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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

The thing that surprises me about nuclear power is the huge amount of enthusiasm right now, without technological wins that might inspire such enthusiasm.

If somebody is excited about deploying solar plus storage, that makes a ton of sense because prices are tumbling, enabling all sorts of new applications.

Nuclear is the opposite. It's always overpromised and under delivered. It's a mature tech, there's not big breakthroughs, we understand the design space somewhat well. Or at least well enough that nobody thinks that there's a design which will cause a 5x cost improvement, like is regularly obtained with solar and storage.

The US seems committed to taking the high-cost, low-economic growth path for the next few years, at least according to federal policies, and this would fit in with that. But I don't understand the enthusiasm at all.

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I think the enthusiasm comes from:

* A contrarianism visa vis environmental crusades against nuclear power that presented it's dangers in a distorted fashion.

* How nuclear on paper presents the possibility of limitless energy with little pollution.

* Nuclear is the kind of big-tech solution that appeals to a lot of nerds.

The problem is that nuclear failed independently from environmental crusades even if some of these were successful. Nuclear power requires vast investment and radiation has the problem that it can weaken anything. Meltdowns aren't the apocalypse environmentalists imply but they destroy permanently a huge store of investment and their commonness has tanked nuclear power independently from popular crusades but those with a stake in nuclear like point to "them hippies" to cover their own failures.

> Nuclear power requires vast investment

In my opinion this is the strongest argument to take. Any argument about radiation or waste is going to be waved away as "scaremongering" and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner - you won't change anyone's mind with that.

On the other hand, the practical arguments are pretty cut-and-dry: the West is unable to build them fast enough to matter, and they are too expensive to compete with renewables on an open energy market. We already have the receipts for traditional reactors due to Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, and Flamanville 3.

Have we solved every single potential problem which needs solving for a 100% renewable grid? No, but we've got plenty of time to work out the edge cases during the transition. Perhaps some magical mass-produced micro nuclear peaker plants will help in that, perhaps they won't. Let's keep investing in tried-and-tested technology like solar, wind, hydro, and battery storage until the nuclear folks get their act together - no need to bet our entire future on a nuclear miracle which probably isn't going to happen anyways.

>and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner

Yes, this is what the solar/wind people keep claiming about energy storage.

>the West is unable to build them fast enough

No, the West is unwilling to build them fast enough. Then it chickens out, and the institutional knowledge to build the next plants are lost (so you lose the volume discount).

Regaining and retaining the institutional knowledge to build things may be more expensive in the short term, but it should be done- the fact that a country is capable of building power infrastructure on a whim is vital for its national defense.

This is the hidden cost of buying Chinese solar panels (because once you can't buy from China, or once China is unwilling to sell to you, you'll be paying for your own nuclear infrastructure regardless). And no, other countries' solar panels are not cheaper than nuclear; 'not knowing how to do it ourselves' cuts both ways.

Energy storage is a solved problem - or rather has a multitude of well known solutions as well as up-and-coming ones.

Energy storage isn't popular with grid operators because it requires a different kind of grid. US grid operators don't want to upgrade their operations for solar or for other problem 'cause their profit strategy is running their capital into the ground.

Solar energy production in many countries is increasing exponentially but who knows idiocy US policy is going to mandate going forward.

While there aren't any flashy breakthrough nuclear technologies, we should remember that universities have been doing research and advancing nuclear technology over the decades even when nuclear power plants weren't being built. The US military has wanted to maintain nuclear sciences and students, nuclear medicine has done a lot, material science has come a long ways for nuclear compatible materials, physics and nearly every branch of it has dipped its toes into if not dove right into learning about nuclear forces and nuclear chemistry. Fusion power requires understanding nuclear forces. And of course there are still people looking for the flashy nuclear power breakthrough.

The reactors we see still operating today are mostly designed in like the 70s and 80s, some going back to the 60s, but that is only like 40 years after the invention of nuclear reactors and nuclear power, we are now over 40 years past that again, and our understanding of nuclear sciences is leaps and bounds above what we used to build most nuke plants in existance.

As far as reactors that could be deployed in the next 10 years, very optimistically we have:

- Westinghouse AP1000

- EDF EPR

- GE-Hitachi BWRX

The AP1000 and EPR have been shown to be very underwhelming, in the US and Europe, respectively. Those failures are prompting Canada to look at the much smaller 300MW BWRX in Ontario. However before any cost-overruns the BWRX is getting priced at $14/W recently, and the eye-popping cost of the Vogtle AP1000 at $16/W has scared all potential builders away.

If we could return to the older designs, we might be able to complete them at cheaper prices, but as our knowledge has advanced, nuclear has gotten more expensive.

The European EPR aren’t underwhelming: the power plants are delivering precisely what was planned. The underwhelming part comes from delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision, as well as difficulties finding builder with the required know-how.

Despite this both France (which has just finished building an EPR) and the UK (which is building one right now) are doubling down and launching new projects to capitalise on the knowledge gained.

In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more. This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience, causing cost overruns on the new constructions. This is not inherent to the technology itself but a symptom of our decision to put it aside for a while. As an example when I was in engineering school I remember being told “don’t do a nuclear physics major there is no job for that in the future”. Not easy retaining excellence in a field when that’s what you tell your children. All the dude that went there anyway are in very very high demand today, as you might expect.

The new generation of reactors is more complex, mainly because of additional security and reliability requirements, which is a good thing. Those are certified for a lifespan of 60 years and costs are computed on that base. Some old gen reactors in the us are looking to extend their lifespan to 80 years. It’s extremely likely the new - safer - reactors will be able go beyond that, reducing the MW costs compared to current estimates.

We are slowly re-learning to build reactors, and mastering a new technology at the same time. The more reactors we build based on that experience the more that initial cost will be distributed.

There is nothing underwhelming in what was delivered; the process to get there was, but we will get better at that.

> difficulties finding builder

If your ideal power plant can only be built by a hypothetical builder, then it cannot be built

Literally a farmer can build a solar power plant.

> Literally a farmer can build a solar power plant.

Can the farmer legally connect it to the grid in your location?

Yes? In California we adopted a streamlined process for new renewable connections. The first project was recently approved under the new lightweight process. It is being built by an irrigation district on a bunch of retired farmland.

https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-06/cec-approves-worlds-l...

"The Darden project, which is owned by IP Darden I, LLC, a subsidiary of Intersect Power" [0]

"Intersect has closed ~$6B in project financings and raised ~$2.1B in corporate equity to support the buildout of clean energy assets including data center opportunities across the U.S." [1]

Not exactly farmers. Solar farmers, perhaps.

[0] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/06/13/largest-battery-stora...

[1] https://www.intersectpower.com/who-we-are/

Oh, note that Intersect Power has a commercial relationship with Google.

[0] https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/new-approac...

Farms quite often have fairly bulky connections that allow them to use their existing grid connection for smaller scale solar. Enough for them to have steady consistent income unconnected to seasons and weather, and a very good tradeoff. You see a ton of these in rural Minnesota because the utility, Xcel, is one of the very few utilities in the country that's not stuck in the 1970s, and can adapt to new technology.

The French experienced negative learning by doing throughout their entire nuclear program?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

For both the French and British the current investments are fueled by wanting to subsidize their military nuclear ambitions.

As per expected Sizewell C costs it will be even more expensive than Hinkley Point C, nothing learned.

The ”lifespan” you proclaim is also an extremely rosy picture. About the entire plant except outer shell and a few core components like the pressure vessel gets replaced over it.

You also have no idea if expensive nuclear power will have an economical lifespan lasting as long.

We already see existing nuclear plants all over Europe being forced out of the market by cheap renewables. This will only worsen leading to nuclear power having fewer and fewer hours to amortize its insanely high costs over.

> the power plants are delivering precisely what was planned

No. The load factor of the pair of EPRs built in China (5 years late and 60% above the budget) at Taishan is quite bad (.55 and .76).

In France the EPR isn't even producing electricity, while it was to be delivered in 2012 (budget 3.3 billions €, real cost > 23.7 billions €)

> delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision

Source? An official report (dubbed the "Folz report") explains why the EPR project in France (Flamanville) was a failure, I cannot find "local political opposition" among the causes.

French ahead: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/media/organes-parleme...

> In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more.

The context was quite different: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl... ... and the real total cost of this "nuclearization" is already huge.

> This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience

The Civaux-2 reactor was delivered in 1999.

In 2000 the French nuclear sector (at the time "Areva") was trying to sell EPRs (even in France).

In 2003 Finland ordered an EPR and work began in 2005.

How exactly are we supposed to believe that all knowledge vanished, without anyone in the industry to act accordingly, especially while the existing French fleet of reactors (56 at the time) had to be maintained?

> our decision to put it aside for a while

Cause: oil counter-shock (~1985), which (sadly) reducing electricity competitivity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...

Even EDF, as early as 1986, considered the nuclear fleet too large: "We will have two to four too many nuclear reactors by 1990," ( https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1986/01/17/nous-auro... ) and this was confirmed by the 1989 Rouvillois-Guillaume-Pellat report. The reason is well known: after the oil price shock, hydrocarbon prices had fallen significantly and sustainably, and they were competing with electricity.

However, reactors were built until the end of the 1990s. Three of them were started after 1985, and four were built in the 1990s. Some were ready to go in 1999 but did only diverge the generate electricity in 2002...

> certified for a lifespan of 60 years

Subject to a successful technical in-depth inspection every 10 years.

Let's not forget the GE-Hitachi (or is that Hitachi-GE) ABWR!

CFR Part 52 license (the first one to get it) https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part052/f...,

UK GDA license (of a variant) https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-...

The BWRX seems way more adequate (safer, more affordable)...

Let's check!

Hitachi Nuclear, hard hit by the reactor shutdown in Japan following Fukushima, canceled projects, even in Europe (inherited through the acquisition of Horizon Nuclear Power) and even their R&D for Generation 3 (ABWR).

Their overall move is moving them away from the energy sector (abandoning their wind turbine division in 2020).

The deal with GE ("GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy") dates back to 2007 and has produced nothing to date: these large industrial companies (inertia...) with very different and poorly complementary cultures have not worked together, and none will be permanently based on the soil of their first customer (Canada).

The combination of their resources and weak hopes will accentuate the difficulty of orchestrating a large two-headed project: Areva NP (French+German), worse.

The BWRX design is truly innovative and very recent; no examples exist.

Specification adjustments demanded on the fly by the safety authority will likely rain down, delaying and increasing the cost of the project.

The client will be sensitive to this, having already suffered this (at Darlington, the host plant itself) and is experienced (Darlington has been in operation for 30 years).

The customer is strict (their nuclear power is renowned for its good performance), well-positioned to benefit from the advice of US and French safety agencies (whose relevant institutes are interested in SMRs), and perhaps a little bitter about not being able to deploy their national CANDU.

This SMR model has been optimized to be low-cost (series effect), which could (the magnitude of the side effects of certain modifications) make it difficult to adapt despite its modularity.

I see a recipe for disaster likely to make the 4 EPR projects and Vogtle look like resounding successes.

Honestly I think Canada should go back to the CANDU rather than the BWRX. As long as they don't modernize it too much to take advantage of "new technology" it might still be cheap. And they can use their own uranium, and not be dependent on the hostile nation to the south. You won't hear me say this very often, but the Decouple Pod is right:

https://youtu.be/CXVHRkd3byg?si=-wqRibYVIOb-E75f

And the fuel flexibility of the CANDU brings all this back to the waste reprocessing original topic too!

> CANDU

This view is much easier to defend than the one in favor of new reactor designs. However, the fundamental debate is about renewables vs. nuclear, and factually, nuclear, even in a nation with good uranium deposits + good track record + design safer than most other ones... is increasingly difficult to defend.

> don't modernize it too much

The price to pay for this is high because it means giving up on trying to resolve some of the problems of nuclear power (risk of accidents, dependence on uranium, waste, proliferation of weapons, etc.).

> it might still be cheap

Projects over the past two decades show that even projects with improved old reactor designs (rather than radically new concepts) fail.

> Decouple Pod

It seems to me that he misses some key points, for example won't such an underground setup be way more difficult to inspect and even more to maintain/repair? Long-term waste repositories projects are way less demanding and their costs are exploding.

The enthusiasm is very easy to understand.

Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient

Geothermal: regionally locked

Wind: unpredictable

Hydro: all the good spots are already being used

Coal/oil/gas: too dirty

Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?

Yah-- nuclear isn't going to win on its own, but no one technology is going to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess.

We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.

Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.

> Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient

The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.

Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?

> Geothermal

This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and outputs.

> Wind

Storage solves this today

In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by regulated monopolies).

Storage tech exists right now but it’s not super widespread or reliable (mostly in the “what do I get for my dollar” - you can store power all you want but making your investment back is a little harder). Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated. Industrial application of Li batteries has been repeatedly hamstrung by supply chain, demand, tariff, etc. problems. New battery chemistry would really be the breakthrough here, anything cheaper and better than lithium

It's extremely reliable, and it's also very economical.

> Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated.

I follow the space closely and there have been zero complaints about this. And regardless the warranties would cover the early installs.

It's going to be extremely hard for any other battery chemistry to catch up to lithium ion. Sodium has a chance, but the supply chain for lithium is massive, growing, and has lots of substitutions if bottlenecks arise.

The logistics challenges of nuclear are an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear. With far more financial risk, timelines around a decade instead of a year.

The technology for storage is robust, scaling massively, and pretty much unstoppable in the US unless there are explicit bans. Nuclear literally needs a technooogy advancement to catch up, and the closest is SMR production, which is coming close to a decade of being in vogue, with plans stalling out everywhere. Even the planned BWRXs in Canada at Darlington may now be at risk since the US is starting to be viewed as unreliable and too risky to depend upon.

> The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.

The existence of the tech isn't the issue, it is the logistics, cost and practicality of building it at grid scale. If you try to calculate how many batteries you'd need to store the equivalent energy of a hydro reservoir, or one hour of a nuclear plant, then try to estimate the land required, you'd quickly discover how intractable the issue is.

I would suggest you go through your own calculations again, because GWH of batteries are being deployed without this supposed "intractable" issue.

> The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.

The ones I've seen in the news have enough batteries to time-shift the output by like four hours. Which is rather less then would be needed to keep up output through morning if there weren't other kinds of sources doing that part.

So you enhance the already-existing continent-scale grid and import your power from an area a few thousand km/mi away which isn't both cloudy and windless at the same time. Heck, there's probably plenty of opportunity for hydro storage in that range.

If all else fails: power up the backup natural gas power plants for a couple of hours. We're trying to minimize CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, getting to 0% immediately isn't the goal. Run a carbon capture plant during times of energy excess to compensate if you feel like it.

It doesn't shift it four hours, the power to energy ratio is fours. If more is needed, all one needs to do is plug in more batteries.

These are not complicated. They scale small, scale big. This is not very complicated engineering, and not very difficult to understand with even basic electronics knowledge.

By “inefficient” I mean you need incredibly large amounts of space, and the power generated is relatively small, and never mind the materials needs!

What kinda batteries are you talking about? There may be tech I’m unaware of, but failing that, there simply isn’t a currently-viable storage solution.

Maybe we’ve made marginal improvements, but our grid certainly cannot handle sending huge amounts of energy to darker regions anyways. The superconductors needed for that don’t exist yet, and the grid overhaul needed to sidestep the superconductors would be tear-jerkingly expensive.

Nuke plants are ready to go. They’re the missing ingredient that steps around all those issues. It provides a large amount of energy, very safely, using a very small land footprint. You can skip huge amounts of the regulation process by using tried-and-tested reactor designs. You can store spent fuel rods in water, then more permanently in concrete and clay.

And again, the holy grail here is fusion. More fusion research will be a completely natural byproduct of a larger nuclear market.

As the other dude said, no one single tech will fix this, and being anti-nuke in an era where we need large amounts of clean energy generation, like, yesterday… we should probably lean on everything we’ve got, and this is tantalizingly low-hanging fruit.

Geothermal does seem to be having its “fusion moment” - I’m very excited to see where that goes! Some Nordic nation (Sweden?) has been living off geothermal for quite some time, so I imagine the tech surrounding its use post-extraction is quite advanced. I’ve got high hopes.

Along a similar line, there was a recent find in hydrogen tech - basically, a way to capture it from the earth, meaning we have an actually-efficient manner of gathering the stuff. Fingers crossed that pans out too!

China is deploying solar at scale and enabling many countries to do it too, like Pakistan.

They are also starting use massive batteries including lithium phosphate and sodium tech for things like grid storage and powered locomotives.

Those incredibly large amounts of space are generally completely unused though. Like on the top of car park sun shades, roofs, and the middle of the desert.

Solar farms, in Australia at least, work both as providers of solar power and as "better than an empty paddock" livestock and feed farms.

Solar panels provide shade, retain soil moisture better, and grow better feed crops for sheep and other animals to graze on while acting as living lawn mowers.

(2022) Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels - https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...

and more recently

(2025) Landline: Episodes 17 & 18, June 8th & 15th

https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11160565 https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11160566

https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2404Q017S00 https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2404Q018S00

ie. In actual practice they're very much the opposite of "ineffcient".

I am a nuclear fanboy not because it promises technological breakthroughs (like you wrote, there probably won't be many or even any), but because there just isn't any other option that can deliver continuous power without messing up the climate. I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all. I am an even bigger fan of solar power, but are we really going to have enough battery capacity to reliably run entire countries?

> I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all.

Vogtle is showing that to be wrong. It costs something like $180-$200/MWh, when market value is around $50/MWh on average. Solar with enough storage to operate as baseload is far cheaper than nuclear today, and will only get cheaper over the next decade. See for example:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uaes-masdar-launches...

Okay, but now run the numbers not for a middle eastern desert but for say Germany, or similar latitudes/weather patterns in the US. ChatGPT roughly estimated the cost to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $500/MWh.

That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. ChatGPT is an innumerate as contemporary nuclear advocates.

I regularly run the numbers for the US, and using old NREL numbers it's $120/MWh.

The US has great solar resources. Germany has some of the worst.

But in any case most of the cost is in the battery, not the panels, which are cheap. So bump that up and it doesn't change the cost much.

I'm any case, unless you are Finland or similar, nuclear is not on the table.

I see. Which part of the US? And the cost of the battery is included the price I gave. Battery is the main reason why it is so high.

Yeah I agree with you. Im not expecting any real improvements in my personal life by going to nuclear power, but it is all but a solved method to produce nearly any amount of power we would want over extremely long timespans with no significant emissions. You want to desalinate massive amounts of water? Nuke plant. You want to run a huge carbon scrubber farm? Nuke plant. You want endless amounts of steel and aluminum processing and fertilizer production that all require large amounts of energy? Nuclear power. And it doesn't need to rely on promises of future technology improvements or mega-structure scale projects like "Cover X entire state with solar panels and install multiple times the worlds current total battery capacity into the grid." Or waiting for the economics of solar panels to make it viable for all consumers and dealing with all the political shenanigans of connecting them to the grid.

”Baseload” solar is here.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

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