NRC issues first commercial reactor construction approval in 10 years [pdf]
nrc.gov
nrc.gov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
[0] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...
Sodium leaks can be nasty, but they can be dealt with.
I love the promise of nuclear energy, and I understand that every single engineering decision has tradeoffs, but these tradeoffs just seem so bad? Are there really no better options?
I like the pebble-bed design because it seems the most intrinsically safe of the three.
What needs to improve about nuclear is our ability to deliver it on time and on budget. Safety is already more than adequate.
For example, building out more AP-1000s is really a no brainer. The first-of-a-kind is always expensive and the AP-1000 was especially so due to many factors. We bore that cost and now we should reap the benefits of Nth of a kind builds.
There are also fast reactor designs using lead as the coolant rather than sodium. These are interesting, but less mature than sodium cooling. Sodium is better from a cooling and pumping perspective though.
A eutectic is an alloy that has a lower melting point than any of its components.
Lead-bismuth eutectic or LBE is a eutectic alloy of lead (44.5 at%) and bismuth (55.5 at%) used as a coolant in some nuclear reactors, and is a proposed coolant for the lead-cooled fast reactor, part of the Generation IV reactor initiative. It has a melting point of 123.5 °C/254.3 °F (pure lead melts at 327 °C/621 °F, pure bismuth at 271 °C/520 °F) and a boiling point of 1,670 °C/3,038 °F.
That I believe is the safest design, but I'm not a nuclear engineer.
Nuclear today isn't that much different from steam engine - the fundamentals make it a technology of the past clearly losing to the today's tech, in this case to the massive solar/wind accompanied by the battery storage.
Nuclear will work in space, as it is the only tech feasible beyond the Mars orbit.
May be, may be the fundamentals will be sufficiently, to make it feasible on Earth, different for thorium MSRs and hopefully for fusion (my favorite is fusion driven thorium reactor - no need for fusion breakeven and relatively safe as turning off the fusion, the source of neutrons, stops thorium fission)
Nuclear solar and wind are all natural complements. This stupid this or that argument only empowers old oil and gas tech looking to hold on to the future.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintains a database of advanced reactor designs, ARIS [1]. It lists 119 reactors. A lot of them are small modular reactors, and the IAEA has published a book with details about them [2]. Some of these reactors have applied for NRC approval, and you can find an enormous amount of details at the NRC website [3].
To answer your question: numerous reactor designs are very safe.
Let's start with the most techonogically mature: helium cooled gas reactors. Helium is a noble gas, chemically inert, transparent to neutrons (the only substance in the universe to have zero neutron absorption cross-section), and it has a hard-to-believe high heat capacity by mass. The downside is that helium is somewhat expensive and it can leak. China has been operating 2 such reactors for the last 4 years [4]. In the US, there is a reactor design, Xe-100, that is quite similar to the Chinese design. It is quite difficult to come up with a scenario where something bad can happen with such reactors. The only problem is that they are quite expensive to build and operate, compared to water reactors.
There is one design that is very similar to the design of helium-cooled gas reactors, the only difference is that the coolant is not helium, it is a molten salt. In the US, the company Kairos is pursuing NRC approval for their reactor Hermes. The molten salt has lower heat capacity than helium by mass, but much higher by volume. There is no need for pressurization. The salt used here is a mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride (FLiBe). Fluorine is an extraordinarily corrosive substance, but exactly because it is so, the salts that it forms are extremely stable. Still, stable or not, they can't match the inertness of helium, so such molten salt reactors are a bit more challenging when it comes to the contact between the coolant and the reactor vessel. However, they are extremely far from being a "low grade bomb". These reactors are almost as safe as they can be, albeit a bit below the inherent safety of helium cooled reactors.
[2] https://aris.iaea.org/publications/SMR_catalogue_2024.pdf
[3] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM
[5] https://x-energy.com/reactors/xe-100
[6] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/non-power/new-facility-licensin...
Todays U.S. meeting "Roundtable on Ratepayer Protection Pledge" with the U.S. President himself leading that meeting garnished commitments from Big Tech as it relates to energy. In time Big Tech Energy divisions will be thing and some citizens will be paying their utilities bill to them.
So assuming the pipe maintenance is done at cost, with no money not being spent on the network. What would your better net positive solution even look like?
But we need to build the nuclear reactors first.
In the mean time, no: people can’t just freeze in the dark.
If you do put in heat pumps, nuclear reactors are still one of the more expensive ways to heat a home, but you need a third as many of them as compared to the no-heat-pumps case, if you insist on heating only with nuclear power.
Nuclear power is really only important if you also want spicy atoms, because it's by far the cheapest source of spicy atoms. Annoyingly, this is now a thing a lot of countries have a solid reason to want.
If only they could sort the underground cabling...
A comparison: the giant Dogger Bank offshore wind farm project (multi-GW) cost somewhere in the $10bn range. On the other hand, Germany calculates with >$100bn for grid buildout within the next decade (https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023...).
Also, having customers that rely on your grid but buy very little of your power is simply unappealing for operators, so I would assume that their pricing tries to disincentivise as much as possible (=> "they gonna overcharge you for the grid connection").
Nuclear advocates, like myself, claim drop in replacement nuclear power reactors at existing coal / gas sites would largely obviate this.
Even adding new nuclear power reactors at greenfield sites would constitute a significantly reduced grid build cost, as the power is highly concentrated.
And nuclear is so say that nuclear power reactors employees are routine exposed to less radiation at work than they are at home in their kitchen with granite bench tops.
YIMBY.
At this point, I don't believe in a nuclear renaissance, because it seems to me that nuclear power got left behind too far; catching up in cost metrics is already hard enough, but matching growth rates (in "installed TWh/a" of wind/solar) seems virtually impossible by now. The only remaining holdouts (China, US, France, ...) are basically doing it as a hedge and/or to keep/obtain related engineering capabilities (and at the very least an easy path toward weapon-grade material).
It is clear to me that no one "actually believes" in nuclear power (by stating clearly: we are solve gonna current and future energy problems by mainly relying on freshly built nuclear power), so I can only see its relevance dwindling (I'd argue that China comes closest, but even they are much more in the hedging/securing capabilities category than anything else).
Put it this way, if it's in commercial operation by 2031 I'll eat my hat.
But that also applies for the current generation of reactors and nobody can build them to schedule or budget in the USA or Europe.
The NRC frequently changes requirements for reactors while they're under construction. The NRC does not waive the right to demand changes merely due to prior design approval. This is a novel (for the US) design, so there will be unanticipated changes as the project progresses.
Russia has been operating two sodium cooled fast reactors for decades. The BN-600 and BN-800 are both operating today. The early history of the BN-600 was... interesting, suffering (at least) 14 sodium fires due to leaks. This "Natrium" design is similar; a sodium pool with two sodium loops. They are taking on the additional challenge of storing a massive quantity of molten salt. It's going to take a lot of effort by many steely eyed missile people to make this happen.
Trump issued an EO in 2025 that's supposed to make the NRC more circumspect about requiring changes of approved designs. Then there is all the pull Gates has. Wyoming is no hotbed of anti-nuclear activism. So that's all to TerraPower's favor. But TerraPower will need to fully utilize all the tailwind it can find to make this work.
But when that fails, you can just siphon up taxpayer money via your connections to the ruling cabal.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/tiny-trump-linked-firm-in-line...
> They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.
I'm not sure what "reverse IPO" means, maybe you mean they'll be acquired by a SPAC, like NuScale was. I doubt it. Bill Gates founded Terrapower in 2008, he is not looking for a quick buck.
I hope you’re right and they stay focused on actual engineering instead of financial engineering but many of Gates’ other investments haven’t been so fortunate and went down the latter path. The billions of dollars in taxpayer funds and constantly shifting tech and demo projects gives me a lot of pause though. (MSR! TWR! Fast Reactor! Fujian! Hebei! Idaho! Hanford! Wyoming! UK!)
Even with all that experience and expertise, their questionable environmental policies and questionable worker rights, it still takes them SEVEN years to build a single nuke.
The claim that anyone else can do it faster with zero recent experience isn’t only laughable, it’s downright fraud.
Be careful with these figures. I understand they start the clock later than the west does.
Seems like we could match a 7 year clip at a much smaller scale. We'll be forced to at some point, but we need to overhaul the regulatory mess and fix the grid first. Hopefully that happens long before battalions of Chinese drones and droids take over the world.
China and Russia are about on par in build times now. Korea is next with APR, Barakah having about 8y/unit, W-house and EDF are the slowest for many reasons
Come April, all the production and construction capacity will be commandeered for the war machine.
Wind and solar prices are still dropping hard, battery and storage tech is evolving fast, but - let's build monsters that consistently overrun time and budget, and run on fuel that can only be obtained from some of the least stable countries on the planet.
The problem with nuclear power is that it is so expensive to be on standby that you need to buy their output even when you don't need it. So energy market pricing tends to be dominated by the least effective sources rather than by the most effective sources. If nuclear plants were left to fend for themselves they'd be out of business in a year. More so if you consider the cost of decommissioning.
Nuclear just doesn’t go on standby, that’s the point.
Standard Thermal's approach seems very simple and promises to deliver 365/24/7 heat (ultimately sourced from PV) at 600 C for cost competitive with Henry Hub natural gas. It's difficult to see how nuclear competes with that.
It's more an economical tradeoff than a technical one. But mostly, people doing off grid setups manage fine in some parts of the world. Winter months are challenging at higher latitudes. But there are also wind turbines and cables as alternatives. Cables allow you to import/export power from further south or further west or east. It's one of those things that might be a lot easier than building a lot of new nuclear power plants.
The issue with gas (aside from emissions) is that gas turbines are a bit hard to get. The lead time for getting new ones is pretty terrible and companies making them aren't exactly eager to make risky investments in extra production capacity for turbines that may or may not be needed in a 5-10 years. And once you manage to get them, you have to supply them with gas; which is expensive. Gas prices fluctuate a lot.
If you look at this through an economic lens, the next ten years will see:
- Hundreds of GW of solar deployed. Every year. Still growing. Probably quite a few TW of capacity added. - A bit less wind turbines but still quite a lot. The US seems to have some irrational anti wind mill sentiment currently. But that might change. Huge potential there for upgrading old ones too. And offshore wind obviously. - > 3 twh of battery produced for use in transport, grid, and domestic storage. - Some new gas plants coming online here and there. But not a lot. Gas usage will grow but renewables will out grow it. - Probably growing number of GW of cables and long distance cables. Possibly even cross Atlantic. - Lost of coal plants being decommissioned (just too expensive). Offsetting most of the gw added by gas. - A sprinkling of nuclear plants coming online. Mostly in Asia. If it's not approved yet, there's no way in hell many will come online before 2036 in the US/EU. A few GW per year.
The big picture here is that if you need a lot of power, you want low cost and feasibility. Gas is feasible. If you can get the turbines. But it's not cheap. If you want cheap, you mainly need to decide on the number of gw of panels you can afford to buy. And where to put them. Or wind. But the point is it's very feasible and quick to execute once you decide on a budget. Battery is not cheap (but still dropping in price year over year). And you may not actually need infinite buffers. You can fall back to gas when needed but as little as you can get away with (because $$).
Any AI/data centers still in business in ten years will probably be competing on energy cost. That's likely not going to be gas or nuclear mostly.
Nuclear is about replacing baseload - currently coal basically
Small nuclear agrees you with about "monsters"
Storage at this scale is also not easy
SNR definitely pencil out in today's energy regime.
EDF in France is now crying that renewables are cratering the earning potential of their nuclear fleet, and increasing maintenance costs due to having to adapt.
In e.g. Australia coal plants are forced to become peakers, or be decommissioned.
We need firming for when the 10 year winter hits. Not an inflexible "baseload" plant producing enormously subsidized electricity when renewables and storage already flood the grid. Which is far above 90% of the time.
What winter are you thinking of, out of curiosity? An energy demand winter? Or like an energy price winter? I do not believe we will see that in the next 5 to maybe 10 years. There’s just not enough industrial infrastructure being built to cover anything like the AI energy demands coming soon.
Neither did I know regions like Germany (or EU as a whole) can get by on ren alone looking at winter capacity factor data
Four years into the war we've almost completely cut out all other parts of the Russian economy. Except the nuclear indutry. We're just too dependent.
It'll happen anyway. Orano and Urenco are expanding while Framatome and Westinghouse learned to manufacture VVER fuel elements
It is France that is tied to the hip of the Russian nuclear industry, and keeps blocking the sanctions.
While continuing to move forward with partnerships with Rosatom and relying on Russian reprocessing for the fuel supply chain .
Up till recently Russia had a higher market share of enrichment market due to megatons to megawatts policy, but as we all know, russia got wild, so now all western companies are ramping up facilities, be it orano or urenco.
Consider this, out of 23Bn of energy imports last year from Russia, nuclear related imports were 0.8bn, the rest being from fossils. Out of this 0.8bn, a big chunk was for VVER reactors (Finland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria) - all requiring a very special fuel element. Framatome and Westinghouse started manufacturing it and testing in several facilities, but it'll take time for full replacement.
The practicality and economic viability are entirely under our control. We made them impractical and uneconomical here, while they are practical and economical in France and China.
In a thermal reactor, reactivity is maintained by a carefully designed lattice of fuel elements and moderator. Disrupt this lattice and reactivity goes down. Thermal neutrons are also highly absorbed by certain neutron poisons with resonances that enable neutron capture at low energy; these can be added to shut down any potential reaction.
Fast reactors aren't like that. If fuel rearranges (for example, by melting and flowing into coolant channels) reactivity can increase. A fasts reactor will have ~100 times the "bare core" critical mass of fissionable material in it, so there's plenty of room for serious rearrangement to bring fission material into a prompt fast supercritical configuration.
That by itself could give you an explosion. But if the explosion then compresses some other part of the system beyond supercriticality, one could get an even more serious explosion. The possibility with something with a yield in the kiloton range can't easily be ruled out. This would be far worse than Chernobyl.
The fast reactor concepts I've seen deal with this by saying "our design can't ever melt down". Color me skeptical on that, and defense in depth says you don't believe such claims when failure could be so catastrophic. Even if regulators can be convinced (or be made to say they are convinced), the first experience that indicates the assumption wasn't true will lead to all reactors of that design being permanently shut down. This would be a serious financial risk to anyone thinking of building them.
If I were dead set on a fast reactor I'd look at something like a fast MSR (chloride salt) where such rearrangement could be ruled out.
In a LWR, if the coolant/moderator boils away, sure, the reactivity goes down. But there is plenty enough decay heat left to melt all the fuel that can then flow into a puddle of suitable geometry and go boom. Hypothetically speaking, at least.
I suppose in practice most LWR's use lightly enriched fuel so it's very hard to get enough material close enough together to make it critical, let alone supercritical, without a moderator of some sort. Of course, plenty of research reactors, naval reactors etc. have operated with very highly enriched fuel (90+%?), but even these have AFAIU so far managed without accidentally turning themselves into nuclear bombs.
Seems most contemporary civilian fast reactor designs are designed to operate with HALEU fuel, where the limit is (somewhat arbitrarily) set at 20%. A lot higher enrichment than your typical LWR, but still much lower than you see in weapons, and you still need quite a lot of it before it can go boom.
In a thermal reactor, there's no problem, as there's now no moderator. There was massive rearrangement and compaction of melted fuel at the TMI accident, but criticality was not going to be a serious issue for the fundamental reasons I gave above.
In a fast reactor? It can only become more reactive. Anything else there was only absorbing neutrons, not helping, and the geometric change reduces neutron leakage.
Edward Teller somewhat famously warned about the issue in 1967, in a trade magazine named "Nuclear News":
“For the fast breeder to work in its steady state breeding condition, you probably need half a ton of plutonium. In order that it should work economically in a sufficiently big power producing unit, it probably needs more than one ton of plutonium. I do not like the hazard involved. I suggested that nuclear reactors are a blessing because they are clean. They are clean as long as they function as planned, but if they malfunction in a massive manner, which can happen in principle, they can release enough fission products to kill a tremendous number of people.
… But if you put together two tons of plutonium in a breeder, one tenth of one percent of this material could become critical. I have listened to hundreds of analyses of what course a nuclear accident could take. Although I believe it is possible to analyze the immediate consequences of an accident, I do not believe it is possible to analyze and foresee the secondary consequences. In an accident involving plutonium, a couple of tons of plutonium can melt. I don’t think anyone can foresee where one or two or five percent of this plutonium will find itself and how it will get mixed with other material. A small fraction of the original charge can become a great hazard."
(Natrium is not a breeder but the same argument holds.)
That no fast reactors have yet exploded is of course no great argument. How many fast reactors have been built, particularly large ones? Not many. And we've already seen a commercial fast reactor suffer fuel melting (Fermi 1).
I'll be surprised if this project actually gets built, though.
Nuclear power plants aren’t flexible enough for sudden changes in energy consumption.
With consistent producers like nuclear there is no storage problem.
And of course the Natrium plant has the buffer so it can ramp grid output up and down while maintaining the reactor at consistent power levels.
This tells me you’ve never looked at a demand curve. In for example California the demand swings from 18 GW to 50 GW over the day and seasons.
The problem has always been economical. And this solution is looking like a bandaid to get taxpayer handouts.
Why store expensive nuclear electricity rather than extremely cheap renewable electricity?
Have you been looking at "net demand" curves? Total demand variation is not too large over the day. The wind/solar production enormously increases the magnitude of remaining demand difference over the day.
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook
> and seasons.
Nobody is talking about batteries to deal with demand swings between seasons though. Capacity has to accommodate whether it's nuclear or fossil or battery or renewable. The issue is day to day variation. And it does not matter how much wind/solar capacity you have, you can't supply demand without storage. That is untrue of other generation types.
Other generation might use batteries to take the edge of peaks, but that would only be done if it made total cost cheaper. That's not the case for renewables. If there were no other generation then they would have to use storage, so it's always going to make them more expensive.
It goes 7 GW negative.
The problem with nuclear power is that about all costs are fixed. It costs 18-24 cents/kWh when running at 100% for 40 years excluding backup, transmission, final waste disposal and taxes.
Now remove any earning potential from large portions of the day coming from renewables and storage and the economics simply does not pan a out.
I don't see the relevance comparing with a plant that start construction over half a century ago?
Sounds applicable!
Let’s first acknowledge that KHNP pulled out of all western projects except the Czech one after their settlement with Westinghouse. They don’t exist as an option.
Then let’s look at the Czech subsidies. They aren’t materially different compared to any other modern western nuclear construction.
They’ve shaved a few billion from the headline number but the project is still pure cost plus putting all construction and financial risk on the governments tab.
You may not be aware of this, but the UAE is one of the richest countries in the world, on par with with the United States and ahead of Denmark and most of the European nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
The design is South Korean.
So: where is your evidence that labor/design/regulations are sub-par?
Czechian govt subsidies were approved by EC and are pretty ok cost-wise. Even 11bn/reactor is fine considering FLA3 is 23bn. On the other hand, Germany spends on EEG alone each year almost a full equivalent of a failed FLA3. And with new transmission subsidies it's even higher. Both EEG and transmission subsidies are not subject to EC approval, unlike subsidies for nuclear
But agree with the other comment - your remarks sound rather racist
Right. Due to solar/wind.
Right. Due to solar/wind.
Gross demand is much flatter. Not completely flat, but it's obvious that it does not require anywhere near the amount of storage or variation that renewables alone would require.
Contrast this with French intermittent renewables projects, which are not profitable at all, EDF receives massive subsidies for them.
Hinkley Point C just got a bridging loan to finalize the plant, after 8 years of building so the remaining risk should be minimal. They got an 7% interest rate. Then EDF needs to make profit on top of that.
When using real world discount rates for FV3 you end up towards 20 cents/kWh.
I love how you quote the EPR2 units cheaper than the proposed subsidies. This looks like blind conviction rather than a factual statement.
The proposed subsidies for the EPR2 fleet is a 10 euro cents CFD and interest free loans. Sum freely, but you end up towards 20 cents per kWh.
And that is excluding for example the backup needed when suddenly half your fleet is offline at the same time. Like happened in France during the energy crisis and multiple times in Sweden last year.
https://www.reuters.com/business/apollo-provide-6-billion-fu...
10 Cents CFD is not a 10 cent subsidy.
You showed exactly how impactful the discount rate is in your comment.
The interest-free loans are also not a subsidy, at least not the loans, as the principal has to be repaid in full. The lack of interest payment is a subsidy, but that's a lot less than the loan amount, and being a state company EDF can get pretty good interest rates on the free market. Oh, and those loans will only be for half of the investment.
My estimates put the value of this subsidy at around €20 billion. So less than 1 year of Germany renewable subsidies just from the EEG. For plants that will run for 80 years or more and produce electricity worth >€600 billion (at 10 cents).
20/600 = 0,0333 or around 3,3% of those 10 cents, or less than about 1/3 of a cent per kWh.
And of course the French state owns EDF, so when EDF makes a profit, the state gets those profits. As they have been doing consistently for the last half century or so.
So as with CFD payment, which you put as a subsidy of 10 cent/kWh, there is the tiniest grain of truth in your claims, but then inflated beyond the pale.
Speaking of the CFD: the expected wholesale price of electricity in Germany is expected to be around €90-95/MWh in the next couple of years, and prices have tended to be higher than predictions. And if the wholesale price goes above the CFD price, then EDF loses money on the CFD, because they get exactly the CFD, no less, but also no more.
Assuming the predictions are correct and apply to France as well, the subsidy would be 0,5-1 cents/kWh, so a factor 10-20 less than your claim of 10 cents, and only if wholesale prices actually stay low.
After all, the CFD is primarily necessary, because the subsidized and preferentially treated intermittent renewables have wrecked havoc with wholesale electricity prices, with prices in Germany in 2025 fluctuating wildly between + €583/MWh and - €130/MWh.
It's not really the price, it's the artificially and unnecessarily introduced fluctuations that cause problems for investors.
And of course those renewables that are causing al this havoc get vastly more subsidies per kWh than this. And preferential loans, preferential feed-in, preferential regulations etc.
Anyway, your claim was 20 cents of subsidies per kWh. The real value ranges from less than a cent (could even go negative) to maybe up to 2 cents. So very generously you inflated by a factor of only 10-40.
So you can see why I don't debunk all of the disinformation you put forward, just some of it. It's too much work.
That's right: nowhere!
Which is why some solar can be a good addition. But there is a lot that is flat. And for that you need solid, steady generation capacity.
I can tell you they won’t. Which is why there’s currently 0 commercial nuclear reactors under construction in the US.
You also have to look at it from incentives. Why should a person or company with solar and storage buy horrifyingly expensive nuclear power from the grid when their own installation delivers?
Well, they don’t.
Why should their neighbors prefer horrifyingly expensive grid based nuclear electricity to their neighbors excess renewables?
Well, they don’t.
Do you know what they do instead? These steady consumers. They buy financial instruments like futures and PPAs to ensure steady price and supply.
The problem for new built nuclear power is that these financial instruments costs a fraction of the price new built nuclear power requires.
New built nuclear power is the fax of the internet age. It is time to let go.
The exact opposite of what you write is true. Please inform yourself.
They are currently buying up all the nuclear they can get their hands on, reactivating shut down plants, investing both in startups and in existing players to build as much nuclear as they can:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2026/02/19/why-microsof...
https://neutronbytes.com/2025/11/20/terrapower-natrium-react...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/google-to-fund-e...
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-12-10/article-7608/vc-summer-u...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/palisades-receiv...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/westinghouse-and-f...
https://highlandscurrent.org/2026/03/07/lawler-announces-pla...
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/a-new-threat-to-powe...
Storage would mean just to reroute the energy to storage, otherwise you need to lower the power plant‘s output what doesn’t happen fast in nuclear power plants
When a cold spell hits France exports turn to imports.
Now EDF is crying about renewables lowering nuclear earning potential and increasing maintenance costs.
The problem is that they are up against economic incentives. Why should a company or person with solar and storage buy grid based nuclear power? They don’t.
Why should they not sell their excess to their neighbors? They do.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-16/edf-warns...
French nuclear is more flexible than coal by design and as flexible as many older gas plants with ALFC system. They can reach up to 0.5%/second modulation (proved by Philipsburg) if the situation requires but it's rarely the case if you have a fleet. It's still not as fast as BWR's that can reach 1%/second but german coal is the slowest load follower and still meets min requirements imposed by the grid.
"When a cold spell hits France exports turn to imports." - was true in the past, a bit, but afaik this and last winter France was net exporting a ton. And with FLA3 reaching full capacity this year it'll be even less of a problem. It's not like they have a problem now, they are the largest net exporter on the continent and it's unlikely to change soon.
"Now EDF is crying about renewables lowering nuclear earning potential and increasing maintenance costs." - yes, because ren generation is acting like a parasitic source without proper BESS deployments - they eat into firm power profits without providing firm power benefits.
"Why should a company or person with solar and storage buy grid based nuclear power? They don’t." - because in many places of the world solar+bess are not sufficient. It's also the reason why Microsoft signed a contract for TMI way above market prices instead of building a fully offgrid ren solution
EDF is selling power to neighbors and makes money from it. It also is modulating it's npp a lot, which will maybe change when AC's will be more widely deployed and EV's will expand. It also is trying to schedule most maintenance works in summer, during lowest demand periods
As EDF will be able to sell fewer and fewer hours at a profit we will likely see them crying for handouts to even maintain the existing plants. Let alone new builds requiring 18-24 cent/kWh average prices to cover the costs.
EDF needs no handouts for maintenance of their reactors. But I'm eager to see their profits evolution in 2026 H1 after arenh got ditched. There will be some govt loans for EPR2, but the amount is rather tiny if we compare to say German EEG fund.
Why always the German comparison? Who even brought up Germany Can’t the nuclear handouts stand on their own?
The EEG costs are quickly going down as expensive early projects are losing their subsidies.
Renewables and storage are built in massive amounts all over the world without subsidies.
Why this completely one sided focus on absolutely massive handouts for the electricity sector, which is already solved by renewables and storage for the 99% of the cases when we still need to decarbonize industry, agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc?
It makes absolutely and sounds like a solution looking for a problem, with a bunch of people who can’t let go attached to it.
It is the fax machine of the internet age. It is time to let go.
EEG costs are projected to rise per EWI because even though most expensive contracts are being over, it's paid more frequently. It's projected nr will reach 23bn/y.
"which is already solved by renewables and storage for the 99% of the cases" - it's not solved by far in Europe unless you add something on top, eg. Gas firming.
It's interesting to say nuclear is a fax machine in the internet age when nuclear is our youngest invention to extract energy while solar/wind/hydro are much older. Such arguments make no sense whatsoever
And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer because the rivers were too hot to be used for cooling. Won‘t be the last time. And that will be a big problem when people turn on their AC in a heat wave but the power plants can’t power up because they don’t have enough cool water.
And that was before drone wars were a thing.
People react nervously when unknown drones fly around airports and power plants.
And didn’t we learn from the internet that centralization is a bad thing? Nuclear power plants are exactly that.
Imagine a grid where every consumer is also a producer who can satisfy their energy needs at least partially for themselves even without the grid. Try to blackout that.
"And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer" - blatant lie. Cooling was fine, it's env protection law to avoid damaging the fauna(read - to not boil fish). Yet, it affects about 0.02% of annual generation and valid almost exclusively to NPP without cooling towers. Yet in those exact periods EDF was net exporting about 14GW to neighbors, again, data is public. French nukes can handle ppl's AC's just well, probably EDF even hopes for that to modulate their npp less and get more $
Why people always spread such nonsense without even checking the facts? Like https://www.vie-publique.fr/files/rapport/pdf/288726.pdf
"And didn’t we learn from the internet that centralization is a bad thing? Nuclear power plants are exactly that." France has a combination of centralized and decentralized power - npp's are distributed around the country but each can generate a lot of power. Even more distribution and you start paying a ton for transmission lines and maintenance. That's the reason Germany started subsidizing them from this year, with about 6bn/y. Full decentralization is not a feature and you still can't achieve it since transmission system is centralized, prime example being recent cascade blackout in Spain.
"Imagine a grid where every consumer is also a producer who can satisfy their energy needs at least partially for themselves even without the grid. Try to blackout that." - that'll mean having to need a fully parallel grid for firming. Besides, a lot of home solar are grid followers - if there's a blackout, it'll shut down too unless you have a special invertor+bess which many dont have (yet)
"And that was before drone wars were a thing." - a drone would do nothing to a NPP. Even an airplane impact can be tolerated depending how new is the NPP.
You do understand what the point of environmental protection is?
If you kill the flora and fauna you are not environment friendly.
The problem is you framed it as
1- not being able to cool reactors physically, which is false
2- being a major deal, when it affects only 0.2% of generation per year, during a period when EDF is net exporting about 14GW to the neighbors
3- being an unfixable issue, which is again false. The problem exista for reactors without cooling towers. EDF can fix it by building them. But there's no financial incentive here. Where would EDF sell extra power when export is already maximized in that same timeframe and market prices in summer are low?
Where does it say physically?
> being a major deal, when it affects only 0.2% of generation per year
Interesting choice of time period. Energy problems are rarely viewed from a yearly perspective.
> being an unfixable issue, which is again false.
Who said unfixable? It’s a current problem and any change needs time and money.
That time and money can be used for decentralization.
Drones will get cheaper and cheaper and more capable and many nuclear power plants aren’t built for that threat
"And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer because the rivers were too hot to be used for cooling" - this does imply that cooling was not possible. You said nothing about the fact it's just a legal limit. Nor did you specify what/how many NPP exactly got modulated. Is "their" supposed to mean all? A bunch?
"And that will be a big problem when people turn on their AC in a heat wave but the power plants can’t power up because they don’t have enough cool water." - this implies it's both a major problem during heatwaves and/or that it's unfixable, both being false.
"> being a major deal, when it affects only 0.2% of generation per year
Interesting choice of time period. Energy problems are rarely viewed from a yearly perspective." - did you omit on purpose LITERALLY the following text "during a period when EDF is net exporting about 14GW to the neighbors" ? France is largest net exporter on the continent both yearly and in summer in particular. You are free to inspect energy charts data.
"That time and money can be used for decentralization." - french generation is already sufficiently decentralized. They can decentealize even more by building more plants across the country.
"Drones will get cheaper and cheaper and more capable and many nuclear power plants aren’t built for that threat" - nuclear plants are built or upgraded to withstand airplane impacts, a drone would barely scratch the outer reinforced concrete.
All your statements are either made on purpose to mislead (especially considering how you dismiss your own statements or omit crucial parts of text quoting me) or you are communicating your thoughts in a very unoptimal way...
> Electricite de France SA said growing solar and wind generation was increasing equipment wear and maintenance costs at its nuclear reactors, which are forced to reduce output when power demand is insufficient.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-16/edf-warns...
French nuclear is extremely flexible https://www.services-rte.com/en/view-data-published-by-rte/g... but it doesn't mean it's free. Solar and wind without proper bess to support them are creating problems for other generators, acting as grid parasites without offering proper firm generation
You are just trying to politicize the laws of physics due to your own lack of understanding of the topic. Meanwhile, your solar panels are manufactured mostly with power gotten from coal, in the 3rd world, and are mostly sited in places where they do little to no good while at the same time destabilizing the grid. Then you have the temerity to argue with actual engineers who spend their lives studying this topic. Seriously???
Solar manufactured from coal is irrelevant, it's offsetting that carbon many times over during lifetime. A real problem is on the other hand providing firm power. In some regions like Australia it could be realistic to get by with ren alone. In other regions like say Germany, it's not realistic and confirmed even by Fraunhofer ISE
I will add that if a place like Germany tries to compete in energy-intensive industry against places nearer the equator with cheap, low seasonality solar they're going to lose.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/terrapower-break...
As far as I can tell, in its 20 years of existence, TerraPower has not built a reactor. nor had one of its designs built by someone else.
Before you build the first one, you haven't built one.
Are you saying first things can never be built?
They started building, with the non-nuclear bits first, as one does.
Now they have regulatory approval.
One step after another.
You claimed that building the non-nuclear parts of the construction as evidence that the reactor itself will successfully be built, which is nonsense. That someone builds a launchpad tells you nothing about their ability to build and successfully launch rockets
I gave the fact that it is being built as evidence counter the claim that it wouldn't be built at all.
Which should be uncontroversial.
Are you describing the "just build nukes" party here?
Cause we've been waiting a while for this nuke solution to actually ship but every example is far more expensive all while the nuke lovers block solar and wind for the same reasons.
0 under construction in the US
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/westinghouse-pla...
Yes, it would be better if they had already started, but the ship is turning.
Why MAGA suddenly loves solar power
The Trump-led attack on solar eases as the right reckons with its crucial role in powering AI and keeping utility bills in check.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/03/02/katie-mil...