France's most powerful nuclear reactor connected to grid after 17-year build

We in the UK phased out the last coal burner earlier this year.

We're building a 3.2GW nuclear power station at Hinckley, expected to start up in 2027.

"Resulting in a Level 2 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale."

A level 2 on the INES is an Incident. A major Accident would be a level 7.

A level 2 is not that bad : Impact on people and environment: Exposure of a member of the public in excess of 10 mSv. Exposure of a worker in excess of the statutory annual limits. Impact on radiological barriers and control:

Radiation levels in an operating area of more than 50 mSv/h. Significant contamination within the facility into an area not expected by design. Impact on defence-in-depth:

Significant failures in safety provisions but with no actual consequences. Found highly radioactive sealed orphan source, device or transport package with safety provisions intact. Inadequate packaging of a highly radioactive sealed source.

That Wikipedia page explicitly states that the public has never subsidized damage from a nuclear accident. Nuclear energy companies are required to have $450M in private insurance for each reactor. For amounts over that, the Price-Anderson Act requires all nuclear energy companies to pay up to $121M per reactor, for a total of $12B in coverage. The public would potentially cover anything after that $12B, but that has never happened.

If every nuclear reactor in the US simultaneously had an accident requiring the $70M paid out for Three-Mile Island, we'd be around 1.2% of the way to needing Treasury funds. Three-Mile Island's operator was responsible for cleaning it up, and they paid the entire $1B required to do so.

True. In Germany some politics are calling for reactivating reactors, but is the energy companies that don't see a future that makes it worth the effort. Regarding safety, here, we rather have a unsolved nuclear waste problem. While municipalities profited from the plants, nobody wants to have the waste. There are other regions in the world, that are probably better suited for disposal, but I think one would need to pay quite a high price for disposal that would again add more to the already high costs. I have nothing against research towards more sustainable reactor types, but one needs to be honest about life cycle costs and not hope for future generations to solve the disposal cost for both waste and the plants themselves.

“Newfound”? People have been fighting this debate for decades. I remember having this exact debate at school 20 years ago, except the price arguments back then were bullshit, but people didn’t care enough about the environment so there wasn’t any pressure to change.

Nowadays the price arguments are… complex. But for the first time people actually care enough about the environment that nuclear is no longer competing poorly with coal (except for in Germany).

The exact maths on comparing pricing is complicated, given that energy storage costs vary so much depending on the inputs (try looking up storage costs for a 100% solar/wind grid during a once in a decade lull, it’d make nuclear look great, but obviously for a slightly mixed grid and more typical conditions, storage might be reasonably priced vs nuclear).

Anyway, I’m mildly disinterested in nuclear now that it’s only a side show to renewables, but I think it’s far from being a slam dunk either way. If some country or politian is more interested in nuclear, fair play to them, I say go for it. We’re not in a comfortable position right now so any movement away from fossils is a win regardless of where we end up (within reason of course)

No doubt the debate will only be resolved once and for all once fusion turns up and actually makes fission genuinely irrelevant (even then, fission might be cheaper for quite a while).