have spent their time working on burning energy. For AI, crypto, etc. Imagine if they worked as hard on making energy instead.
Everything good Greenpeace may have ever done is probably overshadowed by the death and planetary destruction caused by their opposition to nuclear power.
I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence.
However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.
Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.
There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.
The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.
For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.
A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.
The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.
By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.
I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?
How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?
Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.
Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.
Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable.
Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
Nuclear reactors can’t adjust production rapidly and require peaker plants. I don’t have to squint to see how this is also solved by grid scale storage.
Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.
How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.
> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.
None of this happens to be true.
A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.
And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.
What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?
Here the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.
> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.
> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.
True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.
> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment
Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.
> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.
The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.
> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
The main factor determining build times appears to be "how much do you want to?". France built 50+ reactors in a total of 15 years, the fastest build times are Japan, South Korea, China and Germany.
Secondary factors are "is this a FOAK build or NOAK", and "how much experience is there building nuclear plants". When Japan was good it built in under 4 years, and had plans to go below 3. And no, that's not detrimental to safety.
> and use just isn't that important of a factor.
It is when land is expensive.
> With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
Typical dodge into the qualitative: the additional grad capacity required to ship power across the country from where it is produced to where it is needed is a multiple of that required to strengthen it for additional consumers. Never mind the whole "smart grid" madness.
> Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself.
That's also false. These costs are almost always included and have little impact on the total cost of power. For example, the Gösgen plant in Switzerland produces for 4,34 Rappen / kWh, including all costs and including a profit.
> At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize
That's also not true. When subsidies for off-shore wind were reduced, Germany, Denmark and the UK had zero bids for wind-parks, and immediately the discussion was "new subsidy models". Intermittent renewables in Germany currently get €20 billion in direct subsidies, never mind the advantage of having feed-in priority and being able to burden other producers with cost of intermittency.
> The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables
That's also not true. There was a trigger (in PV production) that led to a substation having problems. But that was just the trigger, not the cause. Grids have to be able to deal with faults like that from time to time. The grid in Spain wasn't, because there were too many intermittent renewables in the grid, and too few rotating masses that stabilize the grid.
> Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
Are these grid scale batteries sufficient to power an entire industrialized nation for a week or more in the room with us now? How much are they?
There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.
Why not? Grid scale batteries will allow using solar/wind throughout the day and not only peak times, eliminating the duck curve problem. This is already only a few years away.
This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.
First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).
Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.
Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.
Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany). Thus, a comparison isn't that easy to make.
System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.
That is also not true. For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all. Even Greenpeace and the Green's chief anti-nuclear Lobbyist, Jürgen Trittin, called nuclear power plants "money printing machines".
> Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France)
Those are minute compared to subsidies intermittent renewables get in Germany. In particular as there is the ARENH program, which is effectively a negative subsidy (it takes money away from the nuclear company EDF), and of course EDF is profitable and gives money to the government.
When you add it all up, France has a negative subsidy of € 0.1 - 7 billion yearly, whereas Germany subsidizes intermittent renewables to the tune of around €20 billion a year.
> System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend
That is also not true. System costs are actually rising, because yields are dropping, the share of renewables has risen and the (fairly cheap) coal backup is to be eliminated. Total costs are now estimated at several trillion euros. For comparison, France's nuclear program cost a total of €228 billion through 2011.
Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany. [1]
EDF was nationalized in 2022, doesn't have to build money reserves for decommissioning (which would be tens of billions), is about 50 billion in debt and just got a 5 billion government loan to keep some old reactors running and another government loan to build new plants. These are not minute interventions, both France and Germany heavily subsidize their sectors (in different ways). With the ARENH program ending in 2025, a more fair comparison will be possible.
I have to read up on the system costs though, that may be ai fair point.
> Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany.
That's not true. That report is based on a completely ridiculous paper by the FÖS, the "Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft". Calling the numbers it uses "completely made up" is putting it kindly.
"The disregard for scientific methodology, for basic knowledge of economics and business administration, environmental economics, energy economics, and nuclear technology, the biased selection of sources, even the use of newspaper articles as supposedly scientific sources, and the denial of the positive effects of nuclear energy, which far outweigh its social costs, are unworthy of the FÖS. Either they are a sign of insufficient economic expertise at the institute, as well as a lack of knowledge of scientific methodology, or the FÖS is deliberately misleading readers with the aim of being able to cite the highest possible fictitious costs for nuclear energy on behalf of its NGO clients. Both discredit the study and its client."
The debt that EDF carries is completely normal for a company this size, especially one that does infrastructure. It would be unusual for a company not to use the capital markets to finance such projects. EDF has been highly profitable for decades, recently while being used to subsidize other parts of the economy via ARENH as well as being used to buffer the effects of the energy crisis, not just via ARENH, but through massive expansion of ARENH.
ARENH is not "ending", it is being replaced by a comparable scheme that is structured slightly differently.
EDF was not "nationalized" in 2022. It was always a state company, with the state never holding less than 85%. The period where the state held less than 100% was relatively short, from 2005 to 2022. The state bought out the minority shareholders in order to streamline the planned nuclear expansion.
The "subsidies" for EDF (cheaper loans etc.) amount to around € 2.7 - 3 billion a year. By itself, that's obviously not "minute". However, these sums are dwarfed by the ARENH program and the profits that EDF pays to the state, which turn the subsidies into "negative subsidies" in sum. That is, the state gets more money from EDF than it gives it, by a good amount.
Even if that weren't the case, the sums are dwarfed by the German subsidies for renewable, which are an order of magnitude higher than the gross subsidies in France (and infinitely higher than the net-negative subsidies).
> For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all.
Except financing research and development, guaranteeing loans to reduce default risk and interest rates, capping liabilities to enable insureability at lower rates by guaranteeing to fix damages in case of critical failures with public money, financing and organizing emergency civil protection measures, as well as waste disposal, granting massive tax cuts, doing the diplomatic leg work to import uranium and protecting its transport with the police, all and all summing up public spending on making nuclear energy in germany to 169,4 billion euros according to the scientific service of the Bundestag (Document Number WD 5 - 3000 - 090/21), with the more green leaning FOES calculating 304 billion. And on top of that it is estimated that another 100 billion in public money will be needed to fix up long term waste disposal sites morsleben and asse.
... well except from those few hundred billion euros they barely ever subsidize it at all.
The FÖS "paper" that gets circle-cited everywhere in anti-nuclear advocacy is complete bollocks. This is obvious from even a cursory reading, but many have also done it in detail.
>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
The more I observe a lot of activists the more I suspect, a lot of organizations and movements are cold war era Soviet psyOps that outlived their handlers.
It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure.
It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.
Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented.
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:
>…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated
economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US
$70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.
Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.
In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.
If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
>Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid?
I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Germany is merely transitioning the fastest and doing it without the overpriced and risky albatross that is nuclear power.
>shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable
It's unbelievable that the country some people are most furious at is the one that has decarbonized at the fastest rate.
Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
>I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades.
Maybe you didn't intend too, but your words certainly implied it:
>>...it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
Since you reference Germany later, the implication above was that Germany did prove you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Which might be true someday in the future, but Germany certainly hasn't decarbonized their grid yet. The one thing that Germany did "prove conclusively" is that thousands of lives were needlessly lost over the last 15 years because of bad policy.
>Germany is merely transitioning the fastest
Germany will certainly not be carbon neutral the fastest. I guess it will beat Poland though.
>Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
You have a point - it is the responsibility of every country to decarbonize. I guess a big issue here is simply money - Poland GDP is much smaller than Germany and they have less available options. Though besides your claim, I've never heard anyone actually lauding Poland's efforts or thinking it was a good thing they are using coal.
>...They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
Like I said, I find that those who actually want to decarbonize the grid, don't particularly care what clean technology is used and different countries will have a different mix of technologies they use. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.
True, they haven’t stored any waste yet but the facility is completed.
And depending on how you look at it, it could be 100,000 years before you know for sure if it works, so my claim that it’s a ‘solved problem’ is a bit strong. I’ll retract that and say that it’s the most promising idea for nuclear waste disposal, one that that is close to beginning operations.
These are orchestrated by Russia. They want to destabilise European energy sector and economies and they are sponsoring various organisations to spread such misinformation.
The West is losing information war with Russia - see the downvotes. Sites are infested with Russian bots and useful idiots helping the genocidal regime.
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
You need more centrifuges, several times more, but not orders of magnitude more.
And you need nuclear reactors to make plutonium. The weapons you can make with plutonium are qualitatively different from the ones you can make with uranium.
Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb.
Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.
If you're going for the enriched uranium route to a bomb, nobody is going to start with used nuclear fuel, because dealing with the highly radioactive spent fuel is such a huge PITA.
If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.
That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.
Not everyone has a U mine or pre-existing bomb industry. The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is "yes", bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a "PITA") if you have a reactor core handy to start with.
No but every nuclear power plant requires local military defenses, and every country that expands nuclear power requires this state power even if they don’t have nuclear weapons.
There's a fun game you can play with countries that build nuclear power plants: "guess the existential threat".
In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.
In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.
I doubt it was for any particular energy policy objective, if they were Soviet funded. The soviets (or whatever name you want to give them now) are masters of finding fracture points in relatively stable western societies and exploiting them to make unstable western societies that are less effective at combating Soviet policy. See: almost the entirety of the modern political discourse.
given how the united states starved them of foreign currency and then introduced economic shock therapy that reduced life expectancy of the population by 10 yrs particularly for men one might say the western imperialists were better at that
It's not. Not only is it a completely negligible amount (~one 50-gallon barrel per reactor per year), it's easy to store (literally kitty litter) and can be re-enriched (renewable).
Okay, not all of this is accurate. I am not against nuclear (although in recent years it has not been very cost effective), but here are some figures with citations:
- Storing it is easy in the short term, but unfortunately any leaks are a big deal and you have to store it basically forever, which is a challenge. If Yucca Mountain were to be restarted it's estimated storing existing and new waste through 2031 there would cost in the neighborhood of $100 billion : (warning: large PDF) https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf
I had no idea I was off by so much with respect to waste, thanks - that's important to know. Still seems like a fairly good trade though - 7000 tons for ~400GW.
You're definitely right about long-term storage being a concern; I think only one long-term storage facility exists right now.
I believe the cost of recycling fuel is largely because it's completely unexplored. I'm sure it'll follow a similar cost reduction path most industries share.
I showed your comment to someone who is currently writing their PhD on how to store nuclear waste safely. I barely understood half of what they said in the following rant, but they referenced the situation of the Sellafield site several times.
So about the containers for radioactive waste: to use Germany as an example, there are mutliple(!) issues with the simple containers used in the interim storage site Asse, where they simply corroded and started leaking radioactive material. So "normal" containers just don't cut it. To effectively seal and shield so-called "High-level radioactive waste" (which is basically the used fuel rods from a nuclear power plant) the CASTOR containers are used. Those reduce the radiation to some extent - but still not enough for a human to be able to stand next to them without issue. And that is not taking into account that the fuel rods are HOT. As in thermally. (This is btw how you generate heat in a nuclear power plant - you just use the heat from the fuel rods to boil water.)
To sum up: you have insanely thick steel (or copper) containers which are super hot. And big. And made from metal, which enjoys corroding in salt water.
And like in Tschornobyl, used fuel rods can kill you with their radiation in a couple of minutes if you just stand close enough. Diluting something like this would obviously reduce the immediate danger, but then secondary radiation effects kick in which basically means an increase in cancer rate. So if you throw something like this in the sea, you would probably kill any sea life around (not to mention you would also boil the water probably) it and give cancer to the rest. And since the radioactive particles are now in the fish, which humans tend to eat a lot of, now pretty much all humans have it too.
I've heard of this solution before. I think the greater concern is that other people might gain access by diving down and gathering it back up. I've heard a solution to that is to put it in some container that's highly conductive so it superheats and melts through some amount of the seafloor.
I read it 14 years ago or so, after the Fukushima accident. I don't think the science has changed since then, or since the 90s when this project was shut down. There continue to be so much money in coal, gas, and oil and it's from there I think most of the opposition to nuclear stems from.
Please don't post sneering, unsubstantive comments like this on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'm not arguing about whether we should or shouldn't use nuclear energy. We should.
> 1. Only six reactors have had meltdowns, partial meltdowns, serious core damage, or fatalities.
If we assume that everything above INES[0] level 4 is already serious enough, then there were 11 accidents [1] and around 4484 fatalities (mostly 4000 indirect from Chernobyl but still).
> Gen 4 reactors have gravity driven control rods, passive cooling systems, core catchers, safer fuel, and moderators.
And yet, 100% safety is not achievable. But the risk is probably quite acceptable now.
I had the same response. History has shown that the high-priests of government are the least reliable, least consistent of all we’ve allowed to be the arbiters of truth.
Why mine uranium? Only about 4% of nuclear fuel is actually used before the fuel rods need replacement, which makes uranium highly recyclable. Given all of the “spent” fuel rods in storage, mining operations for additional uranium are unnecessary. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for millennia, provided we are willing to begin a recycling program.
Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use isotopes from it. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.
What do you mean? Modern in situ uranium mining is one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have. It's not perfectly clean, but it's pretty darn good.
I will save you the trouble because I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago. These numbers have been thoroughly debunked [1]. They are simply wrong, likely out of laziness more than malice.
But the people that spread this around do it out of malice to dupe people and influence opinions. You've been duped.
> I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago.
That turns out not to be the case.
Even if it were the case: an official study by the DOE was "thoroughly debunked", in your esteemed opinion, because some random Australian twitter user claims to have talked to a friend.
Ok, well by this definition, all human development activity is unclean. This is a perfectly valid point of view but is pretty distinct from the modern definition of clean.
The problem in my mind with a "clean is clean" litmus test is that it eliminates the word "clean"'s ability to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable human development.
Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.
OK, but then by that logic, solar and and wind shouldn't be categorized as clean energy either. Clearly it's a matter of degrees and meant as a useful segmentation for taxation, etc.
Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage
Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar.
These are death rates with the current saturation of plants. If we wanted to cover all of Europe, a much more densely populated area, with nuclear, the deaths (and other negative consequences) would be far greater, no?
The death rates might be a difference in units; the Forbes article is using deaths per trillion kWh, the other might be deaths per thousand/million kWh.
The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.
E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.
Sure, in deaths per unit energy. But the real risk of nuclear is financial. The tail risk is huge for any producer on their own, which makes insurance extremely expensive, and which means that usually only nations bear the full financial risk of nuclear.
The nuclear industry did say that this would happen but the reality was the exact opposite:
>According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.
Pebble-bed reactors are incapable of catastrophic failure, and molten-salt reactors have negative feedback loops with increasing pressure. Nuclear doesn't have to mean the same designs that were used in the 60s.
Both those design types were operational in the 1960s in the US but have been shut down due to lack of performance and industrial interest. New interest has started today, but let's not claim the new ones are some kind of new improved tech that evolved out of our workhorse water cooled/moderated plants.
Western designs are safe, most Soviet-era ones are/were not. It's unfortunate that nuclear power still has this stigma, as it's like saying "all cars are unsafe" while comparing the crash test ratings of a modern sedan to a 1960's chevy bel aire.
To put a number on it, linear no threshold models predict ~130 deaths as a result of the radiation (and are known to over-estimate lethalities at low doses).
Around 50 people a year die while clearing snow in Japan, so it's ~ twice as dangerous as shoveling snow in worst-case predictions.
LNT is not known to over-estimate lethalities at low doses. The actual situation is that the predicted deaths at low doses occur at such a low rate that the signal cannot be detected above the noise. That doesn't mean the prediction was wrong, just that it cannot be verified. It's possible (as in, consistent with evidence) that LNT under-predicts deaths at low doses.
Even if LNT would under-predict it is still a rounding error in the big picture of the tsunami disaster.
And, let's put it straight: LNT is scaremongering fiction. People who live in Ramsay, Iran, are exposed to higher level of background radiation that n what is allowed for nuclear workers. Yet, there is no elevated levels of cancer or birth defects, not is there a shorter lifespan for people living there either.
Epidemiology is a very blunt instrument. The data you mention there cannot be used to reach the conclusion you are trying to reach, since confounding effects cannot be excluded (and because the doses they receive can only be estimated, not actually measured). Yes, radiation biologists know all about those people and have judged that evidence as part of a larger picture.
The main reason is a combination of negligence by the owner of the plant and not enough enforcement of standards.
The fukushima powerplant was known to have sea wall lower then required and as such was vulnerable to a tsunami (this was known for quite a long time)
Combined with backup power in the basement (also against standards)
For an example of what happens to a reactor build according to safety requirements see the onagawa nuclear powerplant
The Chernobyl plant had known construction defects that could impair safety. These things would prevent a western plant from starting operation, but did not stop the Soviet plant from beginning operation:
They did not even have any automated safeties in place, because their philosophy was “faith in the worker” while the western philosophy is “humans are fallible”:
They then ignored their own safety procedures when operating the plant, which ultimately is what caused the disaster.
Saying that Soviet designs being in the same generation as western designs makes them equally safe/unsafe is quite wrong when you look at the details. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one mistake after another.
That said, the plant was designed by a country that shot down a civilian airliner that had strayed into their airspace due to a navigational error, when they knew it was a civilian airliner:
They had no regard for human life, so of course, they built things that are incredibly unsafe. There is no end of examples of them simply not caring about human life.
I'd say a reactor in inland Europe is far from the craziest place to put one. God forbid someone were to put one in the Pacific ring of fire... oh, wait...
Why? Are you concerned that, like Lex Luthor in that worst-of-all Superman movies, someone will use nuclear reactors to somehow cause damage to continental plates? Actually, that's more of a stretch than the movie took.
Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.
And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on.
You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.
Nuclear fuel storage is relatively straightforward, and volumes have potential to be reduced 30x through recycling.
In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.
If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking kills 7-8 times more people than cars every year (that’s 80-100 Chernobyls worth every year) and we still allow it.
The reasons are political not technically or financially insurmountable obstacles. We didn’t shut down nuclear in Europe for “green” reasons or because we can’t improve it, or because it kills too many people, but because enough Russian money went into politicians’ pockets to do this.
The exemption being France and maybe China?
France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well.
I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong
The average build time is currently 6.5 years. The median is lower at 5.8. The variations across both time and space of those average are neither large nor particularly systematic.
There have always been outliers, so if you focus on those you can "prove" anything you like.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...
Fastest build times are Japan with under 4 years.
Germany built its Konvois in just shy of 6 years.
Just before we stopped building altogether.
France built 50+ reactors in 15 years.
We know how to build nuclear quickly, reliably and (relatively) cheaply. We also know how to do it slowly, eratically and expensively.
Fortunately the former comes almost but not entirely automatically with building lots of them.
There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima.
Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons.
...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason).
Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.
Nobody would notice the difference.
CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous to stand near for 500 years (without centimetres of concrete), and then dangerous to consume for an further many thousand. It is within our technology to look after the quantities we are talking about indefinitely.
Also, with current plants we could reduce the size of the waste by 30x if we recycled it. Other plant types would burn all the fuel and leave us with very low volumes of radioactive elements.
Wrt Ukraine you choose to focus on the potential for release around Zaporozhzhia Vs the actual destruction occuring from the circumstances of war in the rest of the country?
Yes, we have problem with CO2. The solution is to use Solar + Wind + Hydro + Batteries + long lasting storage. Nuclear causes more problems than it solves unless it used to make nukes also.
But the discussion around nuclear energy stopped being rational decades ago. On one side you have the old guard of the environmentalist movement which got started with anti-nuclear demonstrations in the first place and then had their "I told you so" moment in 1986, and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death number are completely overblown, the radiation was actually good for the environment or whatever.
Then I'm seeing that the latest European NPP in Finland was about 15 years late and 3x more expensive than planned (from 3.5 to 11 billion Eu) while wind and solar farms are just popping up everywhere around me without much fanfare, built by whoever has some money and a bit of unused farmland or roof space to spare. And I really can't imagine those same people pooling their money and starting to build nuclear power plants instead ;)
First, it's not just nuclear, it's also Natural gas.
Second, lots of nations have incentives for "clean" energy. And now magically, all those incentives apply to nuclear and gas.
It's a money grab from nuclear and gas manufacturers. It's not that the courts were involved for nothing.
Still, we should use more nuclear. If only it was less expensive to build...
[1] https://people.wou.edu/~courtna/GS361/Energy_From_Fossil_Fue...
I forgot to say hydro is also great where possible.
The incentives of the regulators are not aligned with the public.
Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.
They only care about reducing the risk of an accident however minor happening on their watch while not appearing to completely annihilate the technology because that would open them to political attacks.
So the balance is struck at a point where nuclear power capital costs are absurdly high.
I suspect that trying to make nuclear reactors accident proof has always been the wrong approach. Instead they should have made it so an accident could always be managed - something along the lines of if something happens drown it in concrete and forget about it, because there are 100,000 more reactors. The only safety cost would come from making a meltdown slow enough or happen in a place no one cares about for it to become a balance sheet problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kkgg494Ifc
It had problems well beyond the unsolved 34000 year waste stewardship costs. =3
Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-s...
Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically.
Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit.
It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage.
The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal.
I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.
If you want to argue that nuclear is affordable as non-baseload power, because the (non-economic) cost to the environment of the alternatives is otherwise too high.... well I'd disagree because of how far solar/wind/batteries have come in the last couple of years, but prior to that you would have had a point. And you still would as far as continuing to operate existing plants goes of course.
I'm not arguing that when taking environmental damage into account, that nuclear is cheaper than current solar/wind/battery technology for any single power project. They have the advantage of massive R&D over the last 30 years.
What I am arguing is that focusing on solar/wind/battery might not be the best route to 100% carbon free power in the long term. Maybe it is? But we really shouldn't be jumping to that assumption.
And we shouldn't be disregarding Nuclear because of any argument that can be summed up in a hacker news comment.
they either pick some pet peeves (coral reefs, rainforests, global South inequality, desertification) and usually start buying things (EVs, PV panels, heat pumps)
but when it comes to policy they usually revert to Greenpeace/degrowth/NIMBY cult members
This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.
EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.
There’s a wind farm being built in your backyard? Demand one of them for free to power your village.
But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.
It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]
The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.
Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]
1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continu...
2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-gene...
4.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-b...
That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".
This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.
And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.
My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.
> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).
So what’s the total supply?
LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.
I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.
We both know that neither supply nor demand is that flat.
In reality we can also trivially add wind power, existing hydro, gas turbines ran on carbon neutral fuel etc. to the mix.
How will you force this house that is self-sufficient 97% of the time to buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity to not crater the capacity factor of the nuclear plant?
Then we have the tariffs, as Europe puts tariffs on Chinese equipment that change the price quite a bit.
A country that took this very seriously and decided to put renewables as a top priority could go quite fast. But if there's anything one should learn about the last few decades is that modern democracies care too much about vested interest and NIMBY complaints to actually get projects like this done. Just look at charts showing power waiting to go online in most countries: You'll find very long lines, even after dealing with the rest of the the bureaucratic gauntlet.
First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US.
The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.
Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you
Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill"
I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself
People want the power to stay on but they don't want the power generation built near them.
It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.
It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.
We already do that. France notably has a lot of hydropower and they pump water up when they don’t want to shutdown a nuclear unit.
The issue is that there is very little places where you could build new dams in Europe and water shortage is becoming a regular occurrence.
It's also the oldest storage tech and I doubt there's a single place in Europe available to build more.
> Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
The whole EU is in winter weather together.
I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will).
However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons:
2. It will take longer
3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles
4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well.
Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.
Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a battery buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity from the grid when they can make their own?
”Baseload” is a title earned by having the lowest marginal costs. There is nothing fundamental about it.
Today renewables have the cheapest marginal cost at 0. They are the new ”baseload”.
The reason for the french case is that they were required to reduce output to allow more space for other new energy generation types. Fortunately the French have realised the error of their ways.
When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be).
> Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Longer than nuclear to do what? I was replying to the above commenter who said the following:
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables
TTL for individual nuclear is obviously always much longer than for renewables but time to any arbitrary large generation goal is almost certainly shorter for nuclear (barring taboo).
China is proving this to be objective false. Their total energy production (not nameplate power) for wind/solar/hydro is growing substantially faster than their nuclear output.
> No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts
...is commonly a rhetorical pattern meaning "I've predetermined my conclusion, but I want to save face by appearing rational and casting those I disagree with as biased or incompetent in one fell swoop."
It's the "Aren't there any REAL men anymore?" of contentious topics.
Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.
And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.
Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.
There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
Nuclear power plants only have a high upfront cost, which is compensated by their long lifetime of 60-100 years. Other energy sources also have high upfront production costs + you need to spend additional money on infrastructure for batteries/storage.
I also don't understand your argument on military targets. A NPP is a target the sane way a solar park, wind-park, geothermal facility or whatever would be a target. And to add to that, wile they are of course not indestrctible they are extremely robustly built. You can literally fly an airplane into them and it wouldnt result in a meltdown.. I do agree on your point on decentralization, yes.
And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.
One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
So it should be easy for proponents of renewables plus batteries like you to show that their proposed solutions would have worked all those years.
Can we please stop optimizing everything into low quality low reliability garbage for the sake of being cheaper?
Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price.
The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.
Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
And that doesn't include the fact that for all these years electricity prices in Germany were higher than in France which helped to keep renewables afloat.
> But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
That's yet to be seen, doesn't really match the reality I observe so far. They are promised to be cheaper sure, but you end paying more and subsidizing coal power plants in China along the way.
~10% of PRC energy is generated from solar now. That's enough to carbon offset every panel they've produced and will produce in perpetuity.
Germany has just over 250GW of installed capacity. [0] indicates peak power is 75GW. Replicating the Olkiluoto EPR build for 75GW of capacity would have cost perhaps 500B EUR.
[1] speculates about what would have happened if Germany had retained its nuclear power stations and performed a fleet build-out.
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-industry-has-lar...
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
That study is laughably bad. To the point that they double counted all renewable investment.
See: https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/en/blog/2024/kritische-stellun...
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Not with you in the way
You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have.
I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).
What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas.
The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.
1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year
1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.
Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.
Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).
2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.
3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?
4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
That, as well as intermittency being difficult to manage.
Nuclear+gas is the cleanest solution.
That.
There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost
Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election
The real problem with nuclear energy is, and always has been the cost. It always seems to turn into a boondoggle.
Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
Neither, see gas caverns underground
Also, Texas has done very similar.
People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?
This pitting of renewables vs nuclear is not helpful for renewables or nuclear. They both work well together.
A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough
…and…
B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times)
You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear.
Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box.
Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.
For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal.
There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...)
You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-ene...
Meanwhile renewables are surging and every relevant expert suggests they'll dominate the future.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-is-gettin...
The graph without the relatively flat hydro is even more stark.
The stuff people say about nuclear on this forum is on the level of flat earthism and they seem totally unashamed of this.
Does that mean you’re expert-er?
Or perhaps not, sometimes not being an "expert" in the traditional sense can remove the biases of an industry. Sci-fi author Ramez Naam had some of the most accurate forecasts in the past by doing the simplest thing possible: looking at the past curve and extending it. That is probably the simple type of projection I would make!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23185166
The IEA and EIA are two very respectable organizations that make comically bad projections, just absolutely awful. I know I could beat their projections!
Jenny Chase is a highly prominent solar analyst that has some great anecdotes about how wrong solar estimates always are, and she challenges that new analysts face, but I'm having trouble finding the podcast right now... in any case always read the Jenny Chase megathreads on the state of solar or her interviews in order to get some really great insights into what's going on.
In any case the rate of learning in solar tech far exceeds the expectations of most "energy" experts, and also usually exceeds the expectations of even the solar experts.
Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter.
Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.
The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels.
Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run the grid without help for 14 days.
As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
I don't think there's any other form of energy in the country which has a 7 years emergency reserve.
> As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.
For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons.
It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians.
But that's a political problem.
Finland just built a site for around €1 billion.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finla...
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.
Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.
That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.
It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.
> Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.
You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
> You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.
Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.
But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
So yeah. Regulation.
Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)
So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.
It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.
I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.
Renewables are forcing enormous amounts of coals and fossil gas off grids around the world as we speak.
“On Tuesday, January 3, 1961, SL-1 was being prepared for restart after a shutdown of 11 days over the holidays. Maintenance procedures required that rods be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect each one to its drive mechanism. At 9:01 pm MST, Rod 9 was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize.”
The industry didn’t just randomly get so risk averse there where a lot of meltdowns and other issues over time.
Take this stupid accident, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic#2007_Scaled_Co...
> In July 2007, three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured at the Mojave spaceport while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. An explosion occurred during a cold fire test, which involved nitrous oxide flowing through fuel injectors. The procedure had been expected to be safe.
N2O is very good oxidizer + it's a molecule that can fall apart (and turn into N2 and O2) in a very exothermic way if you look at it wrong.
Oops.
Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.
> The effort to minimize the size of the core gave an abnormally-large reactivity worth to Rod 9, the center control rod.
> One of the required maintenance procedures called for Rod 9 to be manually withdrawn about four inches (10 cm) in order to attach it to the automated control mechanism from which it had been disconnected. Post-accident calculations, as well as examination of scratches on Rod 9, estimate that it had actually been withdrawn about twenty inches (51 cm), causing the reactor to go prompt critical and triggering the steam explosion.
and:
> At SL-1, control rods would sometimes get stuck in the control rod channel. Numerous procedures were conducted to evaluate control rods to ensure they were operating properly. There were rod drop tests and scram tests of each rod, in addition to periodic rod exercising and rod withdrawals for normal operation. From February 1959 to November 18, 1960, there were 40 cases of a stuck control rod for scram and rod drop tests and about a 2.5% failure rate. From November 18 to December 23, 1960, there was a dramatic increase in stuck rods, with 23 in that time period and a 13.0% failure rate. Besides these test failures, there were an additional 21 rod-sticking incidents from February 1959 to December 1960; four of these had occurred in the last month of operation during routine rod withdrawal. Rod 9 had the best operational performance record even though it was operated more frequently than any of the other rods.
That is insane.
What's the relevance of this?
You’re much better off paying attention to site placement than trying to design something to safety handle getting covered in several meters of volcanic ash Pompeii style.
So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.
Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.
However, that was a result of faulty assumptions made when the plant was initially planned. With better data and methods, the event would have seemed a lot more likely.
Was New York City really at risk? Citation needed.
Don't put the emergency diesel generators in the basement where they are certain to be flooded if the tsunami wall is too low. Also, don't build too low tsunami walls.
> So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
No. Hydropower has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments on fuel matter.
> You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems, loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
> Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway. It’s also impractical for a bunch of other reasons.
> But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
No nuclear power plants has ever actually been required to carry a policy with that kind of a payout. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
However, the lesser risk of losing the reactor is still quite substantial. You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems
These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.
> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.
> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.
> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.
Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?
> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?
> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.
> it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source
This isn't how radiation works. Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source. Contamination refers to radioactive emitters being somewhere they don't belong.
There is this thing called neutron activation.
But the elephant in the room is of course that coal plants emitted way more radioactivity than nuclear ones even taking into account every disaster on even non-power generation plants.
Nuclear power plants need shielding to avoid their workforce being killed off very quickly. Obviously safety standards are much higher than that, but significant shielding is inherently necessary.
Nuclear is inherently vastly more complicated requiring more maintenance, manpower, etc per KW of capacity and thus has more operational costs. A 50+ year lifespan means keeping 50+ year old designs in operation which plays a significant role in costs here.
> 5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant.
A cooling tower isn’t dealing with any radioactivity and it’s not a safety critical system yet it’s still difficult to build and thus way more expensive per cubic foot of concrete than a typical surface road. When road projects get complicated they can quickly get really expensive just look at bridges or tunnels.
> You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day.
Hydroelectric dams have directly saved more lives than they have cost due to flood control. The electricity bit isn’t even needed in many cases as people build dams because they are inherently useful. Society is willing to carry those risks in large part because they get a direct benefit.
Wind turbines are closer and do sometimes fail early, but they just don’t cost nearly as much so the public doesn’t need to subsidize insurance here.
I consider myself reasonably pro nuclear, but this is just like some developer going:
“Oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard, I could probably implement that in a weekend”
Fact: hard complicated things are expensive.
There is no “just it’s just some concrete…”.
That is, translated “I do not know what Im talking about”.
Hard things, which require constant, high level, technical maintenance…
Are very expensive.
Theyre expensive to build. Theyre expensive to operate. Theyre expensive to decommission.
Theres no magic wand to fix this.
You can drive down the unit cost sometimes by doing things at scale, but Im not sure that like 100 units, or even say 1000 units can do that meaningfully.
…and how how are we planning on having the 100000s of reactors that you would need for that?
Micro reactors? Im not convinced.
Certainly, right now, the costs are not artificial; if you think they are, I would argue you havent done your due diligence in research.
Heres the point:
Making complicated things cheaper doesnt just magically happen by removing regulations. Thats naive.
You need a concrete plan to either a) massively simplify the technology or b) massively scale the production.
Which one? (a) and (b) both seem totally out of reach to me, without massive state sponsored funding.
…which, apparently no one likes either.
Its this frustrating dilemma where idiots (eg. former Australian government) claim they can somehow magically deliver things (multiple reactors) super cheaply.
…but there is no reality to this promise; its just morons trying to buy regional votes and preserve the status quo with coal.
Real nuclear progress needs realistic plans, not hopes and dreams.
Nuclear power is better; but it is more expensive than many other options, and probably, will continue to be if all we do is hope it somehow becomes easy and cheap by doing basically nothing.
Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.
See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.
I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
And then you have bad faith actors.
No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?
No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?
No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?
Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?
None of that has never ever happened, right?
This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years.
But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power.
Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated
In fact Chernobyl is incredibly badly remembered, because the firefighters who died responding to the initial blaze died of sepsis related to beta radiation burns from spending hours wearing their firefighting coats covered in radioactive dust.
Had they been removed promptly and hosed down, those people would've survived because they would not have received essentially a third degree burn over their entire body. And that's the point: they died of sepsis related complications, not any type of unique radiation damage and the Soviet doctors who treated them did get better at it once the protocols were established.
Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.
Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.
This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.
Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
Next to you and your family, then, since you’re happy trading with their risks.
I would happily live next to a nuclear power plant, the reason not to is mostly to do with "it's still an industrial site". But like, lakeside land where I'm up or down stream from it but can clearly see it nearby? Sure.
It's one of the rare forms of industry where if I was ever worried about contamination a cheap portable device will warn me remotely. Unlike say, Asbestos and heavy metals...one of which there's a bunch in my current backyard.
I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.
My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.
I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
having as much wind solar and nuclear as possible will ensure humanity has a bright future. 18% seems like a good number. how much storage are they investing in?
Fun fact, pumped hydro was actually developed for nuclear originally in the 70s, since nuclear is a large source of power that is hard to ramp down during low demand periods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.
There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.
Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.
It's a strawman to pretend that 10,000 year slow changes are qualitatively the same as what's been going on in the last hundred.
Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.
People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).
>It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days
Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...
So even if we can drop prices down to what China pays, nuclear still loses in China.
Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.
Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1].
Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...
The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.
~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.
~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100
~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100
~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.
It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".
Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...
"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."
— C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951.
(Hanford today, sitting on 56M gallons of leaking wastewater, is debating whether that newly-constructed vitrification plant should be allowed to operate, since it'll emit dangerous levels of toxic acetonitrile.)
Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.
Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.
We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.
You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel.
https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836...
That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.
You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.
> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.
Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year.
I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution.
On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins.
[0] https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
[2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.
Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.
To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?
All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.
Did you continue reading and see how that's 200mg of long lived waste? France has 66.7 million people. For long lived waste that's 13k tons total. That's a bit shy of the trade waste per capita. So about 67 million times more. Or let's go back to full. For power reactor they only produce 60% of that 2kg, 1.2kg. So that's 80k tons of waste, total, per year.Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate
https://xkcd.com/1162/
You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99?
The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture.
I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated. Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?
https://xkcd.com/1162/
This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output.
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.
Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.
Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Refining gets rid of even more uranium before it gets to the reactor. CANDU tried to get around that by using unenriched uranium, but ran into other issues.
And that’s what pro nuclear people seem to miss, really smart people have been trying to solve this issue for decades there’s no easy solutions with well understood downsides. Let’s quickly build some new design isn’t a solution it’s a big part of why nuclear construction costs are so high.
Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc
Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
France built 40 in a decade:
* https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...
More recently, Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, but Unit 4 cost 30% less (though still not cheap).
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear...
I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/spacex-worker-injury-rates...
Super heavy is on year 4.
Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation.
To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade.
They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power.
Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out.
The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility company cannot, because for the Navy it's about having a necessary capability. There's no economic break even to consider.
https://thenaptimeauthor.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/the-uss-le...
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/11/26/A-nuclear-submarine-...
There are some floating PWRs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_pow...
In the current political climate I prefer energy sources that don’t cause severe damage if sabotaged.
Did you hear the worries in Ukraine that Russia could hit a wind turbine with a rocket?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffren-class_submarine
https://onu-vienne.delegfrance.org/Nuclear-power-and-SMR-are...
https://regulation-oversight.asnr.fr/oversight/small-modular...
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-02-05/article-6744/new-swedish...
We’ll see how it goes.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...
The problem is: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?
You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times
Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
The true cost of nuclear is the massive construction cost. We don't know how to solve that.
By unsolved I mean - not convincingly solved, and certainly not yet tested over the expected duration that material needs to be safely contained.
Even if the storage got somehow compromised(extremely unlikely), the disposal sites are distant enough from civilization and the amounts small enough that the environmental harms would still be far below tons of other manmade events.
What more do you want?
I'm not sure where you're getting cheap from, or low-maintenance.
The above-ground stuff is locking future generations in for on-going maintenance for several centuries, perhaps longer. There's been think-tanks trying to work out how you just signpost such a place, given storage may exceed the expected lifetime of languages, and we'd want to be polite and at least contend with societal collapse.
It is hubris to observe that the many locations chosen now will remain 'distant from civilisation' for many centuries.
I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...
If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-hold...
The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction...
A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh
It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.
And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.
I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.
And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.
I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.
Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.
(Not everywhere has good sun for solar.)
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
The places with worse sun conditions tend to have amazing wind resources. Or be such a tiny niche that caring about them is irrelevant, like the few people living in the wind kill of the arctic high north of the polar circle.
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
> Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.
Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):
> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.
1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital. 2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab. 3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.
China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles.
Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper:
> We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.
That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.
That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.
If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)
That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.
Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
Yeah. Due to armies of highly paid experts spending almost a decade of their life arguing if the design is up to the regulations. And also when because of these uncertainties you start building before full approval and then requirements change.
What would change in the construction process?
China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?
I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."
It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.
I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.
Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns.
I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
It's interesting that in China, which you assert lacks roadblocks, renewables are being installed to a much greater extent than nuclear.
I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
Cutting regulations isn't necessary the win people think. If safety regulations are cut, it risks accidents in future.
Nuclear needs to move from bespoke builds to serial production.
The actual situation was that relentless 7%/year demand growth for electrical energy suddenly stalled, while at the same time a large amount of new capacity from cogeneration, made possible by the passage of PURPA in 1978, suddenly started to come on line. In this environment, and with the cost overruns and delays of the earlier nuclear builds, utilities could not make a case for new nuclear construction. High interest rates also didn't help.
This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.
Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.
A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.
Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.
The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.
I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.
I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.
Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.
That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!
As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.
If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.
Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.
Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]
Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.
[1] https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ [2] https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/...
Radioactivity is exponential. If something is very active at start, it will fade quickly. If it is not, it is not dangerous to begin with.
So whatever they do spend, they need to optimize instead of hiding from cost-cutting behind this.
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.
Also do note that no one knows the true cost of Olkiluoto 3. The $11B figure is from a settlement many years before it was completed as interest and construction costs kept accumulating.
> and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.
It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."
No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.
How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?
Buy them while they're selling cheap. They're good for at least 20 years. Plenty of time to stand up domestic manufacturing if they cut you off.
E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.
I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
They spent 1/4th of what we do today.
China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it.
The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.
Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.
I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station".
Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
Or do they pay him that much because he's good at extracting as much money from the situation as possible?
When given an option that would double costs and profits or halves costs and profits which is he incentivized to do?
The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.
A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
The generation is cheap. The delivery, the grid cost, is 3x-5x the cost of the generation.
It's all PG&E and the regulators's fault, for not containing costs more.
I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx...
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
[1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.
>SVP vs PG&E
This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...
[1] - https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=...
This is based on total electrical energy production of 17,301 GWh, since PG&E doesn't seem to publish their total distributed energy.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%242.5+billion+%2F+17%2C301+...
https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA#tabs-1
$2,500,000,000 profit/70,000,000,000 kWh consumed is ~$0.035 per kWh.
So not exactly the smoking gun that CA ratepayers are looking for.
site: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.
This is not true. It might be nice to drive down the cost, but there's no need to do it. Adequate, even preferable, alternatives exist.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"
Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs
It’s not a matter of being a for profit or not. It’s an also matter of technological development. Most of the early incidents in nuclear plants happened under the management of public or state controlled companies.
Not a fair comparison since back then nobody else had the resources.
Not sure how it's the opposite of conservatism to remove unneeded government roadblocks to enable industry. That's pretty solidly in the traditional American conservative viewpoint (not to be confused with whatever viewpoint currently dominates the GOP).
But our regulations on nuclear are utterly insane -- every time I get someone to read into the reasons nuclear here has been so much more expensive than safe nuclear in other countries with more reasonable regulations around it, they come away shellshocked. It takes a while to understand what's going on, because it's truly death by a thousand cuts, but the unifying principle is the NRC's ALARA ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable") principle (with honorable mention going to the NRC's Linear No-Threshold harm model, which despite the evidence assigns a linear cancer incidence to radiation dosing).
Getting radiation exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" sounds like a nice idea. But there's no lower bound, so the costs scale infinitely, gutting the incentives to innovate and invest. If the prices of other forms of energy go up, regulators intentionally raise the costs of nuclear comparably by increasing what must be spent on reducing radiation exposure. New innovative plant design that increases margins? Guess what -- that's another opportunity to use the money to lower radiation exposure even further.
The lack of a lower bound results in absurd results, because we long ago decreased the exposure from plants to far below background radiation levels, and far below the levels at which we've been able to observe harm.
We need to replace the LNT model with a sigmoid model that aligns with the science on radiation harms, and we need to remove the infinitely-scaling ALARA standard. Doing these will not increase risks, but will decrease costs a large amount in the short run and even more in the longer-term.
It's also unacceptable that the regulations can change during builds and then you have to make large parts completely new before you get the license to load fuel into the reactor.
If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.
And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.
Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge.
Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time.
We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.
What model of governance, of language, of human culture is going to last longer than the elephants foot will be dangerous to human beings?
Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant.
Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.
Chernobyl melted down and exploded.
Three Mile Island melted down and the regulatorily mandated containment vessel protected the public.
I wouldn't call that a fake cost.
Yes, they should be made safe, but we need some perspective here.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025
US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
AI wears out quickly if you have special demands.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217477
The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point.
SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.
This is true for any investment pretty much.
AI is also just super young, has apparently zero mote, requires insane amounts of hardware that basically becomes useless after a couple of years, and has promised, over and over, the AI revolution is just around the corner multiple times without ever delivering.
Check out:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
That is unlike any definition of baseload generation I have ever heard.
AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither.
Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.
I guess sabotaging France by preventing it for exploiting the advantage its great strategy in energy should have afforded it is just cherry on the cake.
1: https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/generation/nucle...
Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Then you realise that a significant part of France new debts was due to them shielding their population for the soaring prices of electricity despite France producing cheap energy, said prices being due to Germany brain dead strategy leading to a dependence on Russian gas and the obligation to go through the European market, and you start to see the double whammy.
Well, at least, the energy market is not as bad as the ECB rules.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
I also note that you didn’t have anything to say about the EPR2 program and the absolutely insanely bonkers large subsidies needed to get it off the ground.
That event was actually the final nail in the coffin for the all renewable policies of France, seeing that when the nuclear plants had a problem, the renewables failed even harder than the nuclear plants made it hard to make a case for all renewable policies
Why isn't that instead a call for more storage, in general?
Nobody could say "you had to build more renewables" at the time because they produced even less than the nuclear plants.
> Why isn't that instead a call for more storage, in general?
There's nothing which is appropriate for a winter load yet.
As a result of this incident, France pushed for more nuclear investments and dropped the mandatory renewables share.
Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?
The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
So basically, be the only energy source not subsidized? There are plenty of decent reasons to be against nuclear, and there's a discussion to be had on its price, but pointing out subsidies in the energy sector is like casting stones from your glass house.
the Söder Challenge is Legend:-)
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times.
Your graph also ignores energy used for heating and for industrial processes. Their electrification is now stalled by high energy prices.
Batteries and storage.
> heating and for industrial
That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.
> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.
The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.
Germany is also quietly reassuring investors that it's safe to build natural gas by extending the subsidies: https://www.energyconnects.com/news/renewables/2025/january/...
As usual, actions speak louder than words.
If you're willing, we can place long-term bets on that. I'd be delighted to lose, but I don't expect it.
It is not. We’re discussing what coal is being replaced with for electricity generation. But let’s talk about it.
> high electricity prices
Let’s ask the obvious question: are high prices caused by wind/solar? No, they’re caused by the extremely volatile prices of fossil fuels: “high fossil fuel prices were the main reason for upward pressure on global electricity prices, accounting for 90% of the rise in the average costs of electricity generation worldwide (natural gas alone for more than 50%).” [0]
So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
> heat pump sales
From your own link: the lengthy and public political debate about the legal framework and subsidies for heating buildings has caused people to lose confidence”
None of that has to do with electricity.
[0]: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-global-energy-crisis-pu...
Let's. DW has a nice overview article: https://www.dw.com/en/how-germany-seeks-to-cut-electricity-c...
A third of the total cost is grid charges, and another third is taxes. Both go towards subsidizing the renewables.
BTW, the US average for all consumers is 14 cents: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
> So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
So Germany is _deepening_ its dependency on natural gas prices by building more plants because it's... more volatile?
Just imagine if there was some other reliable form of energy that doesn't require fossil fuels.
> None of that has to do with electricity.
It has everything to do with electricity. The government understands that the grid can't handle additional load from heating, so the subsidies are not pursued vigorously.
Again, let me repeat, actions speak louder than words. Like this one: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-coalition-agrees... Or just from today: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/eu-countries-dela...
We also need to figure out how to build reactors in months to years instead of years to decades to failure.
And to build reactors at a cost less than $10 to $20 million per megawatt capacity.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b065x080
Dispatble solar and wind are about 1/5 the price of new nuclear.
But even from a very matter of fact point of view, I'd rather have 1000 people die every year for 20 years, than have 20.000 people die on a single bad day/week. The economic and social impact is far, far bigger when it can't be "spread out" over multiple years.
In reality when you take all the costs into account there is no cheaper form of energy generation and there likely never will be, outside of cost decreases in Fission based nuclear itself.
Anticipating such a rapid decline is hard and a lot of people still are stuck on outdated data.
Sure China commissioned these plants in the past and will plan more, but it won't be due to cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
Quote from https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761... (Google translated):
Berlin – According to a study, comprehensive insurance against the risks of nuclear power would cause electricity prices to explode. According to calculations by actuaries, the premiums to be paid could cause electricity prices to rise more than forty-fold.
"Nuclear energy is ultimately uninsurable," said insurance expert Markus Rosenbaum on Wednesday in Berlin. If an insurance company wanted to build up sufficient premiums for a nuclear power plant within 50 years, for example, the remaining operating life of a reactor, it would have to charge 72 billion euros per year for liability insurance.
The German Renewable Energy Association (BEE) commissioned the "Leipzig Insurance Forums" to conduct the calculations even before the Fukushima reactor disaster. "The true costs of nuclear power are ignored and, in the event of a serious accident, are passed on to the public," said BEE Managing Director Björn Klusmann.
Similarly, you pay for the electricity you receive and this is priced as say 40$ per MWh. Obviously when you receive nothing the price is 0, you don't pay them to idle, they either produce or not. Thus when storage costs kick in you don't add the costs of both together. You either pay one or the other, not both.
You might average them out taking into consideration what their output is, but you don't stack the costs on top of each other which I often see people do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/nuke_...
Insurance already insures extremely complicated industries.
- who has access to nuclear power? - what happens to nuclear reactors during war? - where does the Uranium come from? - how long does it take to build a reactor? - how many long term solutions have been developed in the more than 60 years of this technology’s existence?
Not saying nuclear doesn’t have a place, but let’s not be blind to the long list of complications that come with it.
- We killed nuclear power in countries that can be trusted so that is not relevant.
- Nuclear accidents are not as harmful as people imagine.
- We have plenty of access to uranium resources in the west.
- the time to build a reactor is often in large parts regulatory burdens. France built out 10% of its electricity generation needs in a year, for a number of years. That is what is possible.
- Part of the reason there is no innovation in this sector is because regulation has strangled it. There are many innovative ideas in nuclear.
The US produces about 1250 cubic meters of waste per year. For comparison the empire state building has a floor area of 208000 square meters, assuming a 3 meter floor height you could fit about 500 years worth of spent fuel inside it.
Also, we only "use" 3% of the fuel in current nuclear power station designs so we could just reprocess the fuel and vastly reduce the volume of waste too.
And, of course, the idea that "dependence" on Russia is bad, but replacing it with dependence on other states AND with building a bunch of nuclear bombs in my backyard that are PRIME targets to literally take out my entire grid, is laughably bad.
There is zero risk of a new stupid energy dependence on Russia.
Sadly, with electricity becoming more reliant on gas and other fossil fuels when it is not so sunny in winter, or on those cloudy days with no wind, means fossil fuel usage ends up higher than if they had stayed and expanded nuclear - instead they closed many plants(Germany a prime example, in favour of....gas).
Then the whole over-dependence on Russian gas and oil really did whammy the energy price market, not just for Europe, but with a knock-on effect across the world. One we still pay for today.
err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
but no: there is no Endlager (permanent spent nuclear fuel waste site) in sight, the costs of dismantling used plants are outrageous and if it were not for nimbyism, we'd be essentially self sustaining on wind and solar within a decade.
matter of fact fossil and nuclear sponsored fud on wind and solar is the single biggest issue we face in Germany.
Atomkraft? nein, danke.
Is the lobby trying? Last I checked the head of RWE himself said that going back to nuclear in Germany was infeasible. It seems to be conservative politicians who had been keen on it before winning the election and before the industry pointed out that it's a bad idea actually.
The Problem in Germany is that by law the state has to build a repository, while the operators have to pay for it. The operators did pay (~24 bln EUR), but politically either NIMBY parties (such as CDU/CSU/SPD) block it, or the Greens (under Habeck) block progress so they can continue to shout "what about the waste???"
In Finland the operators can build their own repository and they did it cheap and relatively fast.
Also from an even more anti-nuclear country (austria): Kernenergie? Ja bitte!
the law to build it is pretty universal, the world has essentially agreed to not export nuclear waste.
associating the progressive innovative green party with blocking progress is an interesting turn, there was no progress in the topic for decades, and the reason is rather that nuclear waste is like toddler art: first no one wants to take it, trying to toss it is met with loud and hefty protest, and at the end nobody knows where to take it.
don't the alps have lovely granite areas for the Finnish model?
Fear uncertainty and doubt is the only thing blocking nuclear power.
The irony is that the fud has been spread by "environmentalists" and has only managed to keep fossil fuels around for the last 20 years greatly exacerbating our climate change predicament.
And I find it horrendously hilarious that you believe the same people that work tirelessly against renewables would actually EVER build nuclear. It's about milking the status quo for cash as long as possible and then fucking off into retirment with that stolen money.
Btw, what's the german energy companies opinion on building nuclear? RWE a big fan? (They aren't!)
https://scipython.com/blog/uranium-enrichment-and-the-separa...
How would this help? Nuclear power plant and enrichment facility are separate entities.
https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...
The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).
Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
Which, as I understand it, is because at 20% enrichment you've already done about 70% of the work needed to get to 85%.
The solution to these issues is just to manage the enrichment supply chain. If a country wants nuclear power but can't be trusted, supply then with at cost uranium.
All it takes is the enrichment to produce the fissile material for a weapon.
As far as I know countries have agreed to not build weapons, with the exception of those that already have them, there is an international body that monitors enrichment sites, but checks are voluntary a country can choose to not accept inspections and/or build additional secret enrichment sites.
The fissile material is not sufficient for a weapon though, as I understand there is quite a bit of science that goes into making a bomb.
Additionally, first generation weapons are large and unwieldy, i.e it takes a bomber to deploy a single weapon with a very small yield.
Miniaturization, building a weapon small and light enough to put on a missile is a significant problem that took the current powers years to get over.
But that's about it, if you can figure out how to make a small bomb of variable yield, you can make bombs small enough to fit a large backpack, and thermonuclear weapons that fit in a ballistic missile as well.
I think their whole schtick is prolonging the current situation and betting on slow and expensive nuclear is a good strategy to prevent real change.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/30/climate-...
Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source.
Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding].
And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in storing. Except for costly disasters in how not to intermediately store it, here in Germany.
If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful, why not make future generations happy by preserving it for them, and for now, limiting its use until we learned how to add to the initial price the full cost of long term storage, with further disasters as a learning experience for that?
Saving lives and being cost-effective in the short run might work, but every energy expert says in 50 years, nuclear will have to be phased out anyway. And fusion could provide clean, but also primary heat inducing energy. So even that will not save us.
There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.
I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.
>If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful
It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.
Luckily we do need lots of heat. District heating, process heat, thermochemical H2 production, ...
We already have enough heat for that, from industries. Distribution is the biggest factor, and in that, distance. It's really cool, but it's stupidly expensive up front. Not to mention, you need to require EVERYONE in the area to buy in and stay in to have any hopes of being worth it in the long run. NIMBYism strikes again.
Seems like the Chinese are picking up where US left off:
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/thorium-molten-salt-r...
Maybe the EU can pick that up too.
In context of that really makes one think if Nazis was on to something other than toothpaste?
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/thorium-toothpaste-als...
I just don't see it happening. They cost too much and take too long. Not holding my breath here.
People thinking fission reactors might randomly explode like nuclear bombs Simpsons-style and so many green parties in Europe being anti-nuclear has held progress back too much. Minimal climate activism isn't bad, but they really bit hard in to the fork on this one.
However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.
The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
There was a trigger in some of the PV systems, but that wasn't the underlying cause.
Spain has far too little transnational capacities. That was a significant contributing factor in the grid outage.
I’m laughing in $0.11/kWh nuclear energy while Germany’s “cheaper” green energy is uh... quite a bit more expensive.
Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable.
Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
Those extra steps are crucial, as they massively dilute the output and make it weather/daylight and seasonally dependent.
Intermittent renewables produce at least an order of magnitude more waste than nuclear reactors, be they fusion or fission.
and leave the waste on a far away star
Nuclear reactors can’t adjust production rapidly and require peaker plants. I don’t have to squint to see how this is also solved by grid scale storage.
This observation seems entirely useless and pointless. What implication are you saying we should draw from this?
Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.
How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.
None of this happens to be true.
A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.
And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.
What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?
Here the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
https://yle.fi/a/74-20136905
Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.
It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.
> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.
True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.
> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment
Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.
> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.
The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.
> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
This, again, is not true. The average is currently at 6.5 years and dropping slightly, the time has been fairly consistent over the last decades.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
The main factor determining build times appears to be "how much do you want to?". France built 50+ reactors in a total of 15 years, the fastest build times are Japan, South Korea, China and Germany.
Secondary factors are "is this a FOAK build or NOAK", and "how much experience is there building nuclear plants". When Japan was good it built in under 4 years, and had plans to go below 3. And no, that's not detrimental to safety.
> and use just isn't that important of a factor.
It is when land is expensive.
> With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
Typical dodge into the qualitative: the additional grad capacity required to ship power across the country from where it is produced to where it is needed is a multiple of that required to strengthen it for additional consumers. Never mind the whole "smart grid" madness.
> Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself.
That's also false. These costs are almost always included and have little impact on the total cost of power. For example, the Gösgen plant in Switzerland produces for 4,34 Rappen / kWh, including all costs and including a profit.
> At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize
That's also not true. When subsidies for off-shore wind were reduced, Germany, Denmark and the UK had zero bids for wind-parks, and immediately the discussion was "new subsidy models". Intermittent renewables in Germany currently get €20 billion in direct subsidies, never mind the advantage of having feed-in priority and being able to burden other producers with cost of intermittency.
> The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables
That's also not true. There was a trigger (in PV production) that led to a substation having problems. But that was just the trigger, not the cause. Grids have to be able to deal with faults like that from time to time. The grid in Spain wasn't, because there were too many intermittent renewables in the grid, and too few rotating masses that stabilize the grid.
> Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
Are these grid scale batteries sufficient to power an entire industrialized nation for a week or more in the room with us now? How much are they?
This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.
lol at wind though. that's not real.
LCOE is not a fundamental metric. EROI is and it's pretty bad for photovoltaics.
First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).
Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.
Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.
System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.
That is also not true. For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all. Even Greenpeace and the Green's chief anti-nuclear Lobbyist, Jürgen Trittin, called nuclear power plants "money printing machines".
> Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France)
Those are minute compared to subsidies intermittent renewables get in Germany. In particular as there is the ARENH program, which is effectively a negative subsidy (it takes money away from the nuclear company EDF), and of course EDF is profitable and gives money to the government.
When you add it all up, France has a negative subsidy of € 0.1 - 7 billion yearly, whereas Germany subsidizes intermittent renewables to the tune of around €20 billion a year.
> System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend
That is also not true. System costs are actually rising, because yields are dropping, the share of renewables has risen and the (fairly cheap) coal backup is to be eliminated. Total costs are now estimated at several trillion euros. For comparison, France's nuclear program cost a total of €228 billion through 2011.
EDF was nationalized in 2022, doesn't have to build money reserves for decommissioning (which would be tens of billions), is about 50 billion in debt and just got a 5 billion government loan to keep some old reactors running and another government loan to build new plants. These are not minute interventions, both France and Germany heavily subsidize their sectors (in different ways). With the ARENH program ending in 2025, a more fair comparison will be possible.
I have to read up on the system costs though, that may be ai fair point.
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88... (last page)
That's not true. That report is based on a completely ridiculous paper by the FÖS, the "Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft". Calling the numbers it uses "completely made up" is putting it kindly.
One of the many debunking is here:
https://kernd.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Artikel_atw_D_20...
Summary:
"The disregard for scientific methodology, for basic knowledge of economics and business administration, environmental economics, energy economics, and nuclear technology, the biased selection of sources, even the use of newspaper articles as supposedly scientific sources, and the denial of the positive effects of nuclear energy, which far outweigh its social costs, are unworthy of the FÖS. Either they are a sign of insufficient economic expertise at the institute, as well as a lack of knowledge of scientific methodology, or the FÖS is deliberately misleading readers with the aim of being able to cite the highest possible fictitious costs for nuclear energy on behalf of its NGO clients. Both discredit the study and its client."
The debt that EDF carries is completely normal for a company this size, especially one that does infrastructure. It would be unusual for a company not to use the capital markets to finance such projects. EDF has been highly profitable for decades, recently while being used to subsidize other parts of the economy via ARENH as well as being used to buffer the effects of the energy crisis, not just via ARENH, but through massive expansion of ARENH.
ARENH is not "ending", it is being replaced by a comparable scheme that is structured slightly differently.
EDF was not "nationalized" in 2022. It was always a state company, with the state never holding less than 85%. The period where the state held less than 100% was relatively short, from 2005 to 2022. The state bought out the minority shareholders in order to streamline the planned nuclear expansion.
The "subsidies" for EDF (cheaper loans etc.) amount to around € 2.7 - 3 billion a year. By itself, that's obviously not "minute". However, these sums are dwarfed by the ARENH program and the profits that EDF pays to the state, which turn the subsidies into "negative subsidies" in sum. That is, the state gets more money from EDF than it gives it, by a good amount.
Even if that weren't the case, the sums are dwarfed by the German subsidies for renewable, which are an order of magnitude higher than the gross subsidies in France (and infinitely higher than the net-negative subsidies).
Except financing research and development, guaranteeing loans to reduce default risk and interest rates, capping liabilities to enable insureability at lower rates by guaranteeing to fix damages in case of critical failures with public money, financing and organizing emergency civil protection measures, as well as waste disposal, granting massive tax cuts, doing the diplomatic leg work to import uranium and protecting its transport with the police, all and all summing up public spending on making nuclear energy in germany to 169,4 billion euros according to the scientific service of the Bundestag (Document Number WD 5 - 3000 - 090/21), with the more green leaning FOES calculating 304 billion. And on top of that it is estimated that another 100 billion in public money will be needed to fix up long term waste disposal sites morsleben and asse.
... well except from those few hundred billion euros they barely ever subsidize it at all.
https://kernd.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Artikel_atw_D_20...
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.
Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
(E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...
The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:
>…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US $70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...
Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.
In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.
If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Germany is merely transitioning the fastest and doing it without the overpriced and risky albatross that is nuclear power.
>shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable
It's unbelievable that the country some people are most furious at is the one that has decarbonized at the fastest rate.
Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
It's bizarre.
Maybe you didn't intend too, but your words certainly implied it:
>>...it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
Since you reference Germany later, the implication above was that Germany did prove you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Which might be true someday in the future, but Germany certainly hasn't decarbonized their grid yet. The one thing that Germany did "prove conclusively" is that thousands of lives were needlessly lost over the last 15 years because of bad policy.
>Germany is merely transitioning the fastest
Germany will certainly not be carbon neutral the fastest. I guess it will beat Poland though.
>Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
You have a point - it is the responsibility of every country to decarbonize. I guess a big issue here is simply money - Poland GDP is much smaller than Germany and they have less available options. Though besides your claim, I've never heard anyone actually lauding Poland's efforts or thinking it was a good thing they are using coal.
>...They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
Like I said, I find that those who actually want to decarbonize the grid, don't particularly care what clean technology is used and different countries will have a different mix of technologies they use. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.
I watched a very interesting documentary about Onkalo, which happens to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
Bit of a rush to close the GitHub ticket eh?
And depending on how you look at it, it could be 100,000 years before you know for sure if it works, so my claim that it’s a ‘solved problem’ is a bit strong. I’ll retract that and say that it’s the most promising idea for nuclear waste disposal, one that that is close to beginning operations.
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
Not an expert, but isn't all you basically need to do is running the centrifuges a bit longer?
Breeding plutonium is a different process than enriching uranium, sure, but with enough enriched uran you will have a nuclear bomb.
And a dirty bomb is bad enough and simple to construct as well.
And you need nuclear reactors to make plutonium. The weapons you can make with plutonium are qualitatively different from the ones you can make with uranium.
Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.
If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.
Not everyone has a U mine or pre-existing bomb industry. The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is "yes", bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a "PITA") if you have a reactor core handy to start with.
Oh, interesting! If so, can you provide an example of anyone producing HEU starting from spent fuel?
I don't know how you are going to disarm the current stable-state of mutually assured destruction.
In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.
In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.
I don't have sources and would appreciate if anyone has anything to offer on this.
- The U.S. generates about 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel each year (from 94 reactors/97 GW) : https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... . For the whole world it's 7,000 tons (375-400 GW) : https://www.iaea.org/publications/14739/status-and-trends-in...
- Storing it is easy in the short term, but unfortunately any leaks are a big deal and you have to store it basically forever, which is a challenge. If Yucca Mountain were to be restarted it's estimated storing existing and new waste through 2031 there would cost in the neighborhood of $100 billion : (warning: large PDF) https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf
- It's possible to recycle the fuel, but currently an order of magnitude more expensive than digging up more : https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/economics-reprocess...
You're definitely right about long-term storage being a concern; I think only one long-term storage facility exists right now.
I believe the cost of recycling fuel is largely because it's completely unexplored. I'm sure it'll follow a similar cost reduction path most industries share.
I showed your comment to someone who is currently writing their PhD on how to store nuclear waste safely. I barely understood half of what they said in the following rant, but they referenced the situation of the Sellafield site several times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_... makes it seem not such a big deal
It's available online also: https://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf
I read it 14 years ago or so, after the Fukushima accident. I don't think the science has changed since then, or since the 90s when this project was shut down. There continue to be so much money in coal, gas, and oil and it's from there I think most of the opposition to nuclear stems from.
Apart from fast reactors, there's also the traditional reactors and storage of spent fuel. Finland's close to opening their process facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
You are likely conflating this with weapons programs.
1. You can operate the facility with a zero critical accident over the whole lifespan of the power plant.
2. You know what to do with a nuclear waste (like keep it safely deeply buried for 10'000 years).
However, point 2) is almost irrelevant now because we already have enough depleted nuclear fuel to deal with it.
Gen 4 reactors have gravity driven control rods, passive cooling systems, core catchers, safer fuel, and moderators.
If humans were raptured, they couldn't melt down.
2. The entire planets worth of spent nuclear fuel would fit into 15 Olympic swimming pools.
Fast breeder reactors can use almost all of the existing waste and on top of that reduce it's lifespan from 100k+ years to a few hundred.
You'd get more radiation exposure from living in Denver than you would sleeping on a cask in Miami
> 1. Only six reactors have had meltdowns, partial meltdowns, serious core damage, or fatalities.
If we assume that everything above INES[0] level 4 is already serious enough, then there were 11 accidents [1] and around 4484 fatalities (mostly 4000 indirect from Chernobyl but still).
> Gen 4 reactors have gravity driven control rods, passive cooling systems, core catchers, safer fuel, and moderators.
And yet, 100% safety is not achievable. But the risk is probably quite acceptable now.
[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_and_Radi...>
[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...>
The white house in all but name, because calling it green is woke, declared that coal is green energy.
Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use isotopes from it. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.
I mean it's not clean
>one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have
Not the point. It's not clean, it shouldn't be called clean end of the story.
So if nuclear isn't clean, renewables are downright filthy.
I will save you the trouble because I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago. These numbers have been thoroughly debunked [1]. They are simply wrong, likely out of laziness more than malice.
But the people that spread this around do it out of malice to dupe people and influence opinions. You've been duped.
[1] https://xcancel.com/simonahac/status/1318711842907123712
That turns out not to be the case.
Even if it were the case: an official study by the DOE was "thoroughly debunked", in your esteemed opinion, because some random Australian twitter user claims to have talked to a friend.
Right.
of course
> modern definition of clean
clean is clean. no need to lie or modernize word definitions to fit your agenda of promoting nuclear energy all day every day for a decade
Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.
Nor is mining for coal!
(Which eventually it will. The more reactors, the more chances for it to happen.)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
The death rates are wildly different than the ones at the site you linked. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy.
The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.
E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.
>According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.
https://theprogressplaybook.com/2025/02/19/german-state-of-b...
Western designs are safe, most Soviet-era ones are/were not. It's unfortunate that nuclear power still has this stigma, as it's like saying "all cars are unsafe" while comparing the crash test ratings of a modern sedan to a 1960's chevy bel aire.
Yet people keep fixating over the radioactive pollution, including evicting people from their homes for truly minor amounts of radiation.
Turns out the "worst case scenario" of nuclear accidents is jackpot for nature. By clearing Fukushima from humans, nature is thriving: https://www.sciencealert.com/animals-aren-t-just-surviving-i...
Around 50 people a year die while clearing snow in Japan, so it's ~ twice as dangerous as shoveling snow in worst-case predictions.
And, let's put it straight: LNT is scaremongering fiction. People who live in Ramsay, Iran, are exposed to higher level of background radiation that n what is allowed for nuclear workers. Yet, there is no elevated levels of cancer or birth defects, not is there a shorter lifespan for people living there either.
The dose makes the poison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
For an example of what happens to a reactor build according to safety requirements see the onagawa nuclear powerplant
"Modern" designs have the ability to self cool in case of emergency by using an ice containment condenser or similar solutions.
Just kidding.
https://inspectapedia.com/structure/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Disast...
They did not even have any automated safeties in place, because their philosophy was “faith in the worker” while the western philosophy is “humans are fallible”:
https://www.eit.edu.au/engineering-failures-chernobyl-disast...
They then ignored their own safety procedures when operating the plant, which ultimately is what caused the disaster.
Saying that Soviet designs being in the same generation as western designs makes them equally safe/unsafe is quite wrong when you look at the details. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one mistake after another.
That said, the plant was designed by a country that shot down a civilian airliner that had strayed into their airspace due to a navigational error, when they knew it was a civilian airliner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
They had no regard for human life, so of course, they built things that are incredibly unsafe. There is no end of examples of them simply not caring about human life.