Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance
world-nuclear-news.org
world-nuclear-news.org
The last few days have also laid bare that there is no sovereignty without nuclear weapons. A civil nuclear fleet is a stepping stone to nuclear weapons stewardship.
(Even absent nuclear weapons, see the special treatment of Zaporizhzhia [1] over Ukraine’s other power infrastructure.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_P...
It's not guaranteed that every geopolitical rival would have those considerations when deciding whether to care about, or plan to actively attempt, triggering a nuclear meltdown in your nation.
And where does the nuclear fuel come from? Russia.
Edit: Parent meant enriched uranium, not ore so this comment is not relevant.
Canada, Khazakhstan, Namibi, and so on. Russia is pretty far down the list. Australia has the largest known reserves of uranium they just haven pushed to extensively extract it.
Not wrong, but Russia controls about half of the world's enrichment capacity.
If you want to avoid possible lock-in, then you may want to look at reactors that do not need enriched uranium (like CANDU: it does have an extra up-front cost for 'heavy water' though).
> The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Heck, >25% of the US's uranium comes from Russia:
* https://www.visualcapitalist.com/where-the-u-s-gets-its-enri...
Being able to use "plain" uranium greatly expands your supplier options.
I doubt that the US is buying from Russia—you know, the country/government which it threw sanctions on in all sorts of ways—because "it's cheap".
Recently a ban on importation was started, and it included a couple of billion for more processing facilities in the US:
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/climat...
It's a supply chain issue that took some time to sort out:
* https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-nuclear-fuel-agreemen...
* There are uranium enrichment facilities outside Russia, even in Europe
* There's uranium outside Russia, even in Europe (look at Czechia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...)
So, let's build a plant.
>And where does the nuclear fuel come from? Russia.
Nonsense.
And even after years of the war in Ukraine, Russia is still the second largest source of uranium for the EU, making up a quarter of imports
Italian companies that work on reactor design, decommissioning and technology commissioned by foreign countries, for example.
>Russia is still the second largest source of uranium for the EU, making up a quarter of imports
The vast majority of contracts are multiannual, the EU will rely much less on Russian uranium export once they expire. Italy has no reason to sign them with Russia.
Not true at all. Russia is producing 5% of the world Uranium, and they probably use quite a lot of that domestically given they produce 8% of all nuclear power in the world with their own plant.
Kazakhstan + Uzbekistan is 50% of the word production. Canada is second and will be happy to start selling to the EU. Namibia and Australia both produce twice as much as Russia.
Not to say that supply of natural Uranium is not a concern because you do depends of a small list of countries but we don't need to buy any from Russia.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
> The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Also a list of countries operating enrichment facilities does not say anything about capacity (Russia 50%) or market share (Russia 44%).
https://www.enerdata.net/publications/executive-briefing/ura...
The reality is that both the US and Europe are dependent on Russian uranium services, with the biggest dependency in Eastern Europe for fuel rods for Soviet-style Reactors. It's slowly changing, but will probably take decades.
On the other hand Germany managed to decouple itself from the Russian fossil gas industry within months.
So tell me again "How it can be done anywhere" when we apparently can't do it without Russia 3 years into the war.
Enel has built/is managing nuclear plants in Spain and Slovakia: https://www.enel.com/media/explore/search-press-releases/pre...
Eni is involved in building the first fusion plant: https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2024/04/0...
I didn't know that Enel operates nuclear power plants, that's interesting, but they seem to come from an acquisition of Endesa and have been constructed way before that acquisition, and from designs of foreign places. So they aren't modern generation reactors that one would want to build from scratch.
As for the Slovakian nuclear power plant, it's a russian design as well.
I don't doubt that Enel could operate nuclear reactors of foreign design, where Canada, Russia and France have strong capabilities, but if the design comes from a different country, do you really achieve the independence goal?
Absolutely correct. It will never serve as a power plant. It's a giant experiment, that's what the E stands for. We should be so lucky that one day it will generate a few minutes of power :)
And do you really want another target for foreign sabotage?
The only way to be independent is to invest in renewables and storage.
Honestly, we need to stop burning carbon and nuclear can help with this.
And like, I'd prefer to live in a world where we have far too much energy than far too little.
Note also that you can use nuclear/renewables to make hydrogen to potentially store more energy.
This is great news, and will hopefully lower the cost of electricity that we mostly import from France.
Well-timed populists.
not really. The referendum was planned long before Fukushima, but then Fukushima happened at just the right time, reminding voters just in time to vote against nuclear.
By the way, Italy had several nuclear reactors, but they were shut down after the first referendum.
For some nebulous and often politically-charged definition of safety.
See, your definition of safety seems to actually be "what feels safe to me". As such, it happens to be exactly opposite to what the data tells us.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
There's people in this very thread enthusiastic about nuclear power because it will help Italy develop nuclear weapons. So hard to argue that they were wrong.
They are wrong, but who cares? As long as Russia and China have nuclear weapons, disarming Europe isn't going to help anyone. Not to mention now North Korea and pretty soon Iran will have them too.
Arguably, if Germany wasn't so reliant on Russian gas, the war in Ukraine wouldn't have started. The "peace" in Greenpeace is more Orwellian than anything.
The second one was an unfortunate coincidence.
This says that up to 25% of electricity is imported during peak times, and as of 2016, Italy was the third-largest net importer of electricity after US and Brazil.
Investing in renewables and storage will.
I wonder what hinders us to replace the roofs of all houses with solar panels and put batteries in all cellars?
It might still be useful to build out nuclear power plants. But the solar+battery approach seems like an easier first step to increase the available power, doesn't it?
Nuclear isn’t a bad option too. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Only thinking in terms of cost is short vision IMO. What happens if in 20/30 years you need to dramatically ramp up the energy generation (maybe everyone will drive electric, maybe house heating will be electric, maybe someone will come up with a new tech that requires a huge amount of energy, ...) and you already covered most of the roofs? or panels and batteries are at their end of life and you need massive investments just to keep up with the status quo?
I woulnd't go in a fight with a fist tied behing my back, and global warming is one of the biggest fights we must face.
Another great move would be to stop the warmongering and to start buying gas from Russia, while we work on solar and nuclear.
This means you have to build other energy sources into the grid like gas turbines to be able to control the grid. So if you really want to compare energy prices than you have to look into the TCO.
https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/11q58pe/price_trend...
Solar panels last 20-25 years. Nuclear power plants last for 50+ years and use fraction of the space that solar. It is hard to believe that the TCO is lower. Usually people just looking at the price in the short term and comparing that. Batteries are a whole different can of worms. Super toxic and you need a high volume of those because the energy density is much lower.
Besides, if the Netherlands can have solar then Italy can too. It's much less densely populated.
And nuclear lasts 50+ years with constant maintenance, which is really expensive.
And what's the cost of building on a mountainside, and how much is maintenance?
> Besides, if the Netherlands can have solar then Italy can too
How much solar are they building in comparison to other sources?
> And nuclear lasts 50+ years with constant maintenance, which is really expensive.
Unlike solar panels built on mountainsides which are not suitable for other types of buildings?
Batteries would need to be cheaper, that is all that is needed for italy. In the south, they have sun all year around.
Which would be: there is not really a need for stationary batteries to be expensive.
It's a very common tactic by renewables maximalists, and I'm very familiar with it
"And what's the cost of building on a mountainside, and how much is maintenance?"
Why should I feel it as my duty to answer that specific question to you? Seriously curious.
So the conversation, in context, is literally this:
---
Someone: we should build panels on mountainsides
Me: how much more expensive will building and maintaining them will be?
You: Maintaining solar panels will be always way, way, waaay cheaper than maintaining nuclear. Also batteries will need to become cheaper
Me: Erm... That doesn't answer my question, and on top of that you're admitting batteries are not cheap either
---
But, again, this is on par with what I expect in such discussions
Citization needed. Actually we do not know and we are figuring this out.
Few examples:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpJKM65tsCo
- https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/weather/worlds-largest-float...
Batteries would need to be safer, less toxic and less prone to be mined by children in Africa, also orders of magnitude more energy dense.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
If 50 years we need to build a single nuclear plant while you have to build twice the solar capacity I doubt that solar come out cheaper.
CSIRO with GenCost included it in this year's report.
Because capital loses so much value over 80 years ("60 years + construction time) the only people who refer to the potential lifespan are people who don't understand economics. In this, we of course forget that the average nuclear power plant was in operation for 26 years before it closed.
Table 2.1:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
The difference a completely absurd lifespan makes is a 10% cost reduction. When each plant requires tens of billions in subsidies a 10% cost reduction is still... tens of billions in subsidies.
Batteries are just going to get better - especially over a 10y time span
In winter the days are short, the sky can be covered in clouds for an entire week, the solar panels can be covered in snow also. I have solar panels but I do not have a way to export my data to show you the summer vs winter GIANT difference.
So people like me with solar need the other people in the area not to all go for solar, then we will need to find a way to burn the excess. Is the same with a country, we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds. The EU market might be so in demand that the rich countries will bid for the energy and the poor will have to burn their things to survive.
I am wondering if it would happen that with so many solar roofs we will either have to pay for people to use my energy or I will need to actually throw the excess in the ground safely somehow.
Short days, but still enough to make a lot of juice in Italy. Scotland and Scandinavia get issues, but Italy's basically OK for winter: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28sunrise%2C+Rome%2C+2...
And: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
> we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds
You, personally, can't store 2 weeks of energy (though it's closer than you may expect, 1 person-week of Italian average electrical consumption is ~= 1 EV battery*). But you personally don't have to, transmission to another part of the country (or continent) has a huge impact on how much storage you need.
Basically, this problem is known, it's not all that difficult to work around — everything on the scale of "national power supply" is expensive and has pros and cons, PV isn't particularly remarkable in the scale or cost of those pros and cons even with current solutions and assuming no R&D effort can improve the trade-offs, they're just different than the pros and cons of the other options.
* https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28%28300+terawatt-h...
Also when the weather is bad it is bad in a big chunk of Europe, sure in the South they will probably have nicer weather.
What about the issue when everyone has solar? then who buys my extra production? Or if there is someone that can buy it because of too much solar the prices would be close to zero then the solar panels investment will not be worth it since you could be cheap energy from the people with solar panels when the weather is good.
My gut feeling is that 100% solar is stupid, it is like the 20-80 problem we see now a lot of growth since it is very profitable, when more grid investment is needed and profits will go down this growth will stop.
I would need to write something the size of a PhD thesis, not a comment, to fully describe the various possibilities and their trade-offs for even just the Italian grid, let alone the whole of Europe's.
But to keep it simple, I can say that limits of your grid can be re-engineered, and even for unrelated age and capacity reasons people are already planning to spend more on upgrading the European grid anyway, than it would cost for the material to build a global high-power DC backbone that would let the EU be lit in the middle of night, in the middle of winter, without any batteries at all, by panels in the Australian outback — and I have in fact done the maths on that.
(Only China is actually making enough aluminium, there's geopolitics even before Trump happened, but the price tag to get a single ohm of resistance around the entire planet is actually fine).
> Or if there is someone that can buy it because of too much solar the prices would be close to zero then the solar panels investment will not be worth it since you could be cheap energy from the people with solar panels when the weather is good.
Such investment is still generally worth it, because you don't need to actually sell anything when the price is low (or even negative), and even if it was zero the whole time forever, you've saved 100% of the current cost of supplying yourself with electricity.
> My gut feeling is that 100% solar is stupid, it is like the 20-80 problem we see now a lot of growth since it is very profitable, when more grid investment is needed and profits will go down this growth will stop.
100% anything leads to correlated failures.
But there's several other renewables.
About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.
I bought the panels because they were subsidized otherwise there would be more profitable to buy the energy, without subsidies and if energy will be cheaper or I would get paid to use it then solar panels would make no sense .
Imagine then a country that needs to over build solar panels, why would private sector accept this?
Interested amateur. I skim read the actual government and industrial reports, and know enough to be able to roughly estimate the effort required to construct precise answers.
> is it cheap to make it possible to get the electricity from homes, and resue or add new transformers to raise the voltage to medium then high voltage and use the same high voltage lines and whatever they use to get the energy from homes in Italy to homes in Romania ?
"Cheap" is already the wrong question: on this scale, energy is measured in percentage points of the economy, opportunity loss from what else can be done with the same resources, geopolitical exposure, not pure €, and that means questions like "is it cheap?" can only be considered against everything else the governments can do with the same resources — not even just other energy projects, absolutely everything, and how everything interacts with everything else, has to be taken into consideration.
Consider this: https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c...
If you limit yourself to just €, the scenarios on page 7 say that improving the grid would:
• 2030: reduce wasted power by 2 GW while saving €5 billion per year in wasted energy
• 2040: reduce wasted power by 4.8 GW while saving €9 billion per year in wasted energy
While another pair of options on page 22 shows:
• €5.6 billion per year invested, returns of €9.4 billion per year
• €3.6 billion per year invested, returns of €8.6 billion per year
But! The report is also has a section header titled "Does the study consider the EU’s goal to reduce dependency on gas imports?" with several specific mentions of Russia throughout.
> About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.
When did you buy?
I think you're over-estimating the current price of PV by a factor of about 15-25 — here's one of my local supermarkets, this price pays for itself in about *one* year: https://www.kaufland.de/product/456527791/?search_value=phot...
I believe Italian electricity (you are in Italy, right?) is slightly cheaper than German electricity, but that's more than compensated for by having more sun.
This is already the case - Germany ends up paying for both electricity exports and imports.
How about large nuclear plants, what are the probabilities of cost overruns and who is insuring that?
Add to that the uncertainty over fuel and the disposal of used fuel, and there's literally no valid cost argument for nuclear.
I'm not anti-nuclear, but the fiscal realities seem insurmountable.
Than you can calculate the price.
Energy mix is key: the cost of 100% dependency on intermittent renewables is extremely high.
Going for 95% dependency on intermittent renewables with the remainder being filled in by low-cost dispatchable generation halves system costs (see table 6, pg. 21).
You do know that the study is only applicable to running your off-grid cabin from a sole source and battery storage based on 2020 costs. The study also assumes 100% uptime for nuclear power.
It does not deal with demand shifts, it does not deal with transmission, it does not deal with backup power.
It also managed to finds a nuclear LFSCOE of $106/MWh. Even though it doesn't adapt to peaks or breakdowns when Hinkley Point C sits at $170/MWh when running at full tilt for 35 years.
Whenever we do quality research on the subject the results end up being that nuclear power is horrifically expensive.
See for example:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
The Clean Power 2030 report from NESO came to a similar conclusion. See Insights from our clean power sensitivities, pg 53: https://www.neso.energy/document/346651/download
Solar panels are down to something like $0.20/W, a factor of 50 cheaper than a nuclear power plant. Solar panels are only a fraction of the cost of a solar installation though. Utility-scale solar is around $1/W, a factor of 10 below nuclear. Adjusting for capacity factor, solar is still several times cheaper than nuclear (and has lower operating cost).
There'd also be less overbuilding of solar as you have to build for winter weather and day length instead of summer if solar is supposed to cover everything
There are also new plants in the making [2]
Being tuscanian, I visited the museum or geothermal energy in larderello once, the area of larderello is quite uncanny, in some parts the ground is literally fuming steam. There's also a smell of rotten eggs lol
https://www.enelgreenpower.com/stories/articles/2024/10/geot...
https://www.lanazione.it/cronaca/geotermia-patto-regione-ene...
https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali...
As far as I am concerned, self sufficiency comes before price concerns. Nuclear is very safe and reliable.
By all means, EU countries should keep investing in Solar, Wind, Geotermal, etc. but that should be done alongside Nuclear.
How do we stop fukushima-like disasters?
Nuclear power is extremely cost effective, even with the current plants.
The individual plants are currently expensive, because they are large and produce huge amounts of power. Since that means you only have a fairly small number of plants, that means the risk is higher than preferable.
However, even with existing designs, building a common design multiple times and overlapping the build times brings down risk, build-time and costs tremendously.
The German Konvois were built for DM 5.8 billion in less than 6 years, and we were just getting started.
China is currently building their version of the passively safe Westinghouse AP-1000, the CAP-1400, in 5 years for $ 3.5 billion.
Even in China, two orders of magnitude more PV comes online each year compared to nuclear (nameplate power, adjust by a factor of maybe 4 for levelized power).
Nuclear advocates defending the fantasy you are espousing here have to resort to universal conspiracy theories to explain away this unpleasant reality. But how are supposedly omnipotent greens and public fear supposed to be hindering nuclear's rollout in China?
Nuclear may benefit from experience, but that means that as rollouts are scaled back, experience decays away and nuclear gets more expensive. Below a certain (and probably pretty large) rate of installs, nuclear just regresses. It's not clear even China can avoid this at the current install rate.
First, you need to compare actual output, not installed capacity. Once you take into account capacity factors, it's not looking so good any longer.
Second, if it were true that nuclear is being "out-competed", then nobody in their right mind would expand their nuclear capacity. Yet almost everyone except a few crazies and countries that are too small are doing exactly that: expanding their nuclear capacity.
Let's see who has decided to get into nuclear / reverse exits / expand capacity:
1. Italy just decided to reverse their exit.
2. Japan had decided to exit, and actually shut down their plants. They are now restarting those plants.
3. South Korea had also decided to exit, but not shut down any plants yet. They have reversed that exit. And are expanding.
4. Poland has decided to start a nuclear program, first 3 reactors are ordered, budgeted and construction has started at the site. There are a lot more planned. The vote for financing the new projects was nearly unanimous in parliament.
5. The UK is so incredibly unhappy with Hinkley Point C that they have just started work on 2 more reactors at Sizewell C, have sited another 2 in Wales and have a policy of expanding nuclear capacity by a factor of 4.
6. The US effectively built no new new plants since the TMI accident. They are now reactivating everything possible, are even planning to finish the two AP-1000s at Virgil C. Summer and have a goal of tripling their nuclear capacity by adding another 200 GW.
7. Sweden has reversed their exit and wants to build 10 new plants
8. The new government in Belgium has reversed their exit, has extended at least one (or was it two?) plant by another 10 years, is trying to save a few more that are/were due to be decommissioned and is looking to build more.
9. France had a ban on expanding their nuclear generating capacity beyond the currently installed capacity. This was lifted in March of 2023 with > 2/3 majority in parliament.
10. The Netherlands originally wanted two new nuclear reactors. They have now decided on 4 large reactors, in addition to the single small one they currently operate. This will be a 10x expansion of their nuclear capacity.
11. India is on track to triple their capacity by 2031.
12. China is currently starting 10 new reactors a year, and the rate is still increasing. Why aren't they doing more? Well, one reason is that nuclear power plants last for a really long time, currently estimated at least 80-100 years for most of the well-maintained plants. If you build 10 per year and they last 100 years, that implies a fleet of 1000 reactors. That's a lot of reactors!
France made this mistake, they built around 50 reactors in only 15 years, due to vastly overestimating electricity demand. The result was that they the nuclear industry they built up had essentially no plants to build for a good number of decades, and so that know-how and capability was lost and had to be re-acquired at great cost (see Flamanville 3).
Countries have learned from this and are pacing themselves. No need to rush.
13. The Czech Republic is betting on both large reactors from South Korea (the APR-1400, IIRC) as well as SMRs from Rolls Royce. In fact, they took a 20% in Rolls Royce.
14. Switzerland has begun the process of undoing their exit decision
15. Even Norway and Denmark are considering nuclear
16. The UAE, with ideal conditions for solar (desert), has recently completed a 4 reactor power plant, and is considering adding more.
... and so on and so forth ...
Why are all these countries expanding nuclear? Is the entire rest of the world stupid? Crazy? Only Germany knows what they're doing?
No.
What they know is that a nuclear + renewable mix is significantly cheaper and more reliably than any attempt to do 100% intermittent renewables, even if that were feasible, which is more than uncertain.
It is only (mostly?) in Germany where this crazy notion that nuclear and renewables are mutually exclusive has taken hold. They are not. They complement each other.
As soon as the bill hits the political discussions tend to turn.
See for example the Polish example:
> Poland plans to support this investment through:
> - (i) an equity injection of approximately €14 billion covering 30% of the project's costs;
> - (ii) State guarantees covering 100% of debt taken by PEJ to finance the investment project;
> - (iii) a two-way contract for difference (‘CfD') providing revenue stability over the entire lifetime of the power plant of 60 years.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
The subsidies to get a single reactor starting construction are absolutely bisarre.
The first Polish plant is not a "single reactor". It is 3 reactors.
The poles haven’t spent money, that is an application for the EU commission to review the subsidies.
Not a single final investment decision is taken.
Even the French are postponing the EPR2 program due to the horrific costs. Now it might begin in 2026, if they can politically agree to the mindbogglingly large subsidies.
https://www.power-technology.com/news/poland-14-7bn-nuclear-...
Of course they haven't spent the money yet.
> Even the French are postponing the EPR2 program due to the horrific costs
Completely untrue.
And French nuclear is not subsidized. Unlike renewables.
It is a program championed by the previous hard right authoritarian government with not as enthusiastic interest by the current polish government.
> And French nuclear is not subsidized. Unlike renewables.
Why do you keep making stuff up which is easily findable? Is accepting reality that hard?
The EPR2 program hinges on absolutely massive subsidies. The French auditing agency said that even assuming insanely low capital costs and profit margins it makes a large loss.
Taking real figures it just becomes stupid.
The French auditing agency recommended to postpone the EPR2 program due to the low value and incredibly high costs.
https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-01/20250114...
What they said about EPR2 is that they were refused the information to even make an estimate of its profitability. Translation (using DocLingo) from page 25:
"In its 2020 report on the EPR sector, the Court recommended that EDF 'calculate the projected profitability of the Flamanville 3 reactor and the EPR2 and ensure its monitoring' (recommendation no. 6). EDF has deliberately and persistently refused to provide the Court with information on the projected profitability and production costs, which leads to considering this recommendation as not implemented. work.
Based on the information at its disposal, the Court's calculation predicts a poor profitability for Flamanville 3. For its part, the EPR2 program is still characterized by the absence of a finalized estimate and a financing plan."
Any claims of profitability of EPR/EPR2 should be taken with heavy skepticism, given that the official auditors have been stonewalled.
The French auditors said that Flamannville 3, the solitary EPR prototype, will be "marginally" profitable. This is one of the most catastrophic builds in recent history. And it will still be more profitable than any of the intermittent renewable projects in Europe.
EDF does in fact, receive subsidies from the French government. For their renewables projects. Not for their nuclear projects. Which pay for all this nonsense.
Compared to the EPR, the EPR2 is vastly simplified, for better buildability. The complaint there was that they were moving too quickly for the auditors, as they didn't have all the documentation they would like to have.
Compare this with the absolutely devastating report of the Bundesrechnungshof, the German auditors, on the failed German Energiewende.
You can see online, nuclear power is actually one of the safest methods of energy generation, behind solar and ahead of wind, because sometimes dudes fall from the tops of the windmills.
Could you start looking at the second-order effects of the meltdown to get a higher death toll? Probably, but you could probably also look at all of the pollutants generated by solar panels, and the fact that they get shipped to Africa and crushed up and thrown in the ground to make solar's death toll look higher too.
And with Fukushima we were kinda lucky. It was still a double meltdown with several hydrogen explosions and could have been much worse.
The WHO says there will be no detectable health effects.
Anyway, let me steelman what you're aiming at here. I think you want to argue not that hundreds of deaths won't occur, but that hundreds of deaths don't matter that much. These are statistical deaths, so it's appropriate to treat them using the "statistical value of a human life". This is the value of a life to be used for policy purposes (like deciding if a safety measure is needed, if spending on a medical treatment is appropriate, etc.) In the US, it's around $12M per life. So, 200 (say) deaths would have a value of $2.4B. This is not enormous compared to overall cost of the accident, even to the utility. It could be reasonable to treat radiation releases as at Fukushima by fining the polluter by an amount related to this value.
Under this sort of regulatory regime, the purpose of regulations is not to avoid all releases, but to keep the releases small enough that the utilities would have the resources to pay the fines. So, no 100,000 death accidents. Nuclear power plants designed to this concept could allow some small radiation release in accidents.
It's a lot like trusting your private data to a company. Sure, Google in 2007 is pretty great, but maybe you have some doubts about their integrity in 2025. Too late, they have what they have, forever.
Is this guaranteed to work? The Chernobyl disaster was caused by grossly-improper maintenance, so… :shrug:. No matter how many physical safety mechanisms you have, a determined mechanic could remove them – but at that point, it becomes deliberate sabotage, which is rare, detectable, and not unique to nuclear power plants. (You could probably kill more people by destroying the right dam in the middle of the night.)
At scale, in the long run, you will get grossly improper maintenance. I feel comfortable asserting that without feeling like a total cynic.
It's not just nuclear either, this is also a problem with dams.
And that's before you take into account second order risks like people dying because they can't afford to heat properly during winter.
The damage from Fukushima has been so small that it wouldn't make it past regional headlines if it didn't involve the scary word "nuclear".
One solution is to house government officials and their families close-by so they're incentivized to never cheap out.
How many times did this happen in 80 years? according to [1] not many times.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
And this is including very early technology and government (e.g. the Russian one) that I wouldn't trust with anything.
The consequences of a nuclear incident are very high, and can be more or less permanent for an area. It's a lot to ask for a technology to be absolutely resilient to mismanagement or even sabotage.
Now apply this logic to many other power sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Pri...
Your link shows a deeper root cause
> TEPCO admitted that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants
Scientific and engineering reports don’t solve that one
No tell me why we are still building hydroelectric plants?
Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Improving continuously, having strict but not restrictive regulation, addressing risks before they become a problem.
And climate change can have very sudden and unpredictable results too as we've seen all over the world in recent years.
Look at what happened here in Spain in Valencia only a few months ago. Unprecedented in the region's recorded history. Yet it keeps happening more and more.
But I can see how the way I worded it suggests I meant that yes. I should have been clearer. What I did mean to say is that recorded history is like a microsecond in geological time and I wouldn't put too much confidence in predicting based on that short period.
But they are two different risks. Over exacerbated by climate change, the other indeed not.
In the case of Fukishima, only one person died directly because of it. About 2000 more deaths can be related to the nuclear accident, for example because they were displaced and living in worse conditions [2]. Since this is the kind of event that every few decades (we have to go back to Chernobyl for something similar) I would say that it is not a reason for worrying.
For comparison, that is 1/10 of people that died in Japan because of the Tsunami that caused it, and it is less than the number of people that die every year for traffic accidents in Italy, so if I was Italian (wait, I am!) I would be more worried about the road traffic than a nuclear accident.
[1] https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2024/07/two-engineers-h...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUnik4gxrtM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
> MSRs eliminate the nuclear meltdown scenario present in water-cooled reactors because the fuel mixture is kept in a molten state. The fuel mixture is designed to drain without pumping from the core to a containment vessel in emergency scenarios, where the fuel solidifies, quenching the reaction.
As one of the worst Nuclear accidents in history (caused by one of the largest earthquakes to hit Japan along with a tsunami), an awfully small amount of people died.
If anything, Fukushima shows how safe Nuclear actually is.
Solar, wind and batteries have no fuel concerns, and they are inherently decentralized.
I know the soviets dug up half the Czech Republic for uranium deposits though. There's still some left there, not sure how much though. I have a feeling that the reliance on Africa and Russia is more price and environmental regulation driven.
With some work and investment European nuclear fuel supply could be 100% free from Russia, which anyway is peanuts compared to billions spent on Russian LNG. Uranium ore can come from Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia, not only African countries.
They will keep working for years as you find new suppliers for spare parts. When the reach EOL you need to find a new supplier.
In the meantime the already existing required firming capacity might be run a bit harder to manage any shortfall.
But in the nuclear cult that is equivalent to still not being able to decouple Europe from the Russian nuclear industry 3 years into the war.
Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada are main suppliers.
It's not taboo, the answer is just extremely simple: mining needs people willing to work in a dangerous and exhausting field, so when practical, rich countries tend to prefer outsourcing this (capitalism does not tend to reward ethics). It's very practical for uranium because nuclear reactors need a tiny volume which is trivial to ship and to store. Most countries with a nuclear program keep a stockpile of multiple years.
Mining uranium in other places is very feasible, as are other more expensive options like extracting it out of the ocean. After all, with nuclear the cost of the fuel is a tiny amount of the actual cost of power generation. This is not happening because there's really no need to. In the past, there have been uranium mines in pretty much every european country, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Euro...
(Refining/processing is a different story. But that's more obviously a "money/care" problem - there's no possible physical constraint for refining/processing as there could be for mining.)
Denmark also have 3700 tons of uranium ore just laying around, not sure how much actual uranium you can extract from that, very little I suspect.
Look at the energy crisis. Did we have a lack of energy? No, the pricing mechanism made sure we had no rolling blackouts.
Did we have expensive energy? Yes, that was the whole crisis.
You want to lock in another energy crisis because you are completely locked into trying to justify building nuclear power.
Solar with battery backup is about that, globally, on average.
But: the averages have sufficiently broad variance that there's places where one wins, and places where the other wins.
PV+battery is between 75-140 USD/MWh; whereas new nuclear is, depending on who I ask, any of 81-82, 65, or 141–221 USD/MWh.
SMRs might, possibly, change that — we shall have to see. I have nothing against SMRs, but they're novel, and I've seen a lot of novel ideas that seem interesting, go nowhere.
(Unless new ones are SMR, which is why there's now business interest in SMRs. They may well have numbers large enough to cut costs).
R&D is high-variance.
You just keep making empty promises that never work out in reality. Just look at Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
You want more of that?!?
Enough for a long cold winter night in northern Europe?
Enough for a longer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute ?
From your link:
"Events that last more than two days over most of Europe happen about once every five years."
I belive that for the EU as a whole, enough for two days works out as about 32 kWh per person. More or less for specific nations.
So, think in terms of what you'd repurpose used EV batteries for prior to fully recycling them.
But this shouldn’t even be a requirement as long as you can feed it into the grid.
In the unlikely event that they do catch fire, they are extinguishable with water.
Nothing has zero risk, but there are much more stable chemistries available than those that formed this (rational) opinion.
I would still skip this step and let it be the power company's problem though, simply because at ~400 USD / kWh they don't seem very cost efficient for off-peak storage (at least in my country).
As for off-peak storage, these would allow you to replace a Tesla powerwall for ~$600-750 US. I don't know your country, or its peaks (or valleys) but on my sailboat, off-peak is night time or cloudy days, and in sunny climes, 600ah gets me nigh infinite power. Without clear skies, I'm limited to ~4-5 days of normal consumption.
(Not trying to nudge you off your position at all, just sort of reflecting/remarking at how practicable this all is at the moment.)
It's not a universal answer.
We are off grid, just purchased solar + batteries that will supply all power needs, including running aircon and hot water at night. That's the purchase price, amortised over 10 years assuming our current daily usage.
The reality is our anticipated power usage will go up with electric cars and the system is speced to cope, and parts will last over twice the 10 years.
I suspect your question was purely retorical. You weren't fishing for an answer is effectively "cheaper than I can buy electricity from the local coal fired utility", but that is the reality. Nuclear costs about twice that.
Notice I'm paying retail. If you are going to compare wholesale prices to the $0.20 you typically have to multiply them by 3.
Panels today. Batteries as available. Nuclear eventually - maybe.
(people will respond with "what about SMRs", to which I will ask "what's the shortest time from decision to online that a SMR project has achieved?")
American here. It’s becoming clear that a sizeable section of our electorate only respects nuclear sovereignty.
Having a civilian program makes things a little easier, or at least easier to hide. Italy does have a tiny uranium reserve, which it never mined, but I'd guess that they'd need to buy the uranium they'd need for a nuclear weapon. That's a bit easier to do, if you can disguise it as nuclear fuel.
If you were going to resume work on nuclear weapons, would you announce it immediately? ... Or would you say that you're developing your nuclear power capabilities.
There are well established historical lines here to be read between.
yea after you build the damn thing maybe. Good luck with that. There is a reason 90% of new added capacity is renewable and it's not because of the environment.
Also... nuclear cheap? Come on, it's the most expensive energy source of the mix, except maybe peak gas.
Nuclear is big in France, has always been big and favoured. Still no "better research" and no magic disposal, after decades of investment. We are asked for religious levels of faith but they don't deliver.
If you want to be cynical than this latest move could just be the same as Australia's right wing party's pretence about nuclear.
At least in Australia it's local fossil fuels they'd be burning not imported gas.
But what game is currently being played by the Trump administration? He told the EU to be self-sufficient in defense spending, insults them and Ukraine to awaken their pride. He (temporarily) cuts off public ties with Zelensky. The press conference with the row at the end actually ended with Trump winking at the audience and Zelensky putting his thumb up. That part is cut out of many videos.
EU leaders scramble to put up the type of peace plans that they know will be refused. What if all is prearranged and Trump just wants to dump Biden's conflict on the EU, at least temporarily until everyone has rearmed?
Trump has said a lot, including lifting sanctions on Russia. But he extended the sanctions. He did halt arms shipments to Ukraine either to pressure Ukraine or the EU.
The EU should negotiate with Russia without the US, get a viable peace plan and drop sanctions. Then we'll see if Trump's behavior is more than theater.
It's far, far more than nuclear per unit [0]. Nuclear power is nearly a thousand times less murderous.
0 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
My wife is a nuclear engineer (in France), and I'd have been the same hadn't Fukushima killed the job prospects in the field for almost a decade, so personally I would rather not have the “nuclear is too dangerous, let's kill this industry” once again.
Also, even if nuclear energy is very far from deadly in its day to day operations, nuclear accident have a lasting impact on the region near the plant, with people having to leave their houses and so on, so I'm not wishing that for anyone. (Living 8 km away from an nuclear plant makes me quite sensitive to this aspect, obviously).
Sorry. Even here, Poe's law is very much a thing when it comes to this topic.
> Living 8 km away from an nuclear plant makes me quite sensitive to this aspect, obviously
Living near a coal plant has a much bigger impact on your health, all things considered. We're just bad at estimating risk with things like this, especially with how media covers things.
The odds of a nuclear accident are far lower than most people believe, and the risks from coal far greater.
- fact #1: nuclear plants are way less dangerous than coal plants, because as long as there's no accident, it doesn't harm you (unlike coal) and odds of an accident are very very low.
- fact #2: when you are very unlucky and a nuclear accident do happen, then it's a big problem. Again, statistically it's not a concern because such accident are very very very rare: just 2.5 occurrences in 70 years of exploiting the technology over hundreds of nuclear reactors (I'm counting TMI as .5 here because it was close)
- now the joke explained: “Nuclear accidents happen when Italy start considering nuclear, which implies such an accident will occur soon”. If that correlation was indeed causation, there would be legit reasons to be afraid, because nuclear accident are still pretty bad when they happen. Obviously Italy doesn't possess such a power of triggering nuclear accident, and there's no reason to be afraid, but that was the joke!
You better believe that every single one of those nations is now revisiting that decision.
For those wondering if Italy can afford to build nuclear: their economy is larger than Russia’s. As is Brazil’s, another nation that put nuclear weapons on hold per U.S. request.
I have special beef with Kurzweil’s life expectancy BS because he misrepresents facts in his essays. His famous “Law of Accelerating Returns” essay has an incredible number of misleading plots and conflated arguments, but the life expectancy graph at the bottom is a pure lie, and Kurzweil knows it. It conflates life expectancy with longevity, and it left out data from before 1840 and from between 1940 and 2000 that he already had. If you include that known data and explain what longevity is, it ruins his plot and his argument, but he wanted to pretend there’s a trend that doesn’t exist so he intentionally left it out. https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-acceleratin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Now you obviously can argue that there should be other considerations, but that is your argument and interpretation, not the obvious truth that the actual data needs to be judged against.
Citing a correct fact about the world is not propaganda, as facts are neither doctrine nor "reflect views".
> Citing a correct fact about the world is not propaganda, as facts are neither doctrine nor "reflect views".
It says "propagation of doctrine" and facts can be used to propagate a doctrine.
Edit:
Here's a definition from Wikipedia:
> NATO's 2011 guidance for military public affairs defines propaganda as "information, ideas, doctrines, or special appeals disseminated to influence the opinion, emotions, attitudes, or behaviour of any specified group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda#Definitions
Does that sound like the information has to be false to be propaganda?
What does that mean?
Claim is correct => Claim is not propaganda
Also means
Claim is propaganda => Claim can not be correct
The GDP ranking involves all countries. So whose propaganda is it, and what’s the motivation? If it’s technically accurate that Italy ranks above Russia by GDP then what’s the basis for calling it propaganda? Typically propaganda is nationalistic and spreading false information within a country and being used to justify a country’s moves against another, not international verifiable facts that are technically accurate and not being used to justify some action.
GDP is a single summary metric, not a comprehensive analysis. It’s entirely possible that Russia’s and Italy’s rankings could swap when using a different economic metric. That certainly doesn’t mean GDP rankings are propaganda.
Anders Puck Nielsen just published an interesting video on this topic [How does Russia's military spending compare to Europe?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxq-TvgNCBU)
The Russian economy cannot produce half of what Germany or Japan can. That means they have to import it. Which means the truth is somewhere between PPP and nominal GDP. (The simplest statistical treatment is to PPP domestic industries and nominalise imports, but that’s really an analysis one must do oneself as the assumptions are too numerous for convincing someone who’s already concluded adversely.)
If they could keep selling in rubles without a fall in exports or prices then the month's contribution to GDP was 15% higher than the previous one. That doesn't seem very confusing.
That is also notable in the context of Trump yelling at Zelensky that Zelensky is supposedly playing with WW3. If anything, by not making nukes Zelensky shows an, unreasonable at my opinion, restraint here.
They need to develop bunker busters though.
Btw, according to the Russian nuclear doctrine nukes can be used when the country is invaded even with just conventional weapons if the invasion presents severe threat to the country. Thus according to the Russian nuclear doctrine Ukraine is allowed to use nukes.
Let's not forget these folks have their self preservation in first order, the population is just a means for their survival.
That's why it's imperative for Ukraine to have bunker busters, like gravity bombs, because the first strike would need to be where the leadership is.
The MAD argument still applies: Ukraine can't threaten to nuke Moscow without Russia obviously threatening to retaliate with nukes.
May be you mean uranium enrichment? When plutonium is already available, like in Ukraine, it is completely different game - you just need to chemically separate plutonium from the spent fuel. That is the only noticeable expense - needs facility with safety protections, etc. Or just a few people willing to die for the Motherland. The rest is putting charges around the plutonium sphere and timing them correctly with electronics. That is basically all. Couple weeks really :)
Which is fortunate, because it's also quite easy to make plutonium by exposing (natural or depleted) uranium to neutrons…
Ukraine isn’t in and probably never will be in a position to credibly threaten a MAD second strike to Russia. From number of warheads to strategic depth, it’s not a realistic option. Instead it would seek to credibly threaten limited nuclear war using tactical nukes.
This would only make sense with European support. And at that point, it almost makes more sense for Europe to directly enter the fight. (Or give Kyiv the nuclear weapons.)
Both sides have to agree to the "limited" part for it to stay limited. Mind you, threats of nuclear escalation are routine from Russia.
It’s more that each side has to moderate itself. That’s true if both have nukes or just one. And it’s much easier to moderate oneself when it’s in one’s own interest, e.g. to avoid getting nuked.
If you mean a scenario where Russia uses its entire arsenal at once, I think I would agree — but that would leave them extremely vulnerable to everyone else. Even without that, between the shared border and the nuclear reactors, lots of fallout would end up in Russian soil, in their farms and food.
For the size of nuclear strike that would allow Russia to not hurt itself directly by the attack:
If Ukraine found a some still-functioning nukes lying around in a formerly-locked Soviet-era cupboard, what would stop them from being so already with current weapons?
Russia doesn't seem to be able to prevent conventional strikes by Ukrainian forces. Is that only due to US assistance with materiel and intel?
They can always just stop? It's not as if Ukranian tanks are at the gates of Moscow, it's more like the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or the previous USSR withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It is unclear whether the UK or France would threaten a retaliatory strike in case of nuclear weapons use not against their own territory. It doesn't seem likely, but if there's one thing Putin is very cautious about it's his own personal survival.
They can, but that is what I am wondering about. Will a desperate Putin think he can get away with a nuclear first strike on Ukraine? If he thinks he can, why stop?
Considering that the Russian government continues to sell this invasion to its people as a "special military operation" and bans calling it a "war", what impact would using nuclear weapons have on the internal politics of Russia?
I also invite you to consider the converse: Ukraine is already asking if it made a mistake by giving up its nuclear weapons, and I have heard plausible claims they could construct a nuclear device within a few months… a few months ago.
The US withdrawing all support, may well result in Ukraine making their own nuclear weapons — and attacking Russia with them to make the point, given that Putin seems to have great difficulty understanding that the Ukrainian people don't want him.
Who's comparing Russia's economy to Italy's? Apparently Lindsay Graham did in 2014. CNN in 2022.
I like this article because it made me think about Russia and it's economy in a way that I didn't fully appreciate before. The article calls out an argument that compares Russia's economy to Italy's economy, using nominal GDP as a measurement. This is supposed to be a Western attempt to brush off Russia as a small(er) player than it really is, but that is a skewed perspective. The use of nominal GDP, especially in times of conflict (and war), does not fully encompass all of the resources that a country is capable of summoning and utilizing. Russia's oil and gas resources, as well as production in wheat, corn, and other earth metals provides it with "substantial leverage" on international markets. Furthermore, when the measurement used to compare the GDP is purchasing power parity (PPP), Russia's economy is more like that of Germany, than Italy. Taken together, the PPP and Russia's domestic production capability, and it seems to make sense why Russia's economy has not completely faltered in the face of sanctions imposed by the West. Could we say the same for Italy? Or even Germany?So all though, CNN is not wrong to make the claim that Russia's economy is equivalent to Italy's in nominal GDP, that comparison fails to take into account the economics of reality. And that's the very definition of propaganda.
What does exactly Russia produces ? Most of GDP of Russia comes from export of natural resources [1]. This is by design: raw material extraction can be managed even by corrupt friends of the government even with a lot of "inefficiencies"; meanwhile higher level production is left to languish on purpose since it would be a potential vector for others to gain wealth and power (most of the oil infrastructure in Russia is serviced by western tools, for example).
Up to a few years ago I would have added weapons to the list, but it seems to me that they can't produce quality weapons anymore, there are very few moderns Russian weapons in use in Ukraine, for example.
Russia's strength is not its own economy, which is a total mess.
Putin, Trump, Russians, Americans... are just doing their thing. Can't really be mad about that. I always thought there will never be another war in Europe, because (1) nobody's dumb enough to die for a bunch of crooks and (2) cannon fodder is not a great use of people anyway. Oh well, turns out propaganda is one hell of a drug (on both ends of the political spectrum).
Meanwhile... my hotel room in Shenzhen could change window tint with a voice command and automatically detect the language. My Indian colleague's 12yo kid wants to be an astronaut and has a better investment portfolio than me. It is so over.. people have no idea. Like, not tomorrow, not in five years, but certainly by the end of the century. Vivek Ramaswamy tried to give MAGA a hint, but got cancelled for it. (Cancel culture was supposed to be a left-wing postmodern thing btw. Oopsie! Let's pretend we're surprised, ok?)
The US nuclear umbrella was not charity, contrary what some in the US appear to believe. It was and is a pure power play.
Another little tidbit that is not generally well-known is that the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) actually requires the current nuclear powers to get rid of their nuclear weapons...eventually.
The US gave/gives something that is fairly easy for it to provide, and valuable to the other side.
In return the US receives something that is of great value to it and fairly easy for the other side to provide (as long as the US keeps its side of the bargain).
If US security guarantees turn out to be worthless, you will see a lot more nuclear powers as well as a drastic increase in conventional capabilities.
The US will then be one power among many, rather than a mostly unchallenged superpower.
What did the US receive in return for this? Gratitude isn't worth much.
With the US now showing they are not afraid of doing a "rug pull" on agreements, one starts to wonder if the Netherlands shouldn't start development of nuclear weapons again.
This is one reason Britain and France are out front right now on matters of European security.
This discussion is already looming in Germany, especially now that Elon Musk openly wants the US to leave NATO. There is a standing offer by Macron for Germany to go under French nuclear protection. The UK also appears to be more than willing to fill in the nuclear vacuum left by the US. If things continue the path of the last 2-3 weeks, I am sure that at some point there will be a discussion about whether Germany should prepare to be able to at least build nuclear weapons quickly.
I have a feeling that Canada has similar thoughts. I wonder what would happen if they started developing nuclear weapons. The US president already announced he would make Canada the 51st state, and around 25% of Canadians saw the US as an enemy country 2 weeks ago [0]
Strategically, it does not make any sense to me. I am pretty sure that the Russians are just as confused. I wonder if there is a historic precedent of a country giving up a functioning empire voluntarily, without any internal or external pressure to do so.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/canada-us-relations-enemy-poll-tari...
It's too late to cancel now, but I guess in the future we will have to reconsider the true value of these bombs and airplanes. Once we really need them, US might "force us into peace".
And also, inexplicably, via (formerly) publicly viewable Chegg flashcards (???): https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expos...
The U.S. president doesn’t seem to care about international commitments, though. How does that work out in the long run? Would you do business with someone who tells you up front that they might break any promise they make?
> Clinton and Yeltsin did promise Ukraine “full guarantees of security, as a sign of friendship and good neighborliness.” The two leaders also reaffirmed “the obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” including Ukraine.
Still - guess you have to check the small print.
The words you quoted came out of Yeltsin's mouth, not Clintons:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/30921-document-9-memorand...
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/30921-document-9-memorand...
Also, that was not any form of an agreement, it was just words in a meeting. Nobody signed, it was not ratified with US congress as a treaty.
If you take that as binding then all the verbal commitments made to Russia that NATO won't expand eastwards should also have been binding, and they were broken first. I know you will get angry that I mention it, but it's a fact.
Security guarantees would at minimum require a treaty ratified by congress in US, something which I don't think is on the table any more at all.
Ultimately it comes down to trust. And the current US administration is doing its best to destroy trust built up over the last 80 years.
That being said, the US still has not broken any agreement, binding or non-binding. So your point is somewhat beside the point.
The U.S. instead provided a security "assurance" which was understood to mean a level of support short of U.S. troops on the ground. And in fact that is what the U.S. has been providing: intelligence and material, but no U.S. forces.
In other words, the level of support has been commensurate with the agreement signed. Until today, apparently.
This happens probably 100x more than rolling up with warships.
When it mattered? Yes. When it was against its own interest? Almost never, just like every other great power.
Also in matters of security they did a good job between 1945 and 2014 of keeping peace in Europe and stopping Russia running amok which was not that easy in Stalin's day.
1) They could reduce and rate limit lend lease to Soviet similar like they rate limited to Ukraine so buy themself more time until nuke is ready and then drop one on Dresden or Berlin (Berlin capitulated in May and they had first nuke in July so just few months later). After that probably didn't had nuke Japan. Also Poland and other eastern countries maybe wouldn't be a puppet state because Stalin lied to them and they would be under influence of US and Soviet Union would be weaker.
2) If they didn't have russian spy in their manhattan project then maybe russia wouldn't have nukes or had much much later.
3) If their didn't listen to british and US didn't overturn Mossadegh (instead of negotiating oil deal) then they wouldn't have maybe such a big mess in Iran and middle east now.
4) If the put some leash on Wall Street and their corporations then maybe they wouldn't let China to outcompete them so easily and now wouldn't have to worry about their own economical dominance.
5) If they would upfront told russian they will return nuke to Ukraine in case invasion because of broken contract commitment then they wouldn't have to worry about current mess in Europe.
6) Not much familiar with the whole history of Afganistan but still wondering what and how badly they US screwed that Afghans that were fighting with Soviet Union with aid of US turned agains them.
> Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "security guarantee" and "security assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. "Security guarantee" would have implied the use of military force in assisting its non-nuclear parties attacked by an aggressor (such as Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty for NATO members) while "security assurance" would simply specify the non-violation of these parties' territorial integrity. In the end, a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement.[17] In the Ukrainian version of the document, the wording "security guarantees" was used though.[19]
Even NATO article 5, I'd expect if Russia rolls into Lithuania Trump would ignore it.
From now on anything short of "Can I press the red button myself?" will not cut the mustard.
USA could before this war started (because they publicly on camera warned about invasion days before) tell Putin that in case of invasion they believe they cannot fullfill contract commitment so in this situation the contract would be void and they would have to return few old nukes to Ukraine. This would be enough deterrent and fair to justify.
Taiwan South Korea Japan Germany Sweden Italy UK (not counting trident) Ukraine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_prog...
Trump appears to only think in short term transactional way - no long term strategy.
Did you write this, review it, then post it as if that's a bad thing? wow
edit: grammar
The sentiment I’ve seen increasingly that goes something like “but they’re freeloading” completely misses the nuance of decades of foreign policy and why the interdependence between allies and enemies alike has maintained relative peace.
If you’re worried about world wars, you should worry about the US undermining itself.
As far as technology goes, putting a hard embargo on US exports of AI-supporting hardware is only going to further accelerate China's push to develop home-grown alternatives, and in a world where the US is isolating itself and new alliances are forming, such as China-Russia, this means that future US attempts to prevent cutting edge technology getting into the hands of others will be increasingly futile since these non-US alliances will support each other.
An isolated USA is in the end a weaker USA.
So imagine what could happen with a nuclear plant... (nuclear is safe, building in Italy is often not)
Italy's the 3rd largest economy in the EU, and 8th in the world, with an advanced technology sector to boot.
And if they somehow cannot figure it out, their French neighbors most assuredly can.
for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi_collapse
and also check what happens (now more than ever) everytime there's a big rain in a lot of italian places. I'm very concerned about this.
I assume same applies in Italy, given that we share some of those stereotypes.
Additionally, one just has to watch the news to see how it works, especially among our beloved politicians and major economical groups, should I list them here for our foreign friends?
Or are you going to say it is all fake news?
It's nuclear, not burning clothes or giving your uncle the building contract.
As long as the people in power are famous for lying and twisting reality, we should not touch nuclear.
Regarding what happened during that heatwave, there are, rightfully so, regulations on how hot the water can be to be dumped into regular rivers. These regulations ensure the protection of the marine life and ecosystem of these rivers. During the that summer, the rivers' natural temperature was almost as hot as the threshold set by these regulations, so they could not dump any hot water into the rivers. But there are add-ons solutions to this in the future, such as cooling ponds where they would let water temperature dissipate before dumping it into the rivers.
Remember when Italy paid the mafia to get rid of nuclear waste, they put it on old boats and sunk them :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...
Apparently even mafias bosses know that famous cartoon where it says that you could swim in the exhaust nuclear bars cooling pool