EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

You're making it sound like anyone who's not against nuclear, thinks Chernobyl is overblown

I've never heard that sentiment anywhere. (I'm sure you can find examples when looking for it; after all, there's also people who believe vaccines cause bill gates mind control.) Why the strawman argument?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...

The average build time is currently 6.5 years. The median is lower at 5.8. The variations across both time and space of those average are neither large nor particularly systematic.

There have always been outliers, so if you focus on those you can "prove" anything you like.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

But that’s OK, Theresa May signed a guarantee that they’d get paid an uncompetitive price by the taxpayer, regardless.

If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking kills 7-8 times more people than cars every year (that’s 80-100 Chernobyls worth every year) and we still allow it.

The reasons are political not technically or financially insurmountable obstacles. We didn’t shut down nuclear in Europe for “green” reasons or because we can’t improve it, or because it kills too many people, but because enough Russian money went into politicians’ pockets to do this.

Sorry, but no.

Chernobyl exclusion zone is less than a single area of the Agent Orange usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial-herbicide-spray-mi...

Sure, these days its too expensive in relative terms but switching back to fossil fuels due to all the Chornobyl/Three Mile panic (but mainly likely because of the cost) might end up being one of the bigger mistakes in human history.

(there is still very low amount of waste that have a long half-life, really not a big deal)

Government involvement doesn’t negate viability, it enables it, just like with roads, ports, or any other infrastructure requiring long-term capital deployment.

0: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...

I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail

Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).

They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.

In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.

An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.

And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.

Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.

Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.

Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...

You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.

Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.

All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages. (Let's just elide the disconnect between wages rising fully with productivity increases, but they do rise some!)

Despite being far more wealthy today than centuries ago, we don't build cathedrals with super intricate stonework, because labor is so much more expensive.

I fear that nuclear is like the gothic cathedral: something that was far easier to do when labor costs were low, but at wealth increases it becomes far more difficult to make economic sense.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem...

In addition, they didn't have hydrogen recombinators, which for example are/were standard in all German plants. Those plants also had special requirements for bunkers for the Diesel backup generators so they couldn't be knocked out by water.

Failing to correctly design, build, exploit or maintain a wind turbine or solar panel isn't a big deal. Failing to do so on a nuclear reactor can become a huge and lasting disaster for many.

which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.

Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?

This is a balance/tradeoff. We agree for some deaths, for a given price. It is the same for food safety, workplace safety.

With the latest designs and regulations there has been no major issue across all the nuclear facilities, except for Fukushima which sustained a 9 earthquake + a tsunami... and yet hardly any death (in the 10 years after, one death by cancer got compensated but still not clear if it was directly linked... the evacuation itself might be responsible for up to 50 deaths though, showing how the perception of nuclear can be overhyped).

It is possible that the nuclear industry is over-regulated (done mostly after Chernobyl) and could benefit to be reviewed based on the current knowledge.

Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time.

The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.

Every decade, the WHO publishes a report on the health effects of Chernobyl. Every decade, they had to reduce the projections for casualties.

By an order of magnitude.

When it happened, we didn't know better. Now we do.

It's entirely irrational just like people who are scared of flying.

What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.

The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.

One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.

And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...

Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.

Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.

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

Not that many, according to long term studies.

People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.

Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.

You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.

> Coal

Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.

Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.

[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.

How does that measure against a whole planet being pulled out of thermal equilibrium, and the projected displacement of 1 billion people?

How many people's health was impacted from coal and coal burning exhaust, which btw. also includes radioactive particles.

Also, Austria makes no sense. It opposes a new reactor in Slo being built but that means that the current one will just keep getting its life extended. Clearly it's not about safety.

Nuclear works now. We just have to build it.

Intermittent renewables supplying an industrial society does not. And there is no way to get from here to there except a lot of handwaving and "magic happens here".

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/20100608webcontentchicagosli...

The correct parable for you would have been the number of bear deaths vs interactions with bears weighed against number of car deaths vs interactions with cars.

"Average deaths per TWh produced" is a good yardstick to me.

Just being near a potentially aggressive bear is a bad situation.

Being near a car or a nuclear power plant is not a bad siuation.

Of course you should run in the other direction if you're close to a potentially aggressive bear.

Same thing if you're in the path of an out of control car, or near a nuclear power plant accident.

But you've got to separate the "probability of bad situation occurring" from the "severity of the bad situation when it does occur".

Analogy doesn’t work, it’s deaths per TWhour that matter.

1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima.

2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here.

3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.

…except nuclear, hydro, solar… They are stable once built.

“Natural gas” is a fossil fuel and adds CO2 that was locked away.

Because of the nuclear exit they had to build Grid stabilization plants e.g in Marbach.

The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons.

It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians.

But that's a political problem.

Finland just built a site for around €1 billion.

That study is laughably bad. To the point that they double counted all renewable investment.

See: https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/en/blog/2024/kritische-stellun...

~10% of PRC energy is generated from solar now. That's enough to carbon offset every panel they've produced and will produce in perpetuity.

Yes water shortage might be a problem if the river you're on runs dry. That's not often a problem though, plenty of major rivers. And a dam doesn't change the total amount that flows, it just changes when. As a result it might even help in lowering some flood risks.

And yes, I realize how well positioned Norway is for this. But you can put these wherever you have a stream and a big reservoir

1: https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftpr...

Sure, less sunshine, significantly more wind.

No single source will do it all, no one is arguing that

> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.

My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.

> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).

This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.

And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.

We both know that neither supply nor demand is that flat.

In reality we can also trivially add wind power, existing hydro, gas turbines ran on carbon neutral fuel etc. to the mix.

How will you force this house that is self-sufficient 97% of the time to buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity to not crater the capacity factor of the nuclear plant?

Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?

In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.

If you want to argue that nuclear is affordable as non-baseload power, because the (non-economic) cost to the environment of the alternatives is otherwise too high.... well I'd disagree because of how far solar/wind/batteries have come in the last couple of years, but prior to that you would have had a point. And you still would as far as continuing to operate existing plants goes of course.

they either pick some pet peeves (coral reefs, rainforests, global South inequality, desertification) and usually start buying things (EVs, PV panels, heat pumps)

but when it comes to policy they usually revert to Greenpeace/degrowth/NIMBY cult members

This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all. You have to consider both operating and capital costs. Nuclear plants are cheap to operate once built, but those operations have to pay off the capital costs. If the load factor is low, then each unit of generated power has to bear a higher portion of the capital costs. If your capital costs are very high, then you either need a very high load factor or very high spot prices to bear those costs.

> Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%

Net demand on CAISO can go from about 2 MW to 30 MW in the summer. 20 MW of that ramp occurs over just 3 hours. I'm sure you can build nuclear plants that ramp that fast, but you need a lot more than the range you're mentioning here. Regardless, I'm not making an argument about the physics of nuclear power plants, just the economics. Expensive plants generally need high load factors to pay off the capital costs.

> nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day.

Most of France's nuclear plants are old and thus fully depreciated. The only one built recently (Flamanville Unit 3), is a good example of the bad cost trend in nuclear. While this was a bit cheaper than Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in the US on a dollars per nameplate capacity basis, at 19 billion euro it's still very expensive (and also way over budget).

France also has high rates of curtailment, which is not necessarily a huge problem for them since so much of their generation is already carbon-free, but it does suggest they're already hitting the limits of their ability to ramp production up and down. Whether this is an engineering problem or something to do with the structure of their electricity market is a bit unclear to me

> New small modular reactors promise great improvements, as they can be pre-built in factories, require limited maintenance, lower risk, and as a result much lower cost per MW.

This has been the promise for years, but so far the low costs have yet to materialize and they are estimated to have a higher LCOE than traditional plants. Currently only 2 are actually operational, a demonstration plant in China and a floating power plant using adapted ice-breaker reactors in Russia. There are a few more in the pipeline, but they are all at least a couple years out from actually producing power.

I've heard much higher figures, in the PWh for Europe as a whole.

Storage of energy as heat at 600 C has much larger potential storage capacity; see standardthermal.com

China is proving this to be objective false. Their total energy production (not nameplate power) for wind/solar/hydro is growing substantially faster than their nuclear output.

Why should someone with rooftop solar and a battery buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity from the grid when they can make their own?

”Baseload” is a title earned by having the lowest marginal costs. There is nothing fundamental about it.

Today renewables have the cheapest marginal cost at 0. They are the new ”baseload”.

I personally think NIMBYism is more along the lines of "this doesn't negatively impact my day to day life, but I'm worried it will lower my property value"

I don't think there's any other form of energy in the country which has a 7 years emergency reserve.

> As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.

BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.

They have solar farms in Alaska and the Antarctic because it's cheaper than shipping in diesel for 6 months of the year.

And the law of economics making modular renewables cheaper is Wright's Law:

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

https://quickonomics.com/terms/wrights-law/

But it's not a law that applies to all technologies, and it will likely end at some point, but there's at least 1-2 decades of cost decrease left.

There is no law of physics that makes renewables work where there are poor renewable resources, except through transmission, which is usually engineered using several of Maxwell's laws.

Source?

It was also my understanding that large amounts of habitat (e.g. Amazon rainforest) are lost for agriculture in general, and that cows are a particularly large part of that

Road surfaces I don't specifically know in terms of habitat area loss, but they split up habitat areas, and surely we'll have gotten more road surface as we went from ~6 to ~8 billion people on the planet in the last 30 years? How could that have stayed roughly the same?!

It's rather interesting how Italy or Poland can fit several times more livestock, people and wolves into significantly less area.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/APRO_MT_LSCAT...

Italy is more densely populated than Denmark for example (and Sweden is an empty wasteland in comparison), yet also somehow has enough space both for wolves and cows/sheep/etc.

Swedish wolf population is extremely small relative to its geographical size.

There are less than 400 wolves in Sweden. For example there are 1500 wolves in Poland, possibly twice that in Italy. How many times more farmers livestock those countries have? Let alone people. The Baltic states have more than twice as many wolves as Sweden and Norway put together...

Sweden is 50% larger than Italy and six times less people, yet somehow several times less area available for wildlife?

Talking about farmers..

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

Sweden has only slightly more cultivated land than Lithuania (and Norway several times less than that), let alone Poland or Italy...

One should not use this situation that those alternatives can't exist or be reasonably expected to exist, or that a system using them would be more expensive than a system using nuclear. If that were a valid argument, one could equally argue that because new nuclear cannot compete with natural gas combined cycle for baseload, new nuclear is not an option.

This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.

Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.

A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.

All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.

I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)

However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)

That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.

Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.

The issue is when the goal posts are ill defined or just straight up moved. Things need to be overbuilt to satisfy demands the regulators may not even have, and still you might get caught up on something that you didn't think could possibly be an issue. There is excessive conservatism because you have at least some track record of regulator decisions, even if it's an imperfect indicator of their future requirements.

Overzealous but well defined regulations, like you need 3 backup diesel generators, obviously add cost, but this can be easily priced in at the beginning of the project. Typically, the more regulations you have, the more likely some of them will be vague, so keeping the number of regulations manageable is often a good thing, but is not strictly necessary. Where you really run into problems is when there is an unreasonable fear which draws strong support for "something" to be done, but there really isn't an appropriate action to take given the severity of the risk and the cost of eliminating it - that's how you wind up with bullshit like ALARA.

And safety regulations are just one facet. Environmental regulations, particularly NEPA requirements, are a major driver of construction costs for big projects and especially nuclear plants. If nuclear plants were primarily facing only the same issues as general construction, you'd expect the labor productivity to be similar to comparable scale projects. The fact that labor productivity is an order of magnitude lower indicates something specific to nuclear plants is lowering labor productivity. While many potential things could be causing that reduction in labor productivity, it's hard to think of any that don't stem from or are made substantially worse by the regulatory environment.

The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.

A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.

Or do they pay him that much because he's good at extracting as much money from the situation as possible?

When given an option that would double costs and profits or halves costs and profits which is he incentivized to do?

It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.

And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.

This is based on total electrical energy production of 17,301 GWh, since PG&E doesn't seem to publish their total distributed energy.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%242.5+billion+%2F+17%2C301+...

https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA#tabs-1

In the current political climate I prefer energy sources that don’t cause severe damage if sabotaged.

Did you hear the worries in Ukraine that Russia could hit a wind turbine with a rocket?