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Comment by fundatus | Hacker News Reader

Levelized Cost of Energy for Germany's existing nuclear fleet was roughly 13ct/kwh.[1] The averaged costs (YTD) from the linked article currently stands at 9.71 ct/kwh. So nuclear in the mix would have increased the costs.

[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...

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LCOE is good for marginal cost (eg: one more solar panel), but fails dramatically at evaluating systemic costs.

A nuclear reactor moves the entire market down, including the costs to the consumer when he buys solar energy.

Here is a UN document explaining it: https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/GECES-21_2025_...

The SCBOE score is a good idea. However, in the case of Germany, it is often overlooked that the power grid dating from the 1970s, which was built as a one-way system from large power plants (nuclear power plants) to consumers, would have needed to be rebuilt regardless. A large share of the grid costs would therefore have been passed on to consumers even without the transition to renewable energy. Additionally, Germany is located in the center of Europe and is thus a major transit country for electricity. Here too, corresponding capacities would have had to be expanded. The expansion of a European power grid also means that the disadvantages of renewable energy variability can be offset. As the SCBOE system also shows, the individual power plant still accounts for the largest share of costs. Many of the additional factors can actually go down in prices as renewables scale up (nuclear has still to prove that this could work there too). In that regard, LCOE remains relevant.

Even in the peak of nuclear electricity production in the year 2001, coal was dominant source electricity in German grid. (Data for 2001, Nuclear 171 TWh, Coal 293 TWh).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

Power grid is not and newer was a one-way system, all the AC power lines, transformers don't care for the direction of the current. It's only the amount of current passing through each power lines, transformers that's important.

The side effect of many electric customers installing PV panels and reducing their demand from grid is that the fuel costs of on-demand power plants decrease, but the fixed costs of on-demand power plants (installation, maintenance) stay the same. These fixed costs have to be recouped in the smaller amount of electricity sold by on-demand power plants, therefor per MWh prices from on-demand power plants will increase for electric grid customer.

For most electric customers it's not possible to disconnect from electric grid and rely just on PV panels and batteries.

Germany is not major transit country for electricity. According to data from 2019 electricity interconnection level for Germany was only 10% .

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

Germany is projected to have import capacity equal to less than 15% of their domestic electricity generation by 2030.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/money-on-the-line-s...

Building of large capacity and long power lines is expensive, therefor many big industrial electric consumers were build near power plants or power plants were build near major industrial customers.

The average electricity price for German households is approximately 32.5 to 34 cents per kWh.

We are not doing an apple to apple comparison if we are not actually looking at what people are paying. The cost of energy is to have the a stable supply of energy delivered at the time that the consumer wants to buy it. The cost of energy production is thus not just the price of producing one unit of energy in isolation, but to have it transmitted in a stable grid at a date and time specified by the consumer. Nuclear energy and solar energy both produce units of energy, but consumers need for transmission, grid stability and time aspects are completely different depending if they buy nuclear energy or solar energy. They are not interchangeable on those aspects.

The 9.71 ct/kwh is the levelized cost of producing electricity from solar. It is not the same as the average cost of consuming energy. Adding nuclear to the mix would not necessary increase costs of consuming energy, even if the average cost of producing energy would go up.

To make a very simplified illustration of this. A energy broker would happily trade 10 units for energy for 1 unit of energy, assuming that they can dictate when and where each unit get transmitted.

The cost of energy is also full lifecycle cost including waste handling, deconstruction and security. I am not saying that everything is that equation for renewables. However, one truth at least in Germany is that we still have not solved the waste problem. Other countries have both better options and also a societal consensus. Here is a study of societal cost of nuclear energy:

Those cost don't even include the full lifecycle societal cost of nuclear energy [0] (25-39 cent by some studies). Sure the renewables also have lifecycle cost we might not pay yet, but in Germany even more important we do not even have a societal and research concesus what to do with the waste (might be much better in other countries)

[0] https://green-planet-energy.de/fileadmin/images/presse/2020-...

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