The question is what’s better value for money, wind and solar (potentially with storage when required), or nuclear.
So you’re saying that we should turn off the nuclear plant?
What do we calculate? A generous 50% capacity factor?
The new built nuclear power now costs ~40 cents/kWh.
It just becomes ridiculously expensive when real world constraints are added.
Yeah, nuclear is better than that.
You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it.
[1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-...
There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol.
The UK has adequate salt formations for large scale storage of hydrogen.
Nuclear is endless clean energy. Why do people like you keep ruining everything? If it wasn't for you, we'd have had full nuclear by 1980. No oil problems, no terrorist states, no dubai.
The huge advantage of hydrogen here is that a gas turbine power plant might cost $600/kW, a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. So if you have a need for a backup plant whose cost will be dominated by amortization of its fixed cost, hydrogen beats nuclear.
The UK hasn’t had any nuclear waste problems?
It might be the solution but pretending it’s perfect is how we got here.
Good if they can get it to work; there's also a hydrogen/ammonia storage scheme being planned; https://www.statkraft.co.uk/newsroom/2025/statkraft-shares-p...
I think it's going to take a while, but certainly worth trying.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cev03wer0p2o
And the subsidies needed to keep the price "low".
That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
> That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?
[0] https://stopsizewellc.org/core/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/TE... page 5
[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...
[2] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...
I am not sure either. But they keep increasing the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 program, and they still haven't been able to pass them.
The French government just fell due to being underwater while being completely unable to handle it. A massive handout of tax money to the nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Doggerland. I've always found its geography and the idea that people lived there fascinating.
Dogger Bank in turn seems to be named after a kind of Dutch fishing boat called a dogger
So nuclear reactors can be built to supply the energy and power as the offshore wind farms get decommissioned. The rise and fall.
> Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind.
What do you mean by cost? Capital expenditure per kW of nominal capacity, or by total energy generated? Plus should we consider other costs (backup, transmission, curtailment)?
I suspect we will always keep around a little nuclear to maintain expertise for strategic national security reasons but it is hard to see nuclear power making sense in an energy market dominated by intermittent renewables like the UK.
If that’s too expensive why not just build enough nuclear to cover it all.
Suppose you need 10GW of power for an absolute baseline. Enough to heat homes to a temperature that people don't freeze to death on a cold day, to keep power to hospitals and other critical services, etc. Then you need another 10GW on top of that to run aluminum smelters and heat homes to 80°F instead of 60°F and things like that.
If you have 20GW (average) of wind but you get an extended period of low generation and the batteries run down, people die. If you have 10GW (average) of wind and 10GW of nuclear and you get an extended period of low wind generation, the price of electricity goes up that week and people turn off their aluminum smelters and things but nobody dies. If you have 20GW of nuclear you can run the aluminum smelter 52 weeks a year instead of 51 but then people are paying more for electricity than they would with renewables in the mix, which isn't worth it.
So which one should we do?
But that doesn't change the fact that solar on the margins, without the availability requirement, is quite a bit cheaper than nuclear. So going 100% nuclear probably isn't the cheapest option either. The optimum is a mix in the middle somewhere.
What you’re saying is they they should use extremely expensive nuclear power to cover the easy portion and then have renewables when they are the most strained supply 37 GW.
Why not just cheap renewables for everything?
New built power literally does not make sense when real constraints are added.
The plans just to build a tunnel under the Thames in the UK in 2025 is over 2 million pages at the moment, imagine what it is for the Sizewell C reactor - the environmental assessment on its own was 44,000 pages.
SMRs are a good middle ground because they can be commercialized and cost can be driven down once the government gets out of the way.
The misinformation hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. The nuclear industry has been far from transparent in how it operates.
The lack of commercialization has exactly a single reason: The lack of commercial viability.
How would you add an extremely expensive new built nuclear plant to this grid? Would you shut it down for days on end or try to run it as a peaker?
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
It is done when moving electricity around when the grid is strained. Buy expensive electricity and sell it at even higher prices. But that is a vanishly tiny portion of the demand.
I'll point to Standard Thermal again here.
My point still stands though given that I specifically did not exclude any scenario. It makes more sense to optimize when you include all energy sources. It's still possible some sources won't end up in the final solution and that's fine.
Think 'agile', not 'waterfall'.
That doesn't follow necessarily. Wind & solar being the most cost effective doesn't mean you remove all backups just because they aren't as cost effective.
Even by their own claims, the caped may be smaller but the $/MWh is substantially higher than large plants, and will stay so even after multiple doubling a of production.
[0] https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reali...
Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby.
Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
The general public don't understand nuclear. And we can thank CND, Greenpeace, and the mainstream press of the 60s onwards for regurgitating their misinformation and poor science as fact.
Modern designs are effectively melt-down proof. Nuclear waste storage is also hilariously funny. People understand not to tread on a railway line or get electrocuted and die, but somehow have a problem with burying waste at the bottom of a sealed mine in a geologically safe area many miles from the nearest village or town (never a city) in containers that have been tested to literal destruction is somehow a problem.
The sad irony is these eco-people's opposition to nuclear for decades has resulted in gigatons of CO2 from coal/oil/gas power stations.
"Originally constructed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s these facilities - two ponds and two concrete silos - no longer meet the safety requirements that are required today and present some of the most difficult decommissioning challenges - not just in the UK - but in the world."
The industry does not have a good reputation, and it only has itself to blame for that.
https://www.onr.org.uk/our-work/what-we-regulate/sellafield-...
Granted, there's other stuff in deep mines and mountains whose chemical toxicity and carcinogenicity is perhaps the equal of plutonium's radioactivity (lead, asbestos, mercury) and whose harms are similarly subtle and hard for unsophisticated people to detect, but as an environmental pollutant it's worse if it gets out due to sheer persistency.
And also granted, where long-term views are a concern, CO2 is going to continue to screw things up for at least 200 years, maybe not 2000.
But most of the eco-folk have argued for energy efficiency, for not treating the planet like something we can just do whatever we want to. Unfortunately the trend is in the other direction, with capitalism demanding endless growth even when the gains are negligible. So people buy trucks even when the marginal utility over a compact car with 25% of the energy consumption is wafer-thin, and fly long-haul for almost no advantage over a short-haul trip.
The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis.
So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.
An individual uses (broad rule of thumb average) somewhere in the 300-500W range to participate in society at a modern level. A warm and well-lit home, cooking a couple of meals, hot water, an EV with enough charge to get to work, TV, laptop and so on. This is before we consider industry and infrastructure.
It's possible to bring those numbers down a bit, but not a lot. Even with fairly aggressive optimisations (Passivhaus, ebike, low-energy cooking), below 100W it gets tough.
But on the flip side, this means a 50kWh home battery can keep a family home running for a day, and 100-200kWh longer than that. 100kWh is affordable today as a home upgrade, and if people adopted a little more of a flexibility ethic with respect to availability, 200kWh will comfortably run a four-person home for a week.
Granted 200kWh domestic instals aren't affordable yet, but by the time these NPPs are online - five years? - they likely will be.
If it's going to stay still and cloudy for a full week, from Jersey all the way up to Orkney, consider running things leaner than usual for a bit. Microwave instead of oven, showers every two days instead of every day, e-moped instead of eSUV to work.
(The outrage some will be feeling at this demonstrates exactly how spoilt we are in the West.)
Just knowing that you don't need to plan and budget for scarcity is something that takes an incredible load off my mind.
I come from a place which has seen wide spread blackouts during hot summers, and know that I do not want my children to face that.
Maybe I am being naive here, but to me, the whole point of doing more with less is so that we can bring up the billions of people less fortunate than us, to have the same or better standards of living as usual, not making our standards worse!
The aim should be to grow the pie, not shrink our shares.
We definitely need more of the latter, and for it to be distributed more evenly across the globe. The former, however, hits an asymptote. The upper middle classes are, in general, a lot happier than the desperately poor, having perhaps 10x their wealth. Billionaires, who have 1000x more again, aren't much happier.
So the question becomes, if we want to avoid scarcity, how much do we overbuild - such that scarcity is a physical and mathematical impossibility - and how much do we make society a bit more adaptive? A simple example - do we build enough electricity that people are guaranteed to always have enough to charge their heavy EVs, or do we overbuild a bit less, and encourage some percent of the population to work remotely or use light transport at times when energy availability is a little compromised.
I'm here for a prosperity that gives everyone on the planet four weeks' paid vacation each year, hell, why not eight weeks if we can. I'm not so much here for all those vacations being long-haul aviation - it's enormously more impact on the planet for a tiny gain in quality of life.
Growing up, I have always wanted to go and spend time in Italy. I am sure that there are countless other folks, from places emerging from the shadows of war, pestilence and suffering with similar dreams.
Who are we to say that no, you should instead go tour only places nearby?
Whenever there is scarcity of anything, the rich rarely suffer, but the farmer in rural rayalseema will go without. I fear that if we bake in this "encouragement" into costs of electricity (say), it is not a software engineer who will go drive in a moped, but a day labourer.
The issue with mopeds is not just that you consume less electricity, but that you put your life at risk!
At the risk of digressing, I am all for getting rid of two wheelers for non recreational use. They are bloody death traps (A person dying on a moped or bike does not even make local news in india). In my family alone, we have lost 3 cousins from my father's side to two wheele accidents) So no, not overbuilding only means that poor suffer more, for no good reason.
So once in a lifetime? Sure. But if people do this routinely, the planet pays, which means someone somewhere pays. Our environmental debt is like a maxed-out bank loan at this point. And those people will paying the price will almost all be poor. Tell me what's more likely: a future where the poor get to fly to Italy every year, or a future where the rich and not-quite-rich do that until we really do run out of room on climate.
In my city we're using electric two-wheelers increasingly. It requires good road design, low speed limits (20mph or even 25kph), high standard of driver training, and well-designed vehicles with good brakes etc. With those things in place, it's possible to operate them safely, and on 1/20th the energy budget of full-sized EVs. 20mph doesn't sound like much, but in a big city it's fast enough to cover a lot of ground, and do so in relative safety.
It’s the same problem as wind has where demand and supply are variable.
Nuclear cant scale up in an affordable cost as the first GW is amortised over 8,760 hours a year, but the top 10GW is only needed 50 hours a year. If it’s £8760 to generate 10GW for a year, that means you have to spend £43,800 to be able to cope with a peak of 50GW, but the average demand of 30GW means the average cost is £14,600 - 65% more than the average “base load”
Diversity in renewable energy sources is important for grid resilience. Some areas are gonna be terrible for solar and good for wind. Some areas might not have proper water access for nuclear.
So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
For example, the UK has been building a bunch of "synchronous condensers" for this reason - essentially a giant flywheel. Battery storage can easily provide a massive amount of inertia as well - provided it is configured to operate that way.
The Spain blackout was mostly caused by misconfiguration. It is not in any way representative of any inherent characteristic of a renewable grid.
And compared to what Hinkley Point C is gonna cost... solar and wind is basically for free
And that doesn't include curtailment costs, which are not insignificant.
You can't really compare strike prices to spot prices on the wholesale market precisely because there's so much supply under CfD contracts, which distorts the wholesale market. When supply is abundant, the wholesale price plummets and even goes negative, yet suppliers still want to generate because they get the CfD price. When supply is constrained (eg: cold snaps in winter with little wind), the spot price can surge to £1000/MWh.
In 2024 money offshore was £102 offshore, onshore £89. AR7 estimates are >10% higher. Those prices were not high enough for Hornsea 4, who cancelled the contract (with a big write down for the entire project) after being awarded it.
Hinkley C is, as everyone knows, a disaster.
But even adjusting for inflation, offshore wind's £59.90 is a fraction of the retail price that UK consumers and most businesses pay for electricity. There's plenty of margin left for the middlemen (regulator, grid operator, distribution network operator, electricity retailer, etc).
... and Hinkley Point C's £92.50 is £133.79 today, and could be £160+ by the time it actually starts generating in (maybe?) 2031.
Maybe the guarantee of 24/7 supply is actually worth something?