Why fans of nuclear are a problem today | Hacker News Reader

Why fans of nuclear are a problem today

jeromeaparis.substack.com

23 pointslocallost114 comments

This is a centralist argument. If the market were structured in a sane manner, you wouldn't need politicians to be involved in these choices. In fact, I think the argument in this article is defunct for a similar obvious reason - people can just build solar panels because they are cost effective. Bam. These alleged legions of nuclear supporters have ceased to be a roadblock. Just go do it, we may well all already agree that any blockages to building solar are a bad idea.

Of course the real case that the nuclear people are making is that if we stopped putting all the bizarre political blockages in front of nuclear it'd be perfectly competitive and people would invest in that too. But this idea that we want politicians to be the bottleneck in deciding where our power comes from is even more bizzare. We should decide power is generated, by paying people who generate power in a way that works for us. The tech is not so important [EDIT not so important that we need to do it through the political process].

But politics cannot be avoided.

If nuclear is to be built, there will be risk of serious accidents. The rational private response to this is to bound the liability to the nuclear operator via bankruptcy. So, in a severe accident, the cost imposed on society will not be covered by the operator. What's the response to this problem? Either imposed safety regulations, or requiring insurance (and the insurers then impose regulations as condition for insurance.) If de facto public insurance is provided (as in the US limited liability for accidents) then public regulation is a necessary consequence.

Well yes, that is what limited liability is. No argument there. We applied that concept to every industry and got fantastic results even though the absolute damage done by most industries is absurdly more than nuclear does. If you applied that exact logic to fossil fuels we'd never have made it to the industrial age. If you applied that logic to the industrial age we'd never have entered the industrial age, it was an OH&S disaster even before what happened to the health of the bystanders.

I'm not sure why we've looked at our collective history and decided the West's biggest mistake was ignoring the Luddites. The costs of nuclear are nothing compared to the potential we walked away from or even the costs we accept as part of standard day-to-day existence.

The maximum cost of a serious nuclear accident is well beyond anything we see in other industries, save perhaps the cumulative effects of CO2 pollution. The answer is not to excuse nuclear, but impose regulations on other such cases as well, and for similar reasons.

> The maximum cost of a serious nuclear accident is well beyond anything we see in other industries, save perhaps the cumulative effects of CO2 pollution.

That isn't so. If I just look up a random explosion I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion which is more damage than most serious nuclear accidents. 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, 300,000 homeless. That is pretty bad.

And, again, your logic would involve people looking at the industrial revolution and deciding against it.

The cost of a serious nuclear accident is fossil fuels[0].

[0]: https://ember-climate.org/countries-and-regions/countries/ja...

I'm talking about financial damage, not deaths. The value of the human lives lost is relatively modest compared to the hit to (for example) property values.

You might object that the financial damage is due to unwarranted concerns by the public. Even if that were the case, they would be legally actionable.

> This is a centralist argument.

It’s a French writer and not a very convincing one from my point of view after reading some of his other articles.

He seems to view things through a very French prism so expects strong statism and ecology dominated by a mostly alter-mondialist view when it’s not openly Trotskyist.

Nuclear power has spent its entire life being forced into existence using subsidies.

A technology agnostic subsidy market for green power leads to exactly zero new nuclear power being built.

Thus the huge push from the nuclear lobby and fossil lobby loving a power source not generating a single kWh for 20 years to create targeted subsidies only for nuclear power.

Sure. What if we remove the nonsensical barriers and then let it fail on its own in the market? Like, say it only has to be 2x safer than the next safest popular form of energy? That always seemed like a reasonable compromise to me. A radical reduction in the standard of safety we hold nuclear to.

The problem is who is affected by the accidents.

For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents so the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment.

For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.

It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.

The playbook of trying to equate nuclear safety problems with the competition is quite sad to see because it relies on people only seeing a number. Not the real world implications of it.

> Not the real world implications of it.

What real-world implications? One of my favourite lines of questioning in nuclear debates is trying to figure out what exactly the anti-nuclear crowd are worried about in terms of real-world implications. The real world implications seem to be minor enough that nobody can point them out.

Even your comment, deploring real world implications, doesn't articulate what they are. The only real world implications I've seen are people panicking over negligible issues. And I'm happy to believe there are actual problems, but it'd be fantastic if someone knew what they were.

I love how the multiple hydrogen explosions when the reactors were going through uncontrolled meltdowns in Fukushima now are “negligible issues”.

Everything to frame nuclear in a positive light.

Are you going to run through what the problem with that was that makes it internationally important? Industrial explosions are an common event. Usually they make local news or whatever then people move on. We don't usually ban technologies because they can explode. Fertiliser explodes.

Did these kill anyone? Did they harm anyone? If the evacuations didn't happen what was the risk?

TMI, Fukushima, Chernobyl. Those are the problems and "minor" real-world implications. That's why no one wants a nuclear plant in their backyard.

If those never happened, I suspect we'd have far more nuclear energy today.

If you could choose to live next to TMI with the knowledge that the TMI accident would happen at some point while you were living there or next to a coal power plant, TMI would be the correct choice.

The great thing is that coal plants are not the alternative in 2024. It is renewables.

Thus no need to compare with coal, compare against your neighbor’s rooftop solar.

The first nuclear build out in the US was already running into serious problems before TMI. Its collapse is due more to cost problems and the unleashing of market forces on the grid via PURPA than it was to TMI.

Fukushima had little to do with the collapse of the Nuclear Renaissance; it was the advent of cheap natural gas from fracking. New nuclear made absolutely no sense in an environment where NG was under $3/GJ and combined cycle power plants with a thermal efficiency of 60% could be built for $1/W(e). Cheap gas is also a big part of why everyone stopped building new coal power plants in the US. The last large (> 100 MW) coal power plant to come online in the US was in 2013.

Your first statement is factually untrue. You could say it was initially forced into existence to generate the fuel for nuclear weapons but beyond that it's way more accurate to say it has spent the last ~50 years having the utter insanity of the regulatory body overridden by large subsidies with the last 30 or so of those years having people that don't like nuclear point at the subsidy and say nuclear is uncompetitive while ignoring the massive cost and uncertainty created by the nuclear regulator. There is no real free market here, most real innovation has been utterly destroyed by the regulator driving massive uncertainty into private investment by removing any certainty of the effectiveness of a company structure containing the cost liability of problems (this is not the same as liability flowing through to management/the board for obvious dereliction of duty, this is flow through happening automatically if you don't do every stupid thing the regulator comes up with, which is mostly unecessary and highly cost additive to your project).

This has stopped any sort of commodification of reactor construction and kept every project a bespoke, highly expensive, one off. Further, throwing solar panels everywhere ignores the total cost of solar because it ignores the large ancillaries cost having a non demand resource causes so it's incorrect to compare the two directly, you need to look at total cost including ancillary costs of grid connection (which is much closer, especially when looking at asian construction costs where the regulators are much less idiotic but still excessive and where production of these bespoke installations continued so skills of the labor force were maintained).

If we get the stupidity of the regulator out of the way we could have commodity built new generator designs with drastically cheaper total costs and eventually much better technology like molten salt that should be dramatically safer and that would be a fair comparison to solar, which has had the support to commodify and drive production cost into the ground over the last thirty years and is still questionably competitive when the total cost of running including ancillary costs is included against the worst version of nuclear (what we currently have). This is starting to become a national security concern because China is going hard on these newer, better technologies and they could end up owning the market on a decade or two timescale, which is a huge strategic issue since their main achilles heal right now is energy imports.

The idea that it's all the fault of "a regulatory body" doesn't explain the global failure of nuclear. It's run into problems everywhere, including in China. There is no global regulatory body.

That is not really true. Most regulators take what the us regulator is doing and copy paste with minor changes, or they have their own deranged nimbys pushing their own version of stupid (looking at you Germany). When you look at asia the problems are much less on the cost side but they are still doing the same stupid crap buying the same expensive western designs, they just implement co struction dramatically better. China specifically has other problems stemming from government co trol so its a tough market to pin blame to one specific group of things.

Or, the regulations are similar because they are rational given the realities of nuclear energy. If you find yourself having to resort to conspiracy theories to explain away a consensus, you're well into crank territory.

That's a remarkably naive of history view. It's that way because the USA views nuclear as risk for proliferation of nuclear weapons and has very questionable foreign policy pushing regulation to follow local bad policy. Everything from the international atomic energy agency, many binding agreement from the u.s. department of state, etc. Pretty much none of the policy anywhere else has developed without the USA's heavy hand pushing bad policy ideas. America has bad ideas and pushes them onto most of the rest of the world stifling innovation in nuclear almost everywhere as part of the design of the policy, not due to any lack of merit in nuclear energy.

Nuclear is where space travel was under the shuttle program. It needs someone willing to throw several billion at it to develop the technology to cut costs to a fraction of a percent of the current design but the regulation pushed by the USA on this is even worse than it was on space travel by a large margin so it's not happening.

>If nuclear made sense, Microsoft or Amazon or Rio Tinto would finance the construction of a few plants to feed their ever growing appetite for reliable carbon-free energy…

But they are starting to do it [1]. I'm sorry, this is not a well though out article.

[1] : https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow...

Existing nuclear power is cheap enough to be viable in some locales. In others huge subsidies are being pushed through.

The article talks about new nuclear power plants.

Neither of those companies are even close to breaking ground on any new nuclear power plant.

They have not started to do it. No nuclear power plant has been constructed for them. Nor have any even started construction. The article you linked to is purchase of power from an existing nuclear plant. This would be a fine precedent if one can build additional power plants for free, with all construction costs sunk. But the Nuclear Fairy is not available to wave her magic wand and present us with such free power plants.

That article is about Amazon buying electricity from a 40+ year old nuclear plant[1] which will operate for another 20 or so years.

Hardly what one could call financing the construction of new nuclear power plants.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susquehanna_Steam_Electric_Sta...

The primary argument against nuclear here seems to be that, given that people argue against it (such as the author), it's slow to build because of all the people arguing against it. That seems pretty... tautological, and the same kind of thinking that resulted in Germany replacing its nuclear power plants with coal (and attempting to use Russian natural gas, too, until...). If the arguments against nuclear are so good, why doesn't the author make any?

If you care about reducing fossil fuel usage, IMO you should be all-in on: nuclear, solar, wind, etc. And nuclear solves a lot of difficult problems: solar doesn't work at night — California has enormous amounts of solar during the day and the majority of daytime electricity is solar-based, but at night nearly 40% of our energy comes from natural gas [1] — and storage is extremely expensive. Wind, hydro, and geothermal don't work everywhere: you can only run them near somewhere with natural features that make them possible. But a nuclear power plant? There aren't really practical limitations on where you can build them, or when they can operate. Any electricity market that has nuclear — CA, Texas [2], New York [3], PJM [4], etc — has an extremely steady base load taken up by nuclear, and everything else is super variable, and the variable gaps from other renewables that aren't plugged by nuclear are plugged by fossil fuels.

Nuclear is good.

1: https://www.gridstatus.io/graph/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=2024...

2: https://www.gridstatus.io/graph/fuel-mix?iso=ercot&date=2024...

3: https://www.gridstatus.io/graph/fuel-mix?iso=nyiso&date=2024...

4: https://www.gridstatus.io/graph/fuel-mix?iso=pjm&date=2024-0...

Please do the calculation on cost for consumers for a nuclear power plant which can’t produce a single kWh for the grid any time the sun is up.

...Do you think nuclear power plants stop working during the day?

Look at the (many) graph reports I linked: in every major American market, nuclear produces consistent power throughout the day and night. That's why they're useful!

And consistent power is not what the market wants. It wants dispatchable power.

But it is clear that you know where such a calculation will end up in terms of costs for consumers which is why you don’t want to do it.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-...

For every passing year the periods of time where nuclear power plants are forced off the grid because they are too expensive will become longer.

That is for existing paid off nuclear plants, new builds are simply ludicrously expensive today.

Please enlighten us about where countries which have gone all-in on solar get their base power when the sun is not shining enough and there is no wind.

I don’t understand why people who have an axe to grind pretend to be more stupid than they are in these debates. The question is not average price per kWh and never was.

The question remains the same: where should we get base power when intermittent sources are off? The solutions are gas, coal, nuclear or some form of large scale storage.

Germany seems to be ok with polluting a lot with coal to appease the proportion of die hard antinuclear activists in its population. From my point of view, nuclear is not the worst of all the options - it’s actually unclear to me if it’s not even cleaner than building all the batteries required for large scale storage - but you might disagree.

Everything is impossible until someone has done it? Meaning the French nuclear buildout also was impossible given your reasoning.

When this question is modeled no large problems pop out and renewables remain the vastly cheaper option.

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2023-24Fi...

You are moving the goal post a lot. I never pretended anything was impossible.

I said that the argument regarding rational calculation based on average costs of a kWh crumbles when you look at it from a proper angle.

The correct question is: is nuclear interesting when compared to building large scale storage facilities? The answer to that is far from being cut and dry with arguments in favour and against both.

The report you quote is not a definitive answer at all. It starts with a huge disclaimer that the cost of nuclear is to be taken specifically in the case of Australia and uses very adverse parameters based on South Korea.

You started with:

> Please enlighten us about where countries which have gone all-in on solar get their base power when the sun is not shining enough and there is no wind.

I.e. demanding real world done and dusted examples or it is impossible.

Then trying to find technicalities as to why the report is wrong or does not fit your made up example.

> I.e. demanding real world done and dusted examples or it is impossible.

Huh? No, the point is that today, countries which have gone all-in with solars use coal or gas for their base. Hardly clean.

I’m not finding technicalities. That’s literally the heart of the report: what makes sense for investment in Australia given the Australian context. That’s barely related to the heart of the discussion especially considering the caveat stated which I have exposed.

You seem to have trouble arguing in good faith when the discussion doesn’t go your way.

The cost optimal path (as CO2 taxes or the equivalent are imposed) will be to displace more and more fossil fuel generation with renewables, then short term storage, then (finally) some combination of very long term storage, transmission, and demand dispatch. At no point will adding more nuclear make sense. That fossil fuels are being used now is just a stage in the migration to 0% fossil fuel, assuming the world actually decides to do that (as it damn well better).

One interesting element is that, while solar needs storage, nuclear needs storage too: the demand is not flat, and become more and more non-flat when decarbonizing the energy sector. For the nuclear, there are two possibilities: 1) over-building centrals, such that they produce the energy corresponding to the peak, but then "dumping" the excess energy otherwise. But this is extremely costly, because the driver of the nuclear cost are upfront: if a central can generate X energy at 100% of the time and costed Y to be build, the price will be Y/X, but if you generate X energy but at 50%, the price will be 2*Y/X. 2) build storage.

So, the storage problem is not a renewable problem, it's something that the grid needs no matter what. In these condition, if the grid needs storage both in case of solar and in case of nuclear, it's not really an argument against renewable anymore.

France has been doing fine with nuclear and hydro for decades (at least when scheduled maintenance doesn’t all happen at the same time). You can use dams as big batteries by pumping water back up when you have excess and nuclear production is actually fairly scalable up and down which ensures the peaks are never that big.

And yet, in France, RTE, the grid supervisor, itself subcompany of EDF who owns the nuclear plants, keeps publishing reports saying that if France does not up their solar generation there is no way the grid works in the future with increased demand volatility.

You can use dams to store renewable energy too.

That's the point. Some people says that renewable is intrinsically flawed because of intermittence. But at the grid level, we will need flexibility, aka storage, no matter what, which means that the intermittence problem is strongly reduced.

And, yes, nuclear plant can scale up and down, but: 1) they need to be designed to do so efficiently and some existing don't. Building a "flexible" nuclear to provide flat generation is uselessly expensive, building a "flat" nuclear to provide flexible generation is uselessly expensive. 2) nuclear, intrinsically, is good to provide flat generation, and scaling the generation up and down cost more money than building storage.

So, it is more efficient to build storage in case of a nuclear heavy grid. Sure, you have different way to solve the problem of flexible grid with nuclear, but you insist on one solution JUST because the other solution is not convenient for you because it is also positive for a grid containing renewable.

I just noticed this gem:

> the same kind of thinking that resulted in Germany replacing its nuclear power plants with coal

Germany did not replace its nuclear power plants with coal.

> If nuclear made sense, Microsoft ... would finance the construction of a few plants to feed their ever growing appetite for reliable carbon-free energy

Companies focus on their strengths. Microsoft isn't building its own chip fabs, or lots of other things it has an appetite for, because it's not one of their strengths. Companies can only be good at a few things. So them not building their own nuclear plants isn't a reason to believe it's a bad idea.

There are a few startups building small modular reactors. As I understand it, while data centers are certainly on their list of potential customers, they're getting more immediate sales commitments from remote mining operations where they're replacing diesel generators instead of competing with the grid.

From a defense perspective, Ukraine has shown that power plants are a vulnerable asset. Even sidestepping war, power plants represent a centralized risk that renewables could conceivably mitigate.

On the other hand there’s a little uptick in France’s nuclear power at the very end of the article, at the very end of the graph, that represents one of the key benefits of nuclear. Even with the huge push by Germany to go renewable, they didn’t have enough power to survive when the Russian gas got shut off and they had to import France’s nuclear. It just makes so much damn power.

Arguing in good faith: places like Ukraine would need significant storage. If it's battery-based, how vulnerable is that? How big a boom do you get from a fully charged, ready for winter seasonal battery storage?

Sure, these are important questions.

Battery storage is more versatile than nuclear power due to its distributability. For example in Puerto Rico there is a concept[0] of a virtual power plant which requires battery owners to sign up to contribute in return for compensation. There will of course be economies of scale possible by centralizing battery storage, for example with non-chemical battery storage such as water batteries[1] that are more vulnerable than the highly distributed model. The point is more that there's more flexibility and variety available to deal with risks of many types.

0: https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/virtual-power-plant/pue...

1: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-giant-water-batt...

Nope, you made a strawman while claiming not to be. PES and distributed battery V2G also exist.

Well, no one really dorectly struck a nuclear power plant in the war so far (though watchin the Russian infantry fight for the Zaporozia one on a livestreem back in 2022 was kinda hair raising) and thus nuclear powerplants provided important source of power for Ukraine.

No one wants to risk serious damage to a nuclear powerplant, given not just international outcry, but even just bad weather ending up contaminating you own country for decades.

In that regard nuclear powerplans end up being an important sanctuary in a conflict.

It would’ve been nice if this post compared the costs of various energy sources per kWh, duration to bring capacity online, externalities related to energy sources (e.g. mass land use for solar, risk of plant failure for nucleae, etc.). That could’ve made it a very informative piece that might have convinced someone who was not already convinced. Instead it reads more as an ad hominem hit piece against nuclear proponents. We should be aiming to compare policies, not people.

> France has lost more annual kWh from nuclear than Germany since 2011

Maybe because we are forced to buy renewable energy (this summer nuclears plants were offline because of overproduction).

Also because Germany fund anti nuclear movement in france to sabotage our nuclear industry: https://www.ege.fr/sites/ege.fr/files/media_files/German_Int...

Author stats also doesn't include projection for 2024, where France exported a record amount of energy, and nuclear recovered from the maintenance schedules issues due to covid. The currently amount produced is already greater than 2022.

Germany also imported 9TWh this year because of the weather. Germany energy grid profit of the stability of it's neighbor.

I keep seeing people saying that kind of things, and at the same time, seeing _professional_ in the sector all agreeing that the way France managed their infrastructure was terrible.

It does not mean a nuclear pathway is not good. But it really makes you look very uneducated on the subject and very biased when you need to twist the reality that way.

Thanks you for this ad homimem attack. Adding additional information the author didn't mentioned looks very uneducated, thanks you for this observation.

"Ad nominem" is saying "this argument is wrong because this person is bad". Here, what I'm saying is that the arguments are wrong because they are simplistic, looks unbalanced and don't correspond to what people who work on the subject have observed.

I've brought new information: in the professional sector, including pro-nuclear actors, France situation is presented as "the example to not follow", and the reasons are way more diverse and unbiased than "it's because of the bad anti-nuclear". You can check if it's the case if you don't trust me.

It's a bit like if someone says "python is never used to do ML stuff", and I answer "but I see plenty of people using it, it looks like it's not really an educated argument: the person seems to not know the community who do ML stuffs". Is that an ad nominem? If yes, does it mean that the first person argument cannot be criticized?

I made some claims, that invalidate the data the author is using to make claims, some were sourced, the others can be easily verified and are well known.

You come and spew out anectodal evidence, which you fail to notice that can be heavily biased, and present it as "the professional sector", and reduce what I said to "the bad anti nuclear".

Then you try to parallel with an example, like this was our scenario.

At least, bring some source when you say someone doesn't know anything.

> I made some claims, that invalidate the data the author is using to make claims, some were sourced, the others can be easily verified and are well known.

And what I'm saying is that, as usual, pro-nuclear people like you (there are intelligent pro-nuclear people that are way less unbiased) will explain the situation by cherry picking explanation that fit their ideology rather than also accepting the elements that don't.

You had the opportunity to say "it's of course not just due to that but ...", but you did not, you really cherry pick as if the French situation is due to sabotage while it is in great part due to plenty of other factors, include intrinsic to the difficulty of nuclear.

And, sorry, I cannot really bring source so easily, because I work in the sector, and when I keep hearing someone casually saying "well, France difficulties is due to ... and ...", I don't make a note thinking "I need to keep the source for Kuinox in 3 years from now". I think it's a good proof that you are not working in the sector: the sector does not play the ridiculous "renewable vs nuclear" game, it knows it's way more complicated than that in consequence does not pretend one is better than the other. It's just not how it works.

As usual, fake news and cherry picking takes few minutes for you to generate, and if I want to source that it's crap, I will have to spend hours and hours digging up in my conference notes from years and years in the past. And for what? You have absolutely no idea of the reality and you will just say "na, you are bad, you lie, I don't believe you". You are clearly not worth the effort.

If you are honest and want to make sure you don't spread misleading info, the ball is in your corner, you can have a deeper look to check if what I brought to the table is bringing useful nuance (it does). But I doubt you will, you will just reject the idea that maybe you, the armchair militant who only read things that goes in the convenient direction, maybe does not understand the complex situation so perfectly.

You blame me of sharing misleading information but you claim I said things I did not say, then claim I'm an idiot.

You didn't brought nuance, from the beginning you personally attacked me, you never directly contested any claim I made.

I'll welcome discussing the points I brought up and the one you brought (none so far, except saying I'm an idiot).

Let's be clear: I'm not saying that your claims are fundamentally incorrect (even if sometimes they are a bit bullshit, like the German sabotage where the report is not able to give anything concrete, just that French people who think nuclear is not a good idea are unsurprisingly friends with people who think nuclear is not a good idea in other countries, and that political groups that think they have understood the situation well will fund reports, like it happens all the time including with pro-nuclear reports). My problem with your intervention is that your claims are not representative of the situation.

You criticize the sentence "France has lost more annual kWh from nuclear than Germany since 2011", which is sourced and is true (even when accounting projection for 2024), by bringing several correct elements. But you are doing the same error as the sentence you criticize: you bring cherry-picked arguments.

The point I've brought up is that your view of the situation is not the same as the view of the situation in the sector, that your view is just ... caricatural.

For example, how would like react if someone says that the failure of the Energiewende is due to France funding pro-nuclear in Germany and sabotaging the program? I would personally say that it is biased: even if we entertain the idea for the sake of argument, in itself it's way not enough to make the Energiewende fails.

For the French situation, typical reasons given for recent difficulties with the nuclear park are: the mess the government made with EDF privatization, the loss of technical expertise, the short-term vision where the electricity was sold too cheap and did not create budget for infrastructure maintenance/renewal, the fact that now we are going toward a flexible grid (something that was not expected even 50 years ago) and that the initial strategy was not accounting for that at all, the fact that the public/politic opinion is stupidly about "nuclear vs renewable" instead of using the best in specific situations, the learning in the nuclear sector that things are intrinsically complicated which burst the investment enthusiasm, ...

You will notice that these reasons are not "anti-nuclear": some of them implies that the French situation is not due intrinsically to nuclear, but due to the specific French situation.

The problem is that you don't mention any of them. You just mention reasons that are supporting the fact that somehow French nuclear is in fact great or in fact the victim of bad anti-nuclear. Some of these reasons are really anecdotal and never appear when professional discuss the subject. So, yes, it looks very biased, and you sounds like a living proof of what the initial article (I'm not always agreeing with it on all the points, btw) is talking about.

> even if sometimes they are a bit bullshit, like the German sabotage

The report is from the Ecole de Guerre Economique, which is renowed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Warfare_School

They do give concrete examples,

> The Heinrich Böll Foundation has had a physical presence in France since 2016. Based at 80 quai de Jemmapes in the 10th arrondissement - the same address as the Sherpa association92 - the Paris branch conducts influence operations against French nuclear power in several fields: public, media and political. The aim of its presence in these fields is to create an unfavorable environment for the deployment of nuclear power in France, with the support of other anti-nuclear relays. Initially, this presence has manifested itself in the recurrent production of content between 2018 and 2021. Publications included: [...]

And the publications are targeted to the french audience.

It looks like you only read the document superficially.

> You criticize the sentence "France has lost more annual kWh from nuclear than Germany since 2011", which is sourced and is true (even when accounting projection for 2024), by bringing several correct elements. But you are doing the same error as the sentence you criticize: you bring cherry-picked arguments.

Something having multiple causes and pointing them is not "cherry picking". I gave 3 differents reasons why france lost more annual kWh than germany in their graph, it isn't because you dislike the information that it is cherrypicking, in order to provide it, provide more context that contredict so said "cherry picking". As I said, there are at least 3 reasons: - aftermath of the covid, that is now completly recovered only as this year. - sabotage of our industry, I did not say the direct consequence, but it's closing perfectly working plants because if it.

> (even when accounting projection for 2024)

You again mentioned information without sourced it (well, you sourced none of it since the beginning), please show a projection, this is available public data.

> For example, [...]

You are again making up an exemple that is far from our current discussion to depict what I say as insane.

> nuclear is in fact great or in fact the victim of bad anti-nuclear

Are you saying that the loss of technical expertise isn't tied at all to the anti-nuclear movement ?

> The problem is that you don't mention any of them.

Are you accusing me of not depicting the full picture of the french energy industry when calling out that the author article is very biased ?

> They do give concrete examples

The example you copy is not really anything concrete. Yes, the Heinrich Böll Foundation exists, has physical presence is several country, as an association with a political party and has an opinion on some policies.

That is not at all unusual, and you have similar foundation, sometimes anti-, sometimes pro-nuclear, everywhere. Just put yourself in their shoes: if you were in France and convinced that the nuclear pathway was good for mankind and that some people in Germany were interested to publish results that is consistent with what you think, why would you not collaborate with them?

But what this report does not do is to provide anything concrete. There is absolutely not proof that any of this had any impact whatsoever. There is no proof that it is a inference attempt and not just some people wanting to share their ideas in a given subject. There is no proof is was with the explicit goal of misinforming people (you realize that if these article published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation are scientifically correct, then it is a GOOD THING they have been published in France, right?). There is also no discussion about pro-nuclear publications supported by other foundations and how they could have impacted the French policy.

At the same time as these publications, France government was very pro-nuclear, which is rather a proof that inference from Germany had few to no impact.

> it isn't because you dislike the information that it is cherrypicking

Of course not, and I don't "dislike" these information. I'm just saying that those are pretty low ranking when normal people discuss what's happening in France and that if you were neutral, it's very strange to randomly point to 3 different reasons that are all pretty uninfluencal on the situation while conveniently "forgetting" the other reasons. And I say it again: these other reasons are not particularly anti-nuclear, but they are just not framing the situation as "in fact everything is perfect" or "in fact it's all the fault of the anti-nuclear". They are showing that it is more complex and maybe less about "renewable vs nuclear" like you try to frame the discussion.

> You again mentioned information without sourced it

Uh? YOU were saying that the projection of 2024 is missing. So, I've assumed you had source for it, so I did not need to provide a source. That's really crazy: you seem to use "source" as a random free-of-jail card to reject things that are not convenient for you.

Normal intellectually honest interlocutors don't need to scream "source" each time the other interlocutor does not bring a source, only if it's not easy for them to find the source and therefore suspect the interlocutor got confused in their conclusions.

As for source, a very easily source to find is the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...

As you can see, the French curve is the same in the article than in the svg (you have to subtract the blue area). And as you can see, projection for 2024 are again dropping w.r.t to 2023. So, yes, the conclusion from the article is still correct.

So now, your turn: what are your sources to say that the sentence will not be true if the projection for 2024 are included?

> You are again making up an exemple that is far from our current discussion to depict what I say as insane.

You know what an analogy is, right?

> Are you saying that the loss of technical expertise isn't tied at all to the anti-nuclear movement ?

What? No its not. It's due to budget and short-term vision. At the same time, France was maintaining its expertise in plenty of other sectors that may or may not be popular, in military engineering, in spyware, in chemistry, ... The politicians in France have majoritarly supported the idea of a french nuclear sector until the 2000's, which is well after the expertise started to erode.

(some nice summary of the reasons: https://www.ft.com/content/d23b14ae-2c4e-458c-af8a-22692119f... I'm sure you can cherry-pick stuff, but they explain that the drop of expertise was because of a global drop on industrial jobs for an increase of service jobs and was not at all limited to nuclear. It also affected the automotive industry, for example)

> Are you accusing me of not depicting the full picture of the french energy industry when calling out that the author article is very biased ?

I am saying that you are more biased than the author article. The author article is not perfect, but I see more effort on their side to depict a fair and realistic situation (starting the article with "Nuclear energy has been great", with several sentence pro-nuclear in their article) than from you.

> But what this report does not do is to provide anything concrete.

It is, this foundation is writing publications in France target to french citizen with germany money.

The Ecole de Guerre Economique argue theses funding are targeted.

> There is absolutely not proof that any of this had any impact whatsoever.

Proving that a political campaign had an effect is impossible, especially if the one running the campaign don't want to know they are doing it on purpose.

> At the same time as these publications, France government was very pro-nuclear, which is rather a proof that inference from Germany had few to no impact.

This statements right there shows:

- you don't know how propaganda works

- you don't know the political context of what i'm talking about: the french governement at this time was not pro-nuclear, they kept the line of the previous governement and followed the 50% nuclear target. The current governement adopted a pro-nuclear stance since around the energy crisis.

- You are critizing someone telling them they are out of breadth and the first thing you do is critizing the report of one of the best school in competitive intelligence.

> are all pretty uninfluencal on the situation while conveniently "forgetting" the other reasons

I think you are completely unaware of how the politics works and how they affect the real world. I pointed politicals problems, which cause problems you point as "typical reasons given for recent difficulties".

> some nice summary of the reasons: https://www.ft.com/content/d23b14ae-2c4e-458c-af8a-22692119f.

> (some nice summary of the reasons: https://www.ft.com/content/d23b14ae-2c4e-458c-af8a-22692119f... I'm sure you can cherry-pick stuff, but they explain that the drop of expertise was because of a global drop on industrial jobs for an increase of service jobs and was not at all limited to nuclear. It also affected the automotive industry, for example)

The Financial Time is highly biased, your article is also behind a paywall, the main reason for the loss of expertise is because of the lack of investment in nuclear in the past. This is what says the EDF CEO here in front of the french deputies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d91h-2fT2w8

> You know what an analogy is, right?

Yes, and your usage of it is manipulative. An analogy is used to illustrate, you are using it to depicting your interlocutor as an idiot.

> Normal intellectually honest interlocutors don't need to scream "source" each time the other interlocutor does not bring a source,

Normal intellectually honest interlocutors don't start a conversation by saying their interlocutor is very "uneducated". Then follows with a graph that finish in 2019 as a source for a projection for 2024.

> And as you can see, projection for 2024 are again dropping w.r.t to 2023. So, yes, the conclusion from the article is still correct.

There is no data past 2019 in your graph.

> What? No its not. It's due to budget and short-term vision.

It is, let me explain you why: the politicians sets the budget, the short term vision, is also sets by the politics.

- Hollande, which was elected with an alliance of the Socialist Party, and the Greens, have set a target to reduce nuclear from 75% to 50%, EDF had to reduce the budget for nuclear due to that.

- Penly 3 was cancelled due to the above line.

- Superphénix, was closed because of the anti-nuclear activists, and the politics bow to this minority.

- Sarkozy, before Hollande, while not being anti nuclear, under-invested in the energy sector, which was needed to correct the course.

> Proving that a political campaign had an effect is impossible, especially if the one running the campaign don't want to know they are doing it on purpose.

Yeah, so they wanted to hide it but have been explicitly stating their funding on their second page?

Again, look at all the publications in this list, they are all open about their funding, nothing is hidden.

> - you don't know how propaganda works

You don't. You are saying that ANY publications with funding from Germany is propaganda. My point is that it's obviously stupid: some of them may be, some of them will not be.

You can find pro-nuclear publications funded by other foreign foundations. Is that propaganda? If yes, why are you saying that anti-nuclear propaganda is the reason it failed while not saying the pro-nuclear propaganda is the reason some stuffs that should have failed did not?

> - you don't know the political context of what i'm talking about: the french governement at this time was not pro-nuclear

It was certainly not anti-nuclear, and that's the point. You are pretending that the situation in France is due to the fact that Germany made a successful propaganda campaign that destroyed the French nuclear sector. This is obviously not what happened because the government was not influenced by this so-called propaganda campaign, otherwise they would not have done what they have done.

> - You are critizing someone telling them they are out of breadth and the first thing you do is critizing the report of one of the best school in competitive intelligence.

If all you know about the situation is what you get from an organism that is short-sighted to their small area of expertise, then, yes, you are out of breadth.

> I think you are completely unaware of how the politics works and how they affect the real world.

But again (and you haven't answered about that), if the french situation is due to politics, then why the Energiewende failure is not due to politics?

That's my point about the bias. You are doing a typical ultimate attribution error: the side that you like, when it does not perform well, it's because it's the victim of external actors, but the side you don't like, when it does not perform well, it's the proof that it's intrinsically flawed.

> The Financial Time is highly biased

Ah. So, Ecole de Guerre Economique is perfect (even if it was several times criticized for promoting a biased view of the world), but FT is "highly" biased. Not just "biased", no, "highly biased".

You are asking for sources and when there are, you just reject them super easily by saying "nope, does not count".

> This is what says the EDF CEO here in front of the french deputies

The guy WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THE ORGANISM THAT FAILED. You are taking for granted the opinion of a person who is deeply not impartial. Of course the CEO of EDF will blame the failure on others.

(and don't get me wrong, what the CEO says is interesting, but at the time, I recall some insiders mentioned to me that it was not very accurate. Again, no source for that because it was just chat, you can not believe me if you want, but it is to illustrate that I'm not just choosing the CEO to be unreliable just because I like it that way, but because there is some reason for it)

And then you are saying that FT is biased. That's so ridiculous, you just pick and choose who is biased or not based on what is convenient for you.

> Normal intellectually honest interlocutors don't start a conversation by saying their interlocutor is very "uneducated"

From the guy who just said that I don't understand propaganda and the french political situation. Are you really sure you want to use this argument, because it does not make yourself look very good, you know.

> There is no data past 2019 in your graph.

Correct, that's not the graph I've used before. But again, when I checked, 2024 did not magically make the French reduction totally disappear (at best it means that the reduction was very slightly smaller, not changing at all the message).

> It is, let me explain you why: the politicians sets the budget, the short term vision, is also sets by the politics.

No, it is due to the strategy of allocating the budget inside EDF. They made explicit choice about not renewing their expertise, they drop local partnership for no good reason. In fact, they move the expertise to other countries for budget reason, and would have done so whatever budget they had. Same with automotive industry: delocalization to cheaper working countries.

> - Superphénix, was closed because of the anti-nuclear activists, and the politics bow to this minority.

And of course, the incredible excessive costs have nothing to do with that.

Again, that's so biased: if someone choose to close a nuclear plant, there is for you only one unique possible explanation: anti-nuclear.

Can you even conceive that, maybe, someone may not do exactly as you like not because they are anti-nuclear, but just because, sometimes, they have other reasons?

> You don't. You are saying that ANY publications with funding from Germany is propaganda.

Again, you are saying I said thing I did not say.

> You are pretending that the situation in France is due to the fact that Germany made a successful propaganda campaign

Again, I did not say this.

> You are asking for sources and when there are, you just reject them super easily by saying "nope, does not count".

You voluntarly miss the "it's behind a paywall part" how convenient.

> The guy WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THE ORGANISM THAT FAILED. You are taking for granted the opinion of a person who is deeply not impartial. Of course the CEO of EDF will blame the failure on others.

I thought you knew things about the politics of the sector. The video I linked was in the context of a commission of inquiry. The result of the commission are available here, they show a way more nuanced statement that you. https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/opendata/RAPPANR5L16B...

Principally, they are not blaming EDF direction about this failure.

> And of course, the incredible excessive costs have nothing to do with that.

The plant was fully repaired and working when it was closed, it was still expected to generate money to reimburse itself, or at least a part. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

This plant was also needed in order to be more independant on uranium.

> No, it is due to the strategy of allocating the budget inside EDF. They made explicit choice about not renewing their expertise, they drop local partnership for no good reason. In fact, they move the expertise to other countries for budget reason, and would have done so whatever budget they had. Same with automotive industry: delocalization to cheaper working countries.

I suggest to read the report I linked in this comment, which show you are making up shit, the reason are highlighted in it.

> Again, that's so biased: if someone choose to close a nuclear plant, there is for you only one unique possible explanation: anti-nuclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Closure

> A 1998 "Inquiry commission on Superphenix and fast neutrons reactor sector" [3] reported that "decision to close Superphénix was included in Jospin's program ... in the agreement between Socialist Party and Green Party".

It's funny how you claimed being nuanced and we are down to you claiming that closing down fully working plants, that have history of anti-nuclear activists fighting against, and making political alliance in order to close it as "not anti-nuclear".

> Again, you are saying I said thing I did not say.

I'm saying that the interference of Germany due to propaganda had negligible effect on the french energetic situation.

You are pretending that your "reason" that France was impacted by German propaganda is not a bullshit reason.

You provide a study that fails to show that there was any impact and that there was any real interference. Just that some foundation is funding some article, something that happens all the time and is not a proof of propaganda.

> You voluntarly miss the "it's behind a paywall part" how convenient.

I'm reacting to, quote, "the Financial Time is highly biased". Very easy for you, if you can read the article and you don't like what you read, you can just say "yeah but it's biased".

> The result of the commission are available here, they show a way more nuanced statement that you

The result of the commission says a lot of things that I was already saying, and show that your reasons are at best anecdotical.

I've mentioned, for example, QUOTE FROM MY PREVIOUS COMMENT:

- "the mess the government made with EDF privatization", discussed in chapter 2, section 1 A 2, and chapter 2, section 2.

- "the loss of technical expertise", discussed in chapter 2, section 1 B 2 and chapter 2, section 2 C. A quote from it: "le déclin des compétences dans la filière nucléaire s’inscrit dans le mouvement plus large de la perte du tissu industriel français et de la disparition de nombreux emplois industriels" ("the decline of skills in nuclear is the result of a larger decline in the french industry").

- "the short-term vision where the electricity was sold too cheap and did not create budget for infrastructure maintenance/renewal", discussed in chapter 2, section 1 A 1c and 2b

- "the fact that now we are going toward a flexible grid (something that was not expected even 50 years ago) and that the initial strategy was not accounting for that at all", chapter 2, section 1 A 1b and 1c

- "the fact that the public/politic opinion is stupidly about "nuclear vs renewable" instead of using the best in specific situations", chapter 2, section 1 A 2c

- "the learning in the nuclear sector that things are intrinsically complicated which burst the investment enthusiasm, ...", chapter 2, section 3 B

Your reasons (you say three, but then only manage to explicit two) do not appear in the report as main reasons for the decline of French nuclear. QUOTE FROM YOUR COMMENT

- "aftermath of the covid, that is now completly recovered only as this year.": the report talk about all the problem that started well before covid. It is said that covid increased the problem and that covid arrived "on top" of the existing problems.

- "sabotage of our industry": can you find something about that anywhere?

In fact, the whole report is very much closer to my position than yours. The full chapter 2 explains that the problem of the french nuclear is mainly due to stupid short-term vision rather than just anti-nuclear things (there is some, of course, but the majority is about EDF governance (which includes the state) not doing the correct choices)

> Principally, they are not blaming EDF direction about this failure.

On skill gaps, EDF both says that it's not their responsibility AND that they are building capabilities to properly form new skilled people. So what's the correct one: either they cannot do anything about it and it's not their fault, or they can form people and they failed to start their program when it was needed.

In fact, the situation is the following: EDF got the message "we are slowly closing the nuclear", and, at the same time, saw the skill slowly disappearing but did nothing about it thinking they don't care, they will not need these skills in the future. When the government changed its mind (which was stupid, they should never have pushed to close the nuclear in the first place), then EDF said "well, there is no skills anymore" because they failed to maintain the skills that they should have maintained as long as possible instead of betting that they will not need them.

On the rest, distinguishing EDF from the state is pretty difficult. Decisions were taken in concordance, especially before 2015 where things were already falling apart.

> I suggest to read the report I linked in this comment, which show you are making up shit, the reason are highlighted in it.

In the video you posted, the CEO explicitly said that they get their skilled specialists in other countries.

> It's funny how you claimed being nuanced and we are down to you claiming that closing down fully working plants, that have history of anti-nuclear activists fighting against, and making political alliance in order to close it as "not anti-nuclear".

Did you even read. I've said, I quote: "And of course, the incredible excessive costs have nothing to do with that". I'm not saying that the Green have nothing to do with that, I'm saying that once again, you "forget" to say that Superphénix bad reputation was not just the result of anti-nuclear propaganda, but also of a lot of failures.

Not enough to justify the closing of Superphénix according to me. But again, it's not "it's all anti-nuclear's fault".

> I'm saying

No no, for the 8th time now, you wrote down something saying I said something, that I did not say.

Then explain me then.

Either you are pretending that German propaganda has an impact or you are not. If you say it has, then, it means you say that indeed the simple facts around the Heinrich Böll Foundation imply it is propaganda.

But enough bullshit, during this whole conversation, all you provided show me that your initial claims are misleading. Even the last report confirms that these so-called-three-but-in-fact-two reasons are in fact at best negligible in impact and that the most important reasons are due to governance failure as I was explaining.

Thanks for once again wasting my time and proving that indeed, as said in the initial article, there are people like you: everything is the fault of anti-nuclear, and they make up crazy stories, like German propaganda and covid, to pretend that the situation would be significantly different without these.

The failure of the nuclear situation in France are all due to external things, but at the same time, the failure of the renewable situation in Germany are all due to the fact that renewable will never work. Everything you say is framed in a biased ridiculous "pro-nuclear vs anti-nuclear" view. You were totally unable to even conceive that some problems were not the result of some sort of anti-nuclear propaganda.

It's incorrect, even the document you yourself are providing is explaining the situation, and, oh surprise, is re-explaining some of the elements I've explained to you and you were saying were incorrect.

Sorry, there is not much more to say, you just have 0 credibility after having provided documents that show that I was indeed pretty on point and that your reasons don't even appear in the document.

For this whole conversation, you refused the claim I brought, and I never said it was the single reason, as wrong because there are other factors in. The loss of heavy industry did play a role yes, but not investing in building plants for almost 2 decades also play a major role.

Every of your response are like this, I say something and you claim that I says it's the single reason.

From the beginning of this conversation you have been manipulative (like your 5th paragraph) in this discussion.

Your manipulation even present logic flaw, you blame that i reject everything on anti nuclear and covid, and 2 paragraph later, "You were totally unable to even conceive that some problems were not the result of some sort of anti-nuclear propaganda."

> Then explain me then.

The things I claim are a part of the whole problem, and I never said that something was the whole cause.

From the beginning when I pointed at A cause you said the cause was the symptom, or alternatively, you said another problem was THE cause.

I'm not the one saying most of the problems are due to the directions of EDF

From very early in the conversation I've said, quote, "Let's be clear: I'm not saying that your claims are fundamentally incorrect".

Since the beginning, I've been clear: it's just bullshit to pretend that the two reasons you brought would have changed any of the conclusion in this article.

That's totally crazy. You have an article, you say "naah, it's just because ..." and then when someone says "not really, it's mainly because ..." you say "yeah, in fact it's not really because of what I've said, but I never pretended it was the case".

Again, if you now agree that your two reasons are not changing much of the conclusion, then you were just hyper misleading and ishonest when attacking the article pretending they did not explain well because they forgot to say reasons that the whole industry, including report that you have brought, agrees are at best negligible on the situation. You could simply have said "I don't agree with the conclusion because it was due to EDF governance". But you didn't did you?

Thanks, now go away, let the adults deal with the situation and continue to think you are not the problem.

>If a few nuclear plants could easily be built on budget and on time in a given system, it would not be an issue...

Then it must not be an issue, because the People's Republic of China has been building dozens of nuclear plants on time and on budget for the last decade.

Authoritarian state still keeping a toe in for military and pragmatic reasons. With communistic 5 year plan system you can through sheer force build a few reactors to keep the option open.

For every passing year they’ve been pulling back their nuclear ambitions in favor of renewables.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...

China's new nuclear connections have slowed way down since 2018. Last year, China connected just 1.2 GW(e) of new nuclear to the grid (a 1000 MW PWR and a 200 MW HTGR).

In contrast, they installed 217 GW(e) of PV in 2023.

Nuclear lost its "reliable baseload power" badge in 2022 when more than half of french nuclear reactors (32/56) were offline at the same time, some scheduled and most unscheduled.

How much backup do you need for nuclear?

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/la-moitie-du-parc-nuc...

I read lots of "Germany needs french nuclear fleet" here (as usual), but obviously no one mentionned when France needed European grid big time due to nuclear failings.

It's a lot simpler: nuclear ran out of time. It will take more time for any new nuclear plant approved today, to start operating, than for renewables solving electricity forever. It takes 12-14 years to build a nuclear power plant from scratch, even in jurisdictions where regulations are not a problem at all (Belarus for example). EU plans to eliminate all fossil-based electricity by 2040. It basically means: too late for nuclear.

And nuclear ran out of time because it had poor learning. A technology with little or no experience effect can be expected to eventually fall to technologies that do, even if it has an initial advantage.

Worse than that, it had a negative learning effect. Nuclear did have some learning but over the course of it positive effect (Wright's law) was more than counterbalanced with discovering many, many things that can go wrong, requiring very expensive design changes and even more expensive retrofits to existing reactors, and eventually required designers to become so paranoid about new designs they became prohibitively expensive to implement because of extended safety measures even in areas where they were probably unnecessary. Simply put: too many things can go wrong, price of mistake is too damn high, and any mistake is probably unfixable because even if a reactor is fine, retrofitting an existing reactor to accommodate safety-related change is frequently impossible because it's guts are forever radioactive even after a short runtime.

It was a political mistake to ever move with the nuclear power to outside of it's initial role: production of plutonium for nukes. Ironically, plutonium-producing reactors are much much safer because they don't need to produce high-pressure steam so can remain at atmospheric pressure cooled by vast amounts of cooling water, and they never develop too much radioactivity within themselves because fuel is irradiated there for 20x-100x shorter durations than in energy-producing reactors (to ca. 1 MW thermal*day per kg) because doing more increases posioning with Pu.240, so even a potential accident on an industrial reactor is much less dangerous, and much less likely.

Nuclear has had issues with scaling, but new small modular reactors (SMRs) could help.

SMRs are being touted because conventional large reactors are now painted into a corner. It's not that SMRs are good, it's that the larger ones are effectively dead in the west. SMRs still are in the running because their sales story has not yet been effectively debunked by experience.

SMRs are well, a story. They don't exist and never will. Nuclear scales well with size, naturally meaning it scales poorly down. A small reactor is bound to be extremely uneconomic to run. They are just a distraction, not going to happen.

That is quite possibly what will happen - for terrestrial applications. But anything past the orbit of Mars will require nuclear power - or very robust beamed power infrastructure.

Space applications cannot, of course, provide any justification for imposing nuclear on terrestrial markets.

Especially since design, and issues with, potential future space reactors have nothing to do with those of terrestrial ones, so there's next to no potential for technology transfer or sharing.

the problem with this argument is that we've been hearing it for the last 40 years - we could have had multiple generations of nuclear by now if it wasn't for the nimbys.

What were the potential alternatives to nuclear electricity 20-30 years, let alone 40 years ago (not counting fossil fuels, of course)? Today, wind produces about as much and probably a bit more electricity as nuclear (~12% less last year and growing quickly), next year, solar will produce more.

There are no nimbys in non-free countries, and nuclear has been pretty much stuck there, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

That's what i call "stuck". Solar went from essentially zero to a larger share of generation than nuclear in China, in 5 years. In the same time, nuclear has stopped growing there. China commissions a few nuclear reactors per year and ~400 GW per year of solar and wind.

When comparing nuclear in China, we need to compare it with... well other things that happen in China. Which are on a completely different scale vs rest of the world combined.

Nuclear power progress might seem impressive there compared to rest of the world, but not at all compared to other things that are being done in China itself.

> if it wasn't for the nimbys

But the nimbys weren't the problem, it was the financiers. Nuclear has been too expensive compared to alternatives. It's always about the money.

It’s only too late for nuclear if we continue to let oil barons decide to stunt the growth of genuine competition in the market. The reality of renewables is they are not and have never been consistent enough to provide full power, and we don’t have the battery technology to keep an energy grid’s worth of electricity on standby. If coal is too ecologically damaging then we need another on-demand power source to replace it since solar cannot supply us entirely and cannot respond to upticks in demand.

I am genuinely convinced most of the people discussing energy have no practical understanding of the power grid. Coal is useful because it can be turned on/off relatively quickly as demand required. Nuclear can do similar, renewables cannot.

I don't doubt renewables and batteries to be able to handle say day or two of power demand in most scenarios... Question really become about seasonal handling. Specially if we move heating from fossils to electricity even with heat pumps.

Doing the seasonal bit at scale in whole Western world(not just select blessed locations). Seems very far. At least if anything closing reasonable costs per kwh spend during low production times is considered.

Seasonal leveling would be done by combining solar/wind (which tend to have opposite seasonality) and by use of overprovisioning and production of e-fuels, like hydrogen.

To see how this would work, go to https://model.energy/ and find optimal solutions for synthesized constant output using solar, wind, batteries, and hydrogen storage. The cost optimizing solutions are found vs. real historical weather data.

Nuclear power is a complement, not a replacement. Together with wind, solar and water it helps keeping energy supply stable and cheap for all days of the year no matter the weather conditions.

That is why I support it.

Nuclear power is not a good complement for solar power. Nuclear works best as baseload power with constant production. To complement solar power you need peaking power plants. It is possible to build nuclear peaking plants, but the cost of that power is many times higher than from a baseload nuclear plant since most of the cost is upfront capital cost.

Meanwhile China can keep building nuclear plants at breakneck pace no problem. It's the same playbook for decades -- first we block nuclear at every opportunity, then we set impossible standards that make it impossible to build, then we say it's "out of time" and "taking away energy from renewables".

For decades these people have been saying "sure, nuclear would've been great if we'd built it decades ago, but there's no time now!" -- at this rate, we'll see those exact same articles keep getting written in 2064.

Of course solar is great too -- I'm highly in favor of having a diverse set of energy sources. Solar has base load problems, nuclear needs fuel, etc -- many strategic benefits and downsides for both.

Authoritarian state still keeping a toe in for military and pragmatic reasons. With communistic 5 year plan system you can through sheer force build a few reactors to keep the option open.

For every passing year they’ve been pulling back their nuclear ambitions in favor of renewables.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...

China connected just 1.2 GW(e) of new nuclear to their grid last year.

In contrast, they connected 217 GW(e) of new PV to their grid last year.

Why ignorance is a huge problem today. https://app.nuclearplanet.ch/nuclearplanet/kkw-world

We need a energy mix and push all technologies to the next level. "Renovables" (btw there is not single 100% renovable energy plant) have a huge impact in area destroyed (directly and indirectly) and a nefarious end of life.

It's difficult to see where we would need new nuclear power plants. Maybe for ship propulsion?

I'll stop advocating more nuclear the very nanosecond someone shows me the fabled cheap-as-water seasonal battery storage.

Renewables make cheap energy, but not when you need it, or even predictably, especially outside of California. But you need to store it, according to renewables maximalist this is imminent and a non-problem, until that is obvious I'm in favour of nuclear.

Love how the topic has shifted from “even an hour of storage” a couple of years ago to now demanding a complete seasonal storage solution without even specifying based on which data it is needed.

It is funny when reality outpaces contrived made up arguments by conservative detractors.

I never made the "one hour of storage" argument so that's a straw man as far as I'm concerned.

And my comment is made sincerely. Seasonal storage is make-or-break for renewables in many geographies (or has to be propped up by fossil fuels, which is the status quo).

Just a reflection in general on how your exact comment made by different people has evolved over the years.

Generally the research sees no problem with 100% renewable energy systems.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

So the question is what problem are you trying to solve?

1% 0.1%? Or even 0.01%?

That is a problem we can tackle when we get there in the 2040s with the solutions available at that time.

No need to force through expensive white elephants for potential made up problems.

> research

I.e. it doesn't yet exist. Until it does, nuclear makes sense.

And if lands, sure, let's ditch it. For now the "it will surely happen" reeks of electricity too cheap to meter.

Everything is impossible until someone has done it?

Meaning the French nuclear buildout also was impossible given your reasoning.

The selective impossibility arguments of the nuclear bros are hilarious.

No one has ever powered a society with nuclear energy either, yet they have no problem suggesting that with a straight face.

France, where this blogger is from, produces a little under 80% of its power from nuclear. It doesn't just power France, but also exports to the UK and Germany among others.

A 100% nuclear society is of course also theoretical, so don't even start with that. We're talking about the optimal mix of sources given currently (and medium-term foreseeable) technology. By most serious analyses, this will include improved energy storage, renewables, and nuclear in the form of SMRs.

Serious analysis means people 'at the coal face' who have to deal with the reality of actually powering a country, not posturing bloggers. Most countries don't have a desert to pave over with solar panels, and wind (especially offshore wind) has proven surprisingly expensive.

Both the current and previous UK governments, left and right respectively, have committed to increasing nuclear as part of the energy mix.

Germany is deeply regretting shutting down its nuclear power stations and the consequences that has had, not only in terms of emissions (twice the per-capita CO2 emissions of France and the UK), but also its energy independence.

France is sitting pretty, precisely because they dealt with the reality in front of them and didn't fall for Greenpeace-esque utopian fantasies that you're now projecting onto others.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/01/25/french-g...

France gets less than half their energy from nuclear. Don't confuse the grid with the society as a whole, with all ways energy is used.

And of course no one energizes all activities in their society with nuclear, not even France.

I will add that providing the world's approximately 20 TW of primary energy use via today's reactors would expend the estimated resource of uranium at current prices in less than 10 years. So anyone proposing a nuclear powered world is also assuming advances in either breeder reactors or uranium extraction. So the hypocrisy of ruling out renewables because they have not been proved in practice is palpable.

Germany is not regretting shutting down its nuclear plants at all. Scholz called it a dead horse last year and said the decision was made a long time ago, and it's time to move on. They gave the world a blueprint with the Energiewende, and the world is jumping on that train. I think it's a very exciting time.

There is no energy independence with nuclear. Most of the uranium comes in the world comes from Kasachstan. The only two countries with relevant production that are democratic are Canada and Australia. The rest is Usbekistan, Niger, Russia. There was a coup in Niger last year and the first thing the military regime announced was they stop selling uranium to France. At a time when the western world has shut its ties to Russia, France is still heavily dependent on Russia to supply uranium. The sun shines and the wind blows everywhere.

France doesn't actually power itself because it doesn't have enough. Last winter was the first winter since there are data (since 2014) that it didn't depend on Germany for imports because their heating is mostly electric, but there's not enough capacity in the winter. I think overall they are in a world of pain, Macron announced I think 6 new plants, but it took them 20 years to finish the prototype in Flamanville. By the time the new ones are finished they will have dozens of old ones waiting to be decomissioned. And they announced enormous investments in the upcoming years so that the old ones even make it that far. So a lot of money to kick the bucket down the road.

> kick the bucket down the road

This delightfully mixed metaphor has some bite.

Texas has been adding metric craptons of solar because it's cheaper to deploy than nuclear. The market forces are already on the side of renewables in most advanced economies. PES and neighborhood/distributed battery including V2G are ways out, and hopefully NMC battery technology will gradually be replaced with something safer. At this point, ostensible talk about nuclear that's not going to happen is crypto-techno-religious political virtue-signaling.

I think I read somewhere that you need 800 wind turbines to replace a typical nuclear plant or 5 million solar panels. Personally, I prefer solar panels on roofs over wind turbines as it's less of an eye soir and noisy.

The subjective "eye sore" argument isn't going to work anymore. It's too frivolous and doesn't give you the right to dictate what others can build on their private property.

Wind and solar work well together. It's windier at night and in winter when solar underperforms. It can be built in farmland wherever agrivoltaics may not be appropriate. It is especially valuable in Europe which has high wind and lower insolation.

Wind turbines are beautiful. Solar panels on roofs are great too. Not sure why you think it’s one or the other.

I do not believe that the claimed grid problems cannot be overcome. If it is really a problem, connect nuclear reactors to a separate grid for the railway and heavy industry.

In Germany, the Energiewende has been an expensive failure that led to astronomical electricity prices that no one can afford.

China will out-compete us yet again with their new pebble bed reactors.

The Energiewende was expensive because it supported PV over 2009-2012 when it was much more expensive than today.

The Energiewende was an enormous success, because that success was instrumental in providing demand that drove PV manufacture down an accelerating experience curve. PV is now much MUCH cheaper than it was then and this impetus is a big reason why.

Nuclear in China is sputtering compared to their renewable rollout.

The electricity prices argument is very simplistic. What drive electricity prices is very complicated, and sometimes misleading (in France, the low electricity price is a huge mistake, they are not collecting enough money for the medium and long term support of their infrastructure), and Germany is not worst than other country, even some with nuclear (Belgium, UK).

Sure, the Energiewende was a failure. It does not mean that 1) there is only one way to transition outside of nuclear (or that there is only one way to do nuclear: similarly pointing at the failure of France is not a good argument to reject nuclear pathways), 2) the situation has evolved and the advantages / disadvantages of the different generations are still the same.

I don't agree with everything in the article, but I also keep seeing pro-nuclear people having very very simplistic view on the situation. I prefer a lot people who are able to recognize the pro and the cons of all generation, without showing that they will minimize strongly the real facts that don't support what they want to hear. Nowadays in the energy sector, it is very very very clear that nuclear is, intrinsically, not competitive (not because of regulations, not because of ideology, just because it's an extremely complex enterprise). As long as the pro-nuclears continue to find bad excuses, I will agree that they are not reliable.

This seems to be a case of Westerners making excuses to screw up their economies.

The Japanese and Koreans have reduced the times for building power plants to 5 years and have even built some in 4.

This sounds like the Western worlds manufactured problems like trans issues and other such nonsense.

What happens to solar in the case of Krakatoa or a Sumatra volcanic event?

Why depend on unreliable weather to produce stable energy?

We are told over and over again that climate change implies weather disruption, so why depend on unreliable weather to produce reliable energy in the long term?

The Western world basically offloaded a lot of its own pollution to China then turned round to claim that they are making progress in achieving the green targets.

I mean the US spend trillions waging war in the Middle East, and yet couldn't invest the same amount on carbon-free energy, nuclear or otherwise. The West have become a joke.

> Why depend on unreliable weather to produce stable energy?

Because it has been incredibly cheap to do so.

> The Western world basically offloaded a lot of its own pollution to China

The overall effect of this on US emissions has been modest.

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