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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Wind & nuclear together. Britain already has large wind installations, since the sea to the east is quite shallow (it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago). Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.

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> it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago)

Doggerland. I've always found its geography and the idea that people lived there fascinating.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

Fisherman frequently dredge up stone age (or earlier) implements from there.

Stone age ... or earlier? You mean from before the discovery of stone?!

Maybe they are talking about fossils? EG: Before humanity stuff.

And that area of the sea is still known as "Dogger" in the shipping forecast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast#/media/File:...

That part of the sea as well as Doggerland itself are named afer Dogger Bank, a large sandbank that must have been some promontory on Doggerland.

Dogger Bank in turn seems to be named after a kind of Dutch fishing boat called a dogger

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

AFAIK the cost of nuclear is building it, but not running it. If you have enough nuclear to provide enough energy when there is no wind, then why do you need to build wind energy at all?

One immediate reason is its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors. Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind. We're deploying wind farms in large numbers right now (and even sometimes connecting them to the grid).

This slow buildout will logically limit nuclear power to a minor role in the UK. By the time we could possibly build out large amounts of nuclear it seems likely we will already have built out large amounts of cheap wind power. With some battery storage and solar this can cover us for 90-95% of the year. For the remainder we will need dispatchable backup power. That will be gas and maybe at some point green hydrogen or its derivatives.

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.

> its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors.

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)?

A big part of the cost is design. China has built a lot of nuclear capacity at a low cost by essentially copying and pasting the same design, something that should be even easier with SMRs.

Relatively low cost. The cost of PV has dropped much faster and they’re building much more of it, even compared to their plans from a decade ago. SMRs are supposed to be the design that solves this, essentially moving nuclear into the same “build it at mass scale in a factory” footing that solar PV is on. But solar is deep down the production curve and SMRs are just beginning it.

I believe France does (or did) this also. The US seems to be the one country to custom design each one.

One option is to build enough nuclear to cover your minimum demand, and enough wind/solar/storage to cover the rest.

Take California. The minimum demand is 15 GW and peak demand 52 GW.

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.

Why not just build the wind/solar/storage to cover it all.

If that’s too expensive why not just build enough nuclear to cover it all.

Because they do different things.

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?

Because it's not that simple. If you want 100% availability year-round then you need about 2X overproduction and quite a lot of storage, not just the four hours normally paired with solar today. That could end up being more expensive than nuclear.

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.

The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.

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 lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups

The lack of commercialization has exactly a single reason: The lack of commercial viability.

> The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.

The misinformation hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. The nuclear industry has been far from transparent in how it operates.

> Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.

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.

Yeh it probably is expensive - but we currently have no other way (other than gas) to cover the low-wind/sun periods; while there are times when the UK can almost run purely off wind, there are other periods where we get ~5% of that wind energy for a week or so; the battery storage is nowhere near useful for that.

They're right, though. Doing both is dumb. The alternative to renewables + storage is nuclear + storage, with the nuclear + storage having the advantage of the storage capacity needed being more predictable and a bit smaller, but with the massive disadvantage of the nuclear being extremely expensive and slow to build. But building enough nuclear plants to do what you're proposing, and then turning them off most of the time to get energy from the renewable plants you're also building, and only drawing from them unpredictably, is objectively the worst option.

Hydrogen or low capex thermal.

The UK has adequate salt formations for large scale storage of hydrogen.

Looks like someone is trying to push for it: https://ukenergystorage.co.uk/

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.

Hydrogen is the worst possible fuel. It's the least dense material in existence so you need a ton of it. It has to be made from either cracking polluting materials, or using a huge amount of electricity. It is really difficult to store and really flammable.

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.

This would be green hydrogen. Sure, it has low density, but underground storage is pretty cheap at scale. Yes, it's flammable, but that can be handled, and is handled routinely -- the world currently produces and consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen per year.

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.

> Nuclear is endless clean energy.

The UK hasn’t had any nuclear waste problems?

It might be the solution but pretending it’s perfect is how we got here.

It's so funny every time we build a nuclear plant we say 'ooooh expensive' then by the time it's built it turns out it's ~ at the cost of gas.

Running existing plants is about the cost of gas - building new ones is extraordinarily expensive and is something like 3x or 4x the cost of other options, even after adjusting for nuclear’s much better capacity factor.

Yeah, let‘s ignore that construction costs

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

Please no more of Stop Sizewell C's Alison Downes a.k.a. (Moira) Alison Reynolds [0] & [1], who also happens to be one of the directors of the Greenpeace Environmental Trust [2].

> 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'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?

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!

The current "real world constraint" is purchasing gas from Russia.

Yeah, nuclear is better than that.

The thing Ive never quite understood is that the UK has no domestic supply of uranium.

Canada, Australia and Germany are all big exporters; without tempting fate, I don't think the UK will have issues importing from those countries.

Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1]

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-...

The French gas plants have been built to support renewables, France didn't have almost any gas plants prior 2010.

There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol.

We could probably do with a small amount of storage as we do have days where we pay for turbines to /not/ generate.

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