Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
bluewin.ch
bluewin.ch
The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.
Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.
We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
Does discourse from neighboring countries leak in as well? For example, German and Italian media's anti-nuclear sentiment versus French media's neutral to vaguely positive sentiment about nuclear.
But, Germany's decision after Fukushima to close down all nuclear reactors has had a strong impact on the 2017 votation that banned nuclear in Switzerland. So I guess the influence is there.
We also have a few language specific medias (German: NZZ, Tagesanzeiger, Blick, ..., French: Le Temps, 24 heures, La Liberté, ...), but I think most people consume Swiss media, especially when Swiss politics and local afairs are absolutely not covered by French and German medias.
It gives the strange feeling that although they decided to create a country together they don't want to interact with each others unless absolutely necessary.
It's just harder to speak in another language than to understand it, so if you ask someone to speak...
Next time, ask them if they understand French :-).
Of course people make jokes and remarks about "those people" who speak a different language. But "those people" are probably 1h away by train, are probably coworkers, and their language was taught in your school (even if some didn't bother to learn).
I'd expect the strong anti movement from Germany to have some impact.
Unless you personally agree with whatever your preferred party's line is on everything and generalize that sentiment, I'm not sure how to get to that conclusion.
I don’t know why we put people in political buckets. It’s good to disagree. I am probably the weird guy but so be it.
There isn't a single party that represents what I believe in - some are just overall clos0er to than others.
People aren't really partisan like that in Switzerland. They'll happily elect people from one party then vote against the party on specific issues in referendums or initiatives.
For something like nuclear, people who vote for green party might be mostly aligned with the party because it's a key issue for them while people who vote for center or right parties won't really care what the party recommends.
We had a nuclear meltdown in an experimental reactor in Lucens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor).
That's going to depend on the geology.
Your statement about "We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time" really stood out to me.
Are Swiss folks maybe acting a bit NIMBY by not allowing nuclear in their own country, but are fine with buying French nuclear power? It seems a tad hypocritical to be against nuclear, while simultaneously using it as long as it's "not in my country".
At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...
They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.
It is a hard sell when you have to front a good chunk of money, without a track record of successful build ups. It applies to other infrastructure stuff like HSR.
Let’s hope Switzerland takes the lead here, Sweden are already building.
The political will is there. Let’s do it?
2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were much more likely to directly invest in energy projects. It didn’t have to compete with Labubus for private dollars.
3. Its current competition didn’t exist, given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten, and how much cheaper battery tech has gotten with signs all of them will only get even cheaper. And on the non renewable side, natural gas has become incredibly cheaper as well.
2. Once the vote is there(Switzerland is a direct democracy), the public funds will be there. Sweden has recently chosen to invest ~40B Euro.
3. Solar, really? In Switzerland? Many parts of the industrialised world receive very little sun, especially in winter, where coincidentally, energy usage peaks.
And intermittent power generation like wind is no competition to nuclear.
These are very weak arguments. Good luck replacing Oskarshamn with solar panels…
In a world with a lot of oil. How does that evolve when we don't have enough oil anymore?
Feels like renewables are extremely distributed, which sounds like it may be harder to manage without the happy globalisation brought by accessible oil.
To be clear, I believe we also need renewables. But I also believe that we won't remotely replace oil, so we need absolutely everything we can imagine, and that includes nuclear energy.
For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.
Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.
The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.
That nuclear power must take forever is a myth and is only due to dysfunctional politics.
That “you get a permit in the winter and it’s done by summer” is a totally bogus claim. Perhaps for some tiny installation compared to a power plant with 1.5GW output.
https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/o...
It is easy to dream about what could have been half a century ago, but that doesn’t change reality today.
Please do tell me the expected capacity factor of these biomass plants, even if 18 cents per kWh is correct, after renewables, storage, hydro if available and existing nuclear plants with 80 year LTOs do the heavy lifting.
Can you see the difference compared to new built nuclear power which requires that absolutely insane price when running at 100% 24/7 for 40 years?
And you do realize that across such a lifespan essentially the entire nuclear plant except the pressure vessel and outer shell is replaced?
Steam generators, turbines, generators, control systems, piping, valves etc. Everything is replaced. Is that free?
There’s no trouble building renewables with similar lifespans. It is just not done because predicting profitability until the 2100 is absolute lunacy.
"do realize that across such a lifespan essentially the entire nuclear plant except the pressure vessel and outer shell is replaced?" - so you are saying that EDF replaced/will replace all the components except PV of it's plants to reach 60-80y? This sounds ridiculous. Maintenance isn't free but is part of opex of a plant which for existing ones is rather low.
For anyone understanding economics it’s an admission of how far you need to twist the numbers to just make it horrifyingly expensive.
The OPEX calculated in for example Lazard is not including all replacements and maintenance needed for LTO.
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
Lazard doesn't (or at least didn't) estimate the plants to work for 60y either considering all gen 3 are licensed for this period. Lazard also has interesting numbers about LCOE of ren+cheap gas firming. Would be interesting to see the added cost of transmission, considering Germany spends 10x more than France per year on it
Due to renewables having zero fuel cost they win this handily. Which now also extends to when storage from either wind or solar delivers.
Which is what we see in action:
From night to noon: France’s reactors are now bending for European solar
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/05/14/from-night-to-noon-fr...
EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-16/edf-warns...
They do. They have a diamond which is Vogtle with a 97% capacity factor and 70 year economic lifespan. Still leading to horrifyingly expensive electricity.
Like I said. It is an admission in how far you need to tilt the numbers to still get it to be horrifyingly expensive.
We have studies like that. But I know people like you desperately try to dismiss them.
Here, a modern article modeling "System LCOE". In other words, the whole grid including transmission backup and everything else.
It starts by giving new built nuclear power the benefit of doubt, having it cost 40% less than Flamanville 3 and 70% less than Hinkley Point C. Since no one would ever be stupid enough to greenlight a project like that again.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
It finds that for Denmark, a country with very low insolation and awful winters that renewablws are 53% cheaper than the nuclear system.
Nuclear is more flexible than coal and on par with some gas plants. BWR's are even faster. Your second link about french modulation proves that. Or you can check directly on RTE website
EDF is crying because ren get CFD's and curtailment payments while EDF does not.
The paper you posted is so funny. The author is also the chief editor of the journal the paper was published. He is also one of the founders of DK antinuclear movement which resulted in DK becoming one of the largest coal consumers at that time. His previous paper was subject to correction due to favorably "omitted details". His current paper still assumes for some reason dirt cheap hydrogen firming for renewables. Shall we check the cost of pure H2 firming per Lazard?
Not only DK has worse emissions than France - it also managed to piss off Norway and Sweden https://montelnews.com/news/0138d712-3afd-4590-883e-4b9221fd...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-pauses-plans-...
Followed by attacking the author rather than the context, followed by a "what about".
You truly lost the plot here. You do realize that right?
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
It's not an attack on the author. What I've written can be easily verified. The author IS the chief editor of the journal the paper was published in. The author is one of the founding members of DK antinuclear movement. His previous paper was subject to correction due to details that were omitted which skewed the final results. The paper does assume dirt cheap H2 firming which is not bounded to reality in any sense whatsoever. Nuclear ban in DK DID led to it becoming one of the largest coal consumers at that time.
You don't need to ask this stupid question at each post. It'll not change the simple fact that DK and DE have far worse emissions than France and Sweden. It'll not change the fact Germany plans gas expansion for firming renewables.
Maybe I should ask you the question why are you so afraid of nuclear combined with renewables when history proved this pathway gives the best results? I can't think of anything more than blind hate
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Yes. That is the issue. How do you suggest the nuclear plants will survive in such an environment when they are already today, early in the renewable disruption, facing headwinds?
Then more just attacking the author. Then trying to discredit this paper by an old one, and you clearly haven't read the criticism.
The criticism said:
1. Assuming new built nuclear power is cheap and fast to build then you are wrong!!!!
But you never read further than the headline did you?
Then you go on to mindless complaining. Yes, it would have been amazing if Denmark and Germany built nuclear power half a century ago and decarbonized their grids.
But we live in 2026 and there's no point crying over spilled milk.
> nuclear combined with renewables when history proved this pathway gives the best results?
Which is revionist history. As shown by the French nuclear plants struggling to cope with an increasingly renewable grid. Same with the Swedish ones where 4 reactors has shut down due to market conditions in recent years. They were hemorrhaging money.
You are looking at an incredibly short period of time where half a century old paid off plants are still around and renewables haven't completely disrupted the French grid yet.
Please do explain how you would fit a nuclear plant into this grid mix:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
That is where all grids globally are headed in less than 10 years time. Before a single nuclear projected started today is completed.
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage? Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
SVT or SR has never shown me this, wonder why...
And what is crazy is we, in Europe, act and talk as if we cannot do anything without sucking up to USA or China.
We also have massive Hydro in Sweden. We can see what is currently giving us electricity.
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/
oh and dont get us started on the electricity zones and germany...
Turn on Barsebäck again... absolute asenine they shut it down. Will never happen, been too long, also owned by Uniper... (Germans)
And sadly S+MP+V will win this election it looks like. Say goodbye to any new nuclear power. Also it will be 2015 all over again but that is off topic...
After the accidents showed that these designs where just not quite safe enough, redundancy in the safety systems were added. The thing is; as soon as those reactor designs got a bit more safe, they got much more expensive quite quickly. Just look at France's history of nuclear reactor development.CP0, CP1 and CP2 were somewhat cheap and they were able to churn out the things in quite a number.P4 and P'4 were already much more complex, more expensive and it just wasn't possible to mass produce these things like before. By N4 the economy of scale had broken down almost completely.
That's the problem with nuclear reactors. They are simple in principle, but fiendishly difficult in practice and enormously complex. So complex indeed that the learning curve doesn't yield any compounding returns. That's what we've seen play out in the last 50 years.
I don't know how things evolved in Sweden, but I assume that Swedish reactors don't have all the safety features of modern reactors. I guess that's what made them cheap, just like the CP-series in France.
It's not about safety but features and wishes to have. French reactors were cheap even at P4 level but the demand hasn't increased as planned and electrification was not great, so construction stopped. EPR is a complicated mess trying to cater to all regulations at once, especially the harsh german ones. That's why EPR2 has some stuff stripped apart
If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.
Those regulations you despise were written in blood.
Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it.
Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.
An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent.
I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically.
Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.
Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal.
But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.
We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?
No need to run the world: in the last decades, some environmentalists have been lobbying against nuclear energy and in the end, the people in many countries have become opposed to it by fear of it. And that feared is fuelled (among others) by environmentalists for sure.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
If it's about comparing energies financially (and many other dimensions actually), nothing gets remotely close to oil. But oil is limited and oil is destroying the world.
Also not to forget: everything nowadays depends on globalisation and therefore oil. We like to compare renewables to oil, but we forget that they totally depend on oil at the moment. Without oil, we don't build much renewables anywhere. So an important question is: without oil, do we need nuclear energy or not? I believe we do. I believe we also need renewables, to be clear.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.
(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)
Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.
France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Unfortunately "the environmentalist movement" didn't have the information regarding the dangers of climate change and the information about the near-zero threat from low level nuclear radiation in 1970ies. Hindsight is 20/20.
That said; planning and construction of new nuclear reactors peaked in the early 1970ies, before large scale accidents (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) really mobilized civil society against nuclear power.
The reason the West stopped building is because even with state support, it's not such a financially attractive investment. That's why "the East" continued building more and more reactors until the big incident. (Arguably their reactors were also much less safe and thus probably cheaper by quite a bit.)
So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?
Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.
None of the theories put forward about the loss of the USS Scorpion have involved the reactor. Maybe they didn't discuss it because it wasn't relevant?
Ok
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Bo...
Naval reactors are inherently safer due to their small size and unlimited supply of cooling water. A meltdown is virtually impossible, worst-case scenario you could always use a firehose and a diesel pump to inject sea water into the reactor. On the other hand: you really don't want to overfill the reactor: a naval reactor "going solid" rips itself apart, killing the ship.
Commercial reactors are the exact opposite. Overfilling them is not a huge deal as there are plenty of ways to relieve pressure, but underfilling them can easily lead to a meltdown. Even after shutdown it needs active cooling for a decent while to prevent residual decay from overheating it.
The TMI reactor operators were trained on naval reactors, but they were operating a commercial reactor. During the incident they were too busy trying to prevent it from overfilling to notice that it was actually cooking itself dry - so they intentionally shut down the emergency cooling system!
So no, saying that the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program has led to zero accidents is both wrong, and completely irrelevant to the subject here.
https://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/alfieri1/
To put it another way, the only way to blame the Naval Reactor program is if you believe in a scenario where equipment failure of the control panel to notify operators of the exact problem that you described did not contribute to the incident. Once you get to “equipment failure doesn’t cause problems, the United States Navy causes problems” you’re pretty squarely in fantasticism territory, though.
Lmao at “three quarters of a century of institutional knowledge isn’t relevant because I don’t think you can build a nuclear reactor by water for some reason” while talking about a nuclear power plant on an island
Yes, with extra steps.
Regulations, more so than their impact on price, cost calendar time.
Time, especially for already-lengthy and complicated infrastructure projects, costs volume.
And low volume means high prices and a slow pace of improvement.
Henry Ford wouldn't have built many automobiles, or improved them as quickly as he did, if every one needed to be individually permitted by multiple government agencies.
The failure of nuclear is that it never standardized and scaled to industrially-efficient volumes (outside of arguably France) at exactly the point that it could have technologically done so (~1970s). Had Offshore Power Systems^ begun producing floating reactors at volume in Jacksonville, FL in the late 70s, we'd be having a very different conversation about cheap American nuclear power today.
nuclear being expensive is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. the costs for certified equipment are high because the market is small and not competitive, because nobodys building nuclear, because everyone knows its too expensive to build and not worth it.
the only solution i see is massive state investment like what france was doing in the 70s. that would upset the market purists but its more practical than trying to push the industry with a neoliberal hands off approach.
How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?
(also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)
The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it.
Environmentalists weren't just useful idiots then (and I hesitate to call people acting in good faith, without any self-interest, "idiots"). They're convenient fall guys today. The fossil fuel industry killed nuclear power and pinned it on the environmental movement. That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.
> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.
And yet you blame the messenger more than the money. If environmentalists didn't exist do you think fossil fuel wouldn't have found a different way to get the message out there? When money talks, people listen.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/trump-administration...
And they've been working steadily against solar and wind the whole time.
This is just one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra#Aftermath
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Prosperity#Fundi...
The fact that solar and wind are rolling out at unprecedented speed despite these headwinds is proof that its economics are better than nuclear, which could not overcome the same headwinds.
But that's still insufficient to explain it. If the fossil fuel industry had wanted nuclear power we'd have it. They could use lobbying to reduce the push for nuclear, and then blame it on the environmentalists. Who were happy to take a rare win.
It's just weird to me that environmentalists get blamed for killing nuclear more than the group that actually made it happen and had something to gain - the fossil fuel industry. They funded the environmentalists to protest against it, and they funded the politicians to write laws against it.
Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.
The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.
Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.
That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.
"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
All german plants are decomissioned through operators money except soviet/experimental units. Operators also paid into KENFO, an autoinvesting fund about 24bn and it keeps it's value despite the state taking about 2bn/y from it for interim storage and 'searching'. Meanwhile Finland built Onkalo for 1bn...
When you actually need to generate electricity rather than gather it, what's better than nuclear?
So you can build expensive nuclear plants for that small fraction of the time, or you can continue to use existing fossil fuel plants for free. The difference to the carbon bottom line is small.
In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2025...
On the spectrum from "cheap" to expensive, where would that fall?
For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
https://reneweconomy.com.au/ontario-utility-wants-to-double-...
> * The FAO estimates that the Plan will result in nuclear generation supplying a significant proportion of Ontario electricity demand from 2016 to 2064 at an average price of $80.7/MWh in 2017 dollars. (For reference, the 2017 Nuclear Price is $69/MWh and the current price of electricity for most residential and small business ratepayers is $114.9/MWh.)
> * The Nuclear Price will be higher than the average price of $80.7/MWh during the majority of the time that the reactors are being refurbished from 2016 to 2033. Post refurbishment, ratepayers will benefit from a lower than average Nuclear Price.
> * Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
> * OPG will realize a financial return from the operation of the DNGS and PNGS. OPG is owned by the Province and any return would improve the Province’s fiscal position. There is no significant fiscal impact to the Province from the refurbishment of reactors at the BNGS as it is operated by Bruce Power, a private sector organization.
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
I was not able to find a similar report (pro or con) for new build, though I think the current plan with some SMRs in Ontario is dumb: if we decide on more nuclear, we should stick with big(ger) CANDU, as there's little point in small reactors in a large grid like Ontario.
Renewable programs have also cost Ontario ratepayers quite a bit of money, for not a lot of electricity generated:
* https://ospe.on.ca/advocacy/green-energy-contracts-fao-repor...
It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).
Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.
The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.
But its finances were completely underwater with no way out due to the debt from nuclear construction.
After the breakup the public were left with $38B in debt from nuclear construction. Which the subsequent nuclear company was unable to pay off, or it would of course not have been restructured.
The debt from nuclear construction was being paid off then, just like it is being paid off right now: OEFC holds the debt and has revenue to pay it off. An article from someone who is not a fan of nuclear, but is also not a fan of Harris's non-sense:
> Harris claimed Hydro was so badly in debt as to be bankrupt. This claim was proven false by the final Ontario Hydro financial report in March of 1999 which showed that $1 billion of Hydro’s debt had been paid down and was on track to be paid off in 20 years. At the time critics said: “wouldn’t we all like to have a 20-year mortgage on our home because then you have an asset that serves you well!”
You can’t compare it with a house mortgage.
They had X in earning potential in a set time frame.
The debt accumulated was X + Y.
After the restructuring the public were left as bagholders of the ”+ Y” since it would be impossible to pay it off reasonably under the current framework.
A new framework was created where this stranded debt was paid off as a forced separate line item on everyone’s bills.
In other words. They were bankrupt, if the state hadn’t stepped in then they would not have been able to amortize the debt in the expected timeframe.
"Chart 1- History of Residual Stranded Debt & Unfunded Liability of OEFC" seems to show a decreasing number:
* https://www.breckenhill.com/blogg.php
There is of course a lot of political history (OPC, LPC, etc) that makes the whole situation messy.
> A new framework was created where this stranded debt was paid off as a forced separate line item on everyone’s bills.
The Debt Retirement Charge was $0.007 or 0.7¢ per kWh.
https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports...
A near 1 cent per kWh levy on every single kWh produced, across all sources, is a massive expense.
And that is after the maximum possible had already been extracted from the market.
Why are you so afraid of admitting that the nuclear construction in Ontario was an absolute economic shit show?
The website does not open for me. Are the quoted prices consumer prices including tax or wholesale prices before tax?
If it’s the latter, 8 cents is not that cheap and comparable to the average price per kWh (all sources) in Germany. In most cases in most places, the lion’s share of electricity costs is tax and infrastructure refinancing, not actual production. Levellized cost of PV+storage is well below new nuclear virtually in every deployment scenario.
> For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
Because NG is one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity, if you are not producing NG yourself locally AND don’t have to pay for environmental costs.
Nuclear is cheap to operate. It's expensive to build and expensive to decommission. Any analysis that doesn't include those two costs is highly misleading.
Ontario Hydro did not go bankrupt.
It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).
Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.
The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive.
It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition".
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.
I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".
Ontario's Bruce A site (Units 1-4) have an age of ~45 years, and has just finished refurbishment (ahead of schedule and under budget) to run for another few decades:
* https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/refurbishment-of-bruce...
Ontario's Pickering B nuclear site (Units 5-8) have an age of ~40 years, and are about to be refurbished to run another 30+ years:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...
So while the 60-80 years has not been hit, it is probably less on the "speculative" side of spectrum and more on the "probable" side.
Linear-Quadratic (LQ) Model
Threshold Model
Hormesis model
The linear no-threshold model is less realistic than threshold or hormesis-based models: An evolutionary perspective
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000927971...
"They removed the "as low as reasonably possible" design goal which means it's now allowed to dump radioactive waste into a river to save money"
This is just an incredibly stupid lie that completely destroys your credibility.
The ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principle paired with hyper-sensitive detection technology requires nuclear operators to spend billions on redundant safety features and extensive permitting for infinitesimal health benefits. This regulatory burden prices nuclear energy out of the market.
https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/georgia-nuclear-powe...
Renewables are not remotely displacing fossil fuels. Look at fossil fuel consumption.
Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sense to invest the money in something else.
Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.
You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!
> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?
> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.
Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base. Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.
It does because 1. they're both fighting for now-expensive imported natural gas 2. rates go up for everybody to pay for the malinvestment in solar
> Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.
I meant "for Germany". Those are a problem for others.
Maybe this is already complete, but at one point of lot of it was from decommissioning nuclear weapons, so it wasn't "we need them for fuel", it was "lets make use of this waste material and provide a financial disincentive for nuclear proliferation".
Finally, the West has plenty of sources for Uranium, and given plants already have years of fuel onsite, it is never a pressing problem.
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing. > It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.
Virtually nowhere gets zero sun.
Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
As well as a very low population density.
It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disaster of recent projects (e.g. EDF cost overruns).
And at high latitudes, the night can be very long. And even when the sun does appear for a bit, it doesn't provide a lot of energy.
And you might want to ask the Fins how they feel about nuclear power: around two thirds of the population are for it as well as pretty much the entire political establishment, including the Green Party.
Where did you get that idea from? This isn't Norway; we don't have any mountains. The country is mostly flat and most of the suitable locations already have a hydropower plant since the 1970s.
Low sun angle plus very heavy cloud cover means that even midday looks like a gloomy sunset.
Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).
Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly.
The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.
China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
isn't this proven to be true? better for the country, worse for a small amount of directly affected people?
But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.
Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).
Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.
Or Mercedes, where they decided to build extremely expensive EVs that departed from their core design so much their core audience didn't want to buy them, then they were surprised EVs don't sell.
Or Audi who were probably a masterclass in offering the worst possible value for money you could imagine with their EVs - £50k Q4 that still had manual seats, like what are you competing with exactly?
Only Skoda could really kinda buck the trend with the Enyaq, which proves that VW could be competive if they wanted to, but they actively decided not to.
And don't start me on the Peugeot/Renault/Opel cars, which initially looked incredibly interesting and actually competitive, but I can only guess that Stellantis told them to tone it down because again - have to protect their core business of ICE cars, can't be too good.
And then MG came in with very well specced working EVs, and then other Chinese brands moved in, and big european manufacturers are crying that they are eating their lunch. Like, you guys had literally years to address this, but you decided to protect your legacy product over investing in the future = you're reaping the results now.
Building out a new production line for vehicles is insanely expensive. Billions upon billions of dollars. You need the old cars to sell well enough to pay for this and all of your other expenses.
China got to get into the EV space with a mostly-clean slate. Their domestic manufacturers made absolutely horrid products at the turn of the century. They did what they do best: copy successful people with investment from the successful people.
They only let Western manufacturers sell in China with the cooperation of a local vehicle manufacturer. That necessitated a bunch of investment and IP transfers to Chinese manufacturers who didn't have to shell out themselves, and when they did, it was with the complete backing of the state.
When EV technology really became something viable in the last 10-15 years, they just used that capacity, lower wages, and lax environmental regulations around mining, to undercut the rest of the world on EVs.
It's easy to act like the rest of the world just isn't competent enough, but there are layers to this.
In practice though Westinghouse still bids lowest out of the politically viable options these days. Korean and French reactors are rather expensive.
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
What if I told you Europeans used to throw people in jail (or worse ) for claiming the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun?
This is a forever problem.
Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor#Fuel_repro...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.
Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.
Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
No, it's the normal that does the heavy lifting. A radiation therapy machine does not allow for an easy removal of the source, not without hours of work with specialized machinery. Again, how does a disgruntled office worker do this without immediate attention of security?
>>There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that
Well, it's really unfortunate, but we have multiple reports from people who have accidentally walked into a room with an open Cesium source at various irradiation facilities - they all reported that they felt incredibly sick in less than a minute. And that's "just" an irradiation source, not an active nuclear reactor. Again, I'm struggling to imagine how a "disgruntled worker" gets anywhere near the actual radiactive material within it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project)
The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.
Yes it's subsidized, everything in China is subsidized, that's the best part of a planned-capitalist economy. But it's actually becoming more market driven so they can reduce financial pressure and force efficiency from competition. In 10 years those subsidies are gonna be a lot smaller
> Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.
> Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Global-report-confirms-an...
The statement about subsidies is false too for existing plants. IPEX data is public. There are more subsidies for new units because the west is bad at construction but the amount is still not that great. Heck, biomass in EU gets 2x the CFD's vs min profitability limit of french Flamanville...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
"Most significant was the decision to abandon adding an extra wall in the reactor containment building—a feature designed to increase protection against radiation in the event of an accident."
Most reactors currently in operation have a single wall containment building. The EPR has double layer containment, but the new EPR2 reactor will have single-wall prestressed concrete containment structure with a metal liner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR2_des...
Also Korea’s nuclear industry as pretty far from decline:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/khnp-sets-out-pl...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/sites-selected-f...
Areva underbid on the fixed price contract to win against the ABWR, IIRC. Admittedly the Fins were not pleased at the time overrun, but the construction cost was historically not so bad given it was FOAK in a country without recent construction experience .
Citation needed. Delayed since FiD? Or since the project was originally announced? To me the latter is rather an unfair given planning permission issues and government changes.
There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.
What should one do then? Just shut everything down?
That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.
Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.
You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.
Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.
No, it can’t. We’re already building solar as fast as we can, the economics drive that. The marginal supply will come from something else. That margin is what we’re talking about, not the bulk. Most of the new energy will come from solar. But we can’t manufacture and install PVs quickly enough, particularly over the next 20 years, to close the gap.
So we either fully rely on gas turbines for the base load for the next 20 years, orrrr we rely on gas turbines during the few days it is both dark and wind-less for the next 20 years.
Wind and solar anti-correlation does not lowering this number. Number is still 20x, just it's more rare now, but it is still there.
I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.
All the places that can use hydro already do. Oh, and it's pretty damaging to the environment, it turns out.
Wind and solar are pretty cool, but also unreliable, so it's not so clear that they're really cheaper after you account for overprovisioning and storage costs.
If only there was a safe and reliable source of energy we could use to complement them...
Lol-ed hard... If we look only at modern generation of tech, Gen3 nuclear plants are the safest source of power
In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.
Where are the free nuclear plants?
Sizewell C = £40 billion
That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.
Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.
Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.
Nuclear "became expensive" because state subsidies declined, labor costs increased, and environmental regulations across all industries tightened.
I do note that you have changed your argument from "plants were built mostly by private sector" to "it wasn't fully state controlled enterprises in the west". Closer to the truth, but still incorrect.
Still, no CFDs were given to them. So it's not about state reducing subsidies. Nor was it about environment regulations.
The high costs of recent western projects are more related to depleted supply chain and poor designs of the plants. We'll get a chance soon to observe how Canada and Korea will build in Europe. Both have much better supply chain and both want to build (Czechia- apr and Romania -candu). If both will have the same cost blows as flamanville then it's clearly related to EU itself. If not- then the problem was EDF incompetence specifically here and Westinghouse incompetence in US
Climate change? Pollution? Nah, who cares, efficiency!
… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.
Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!
A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?
Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.
"China aims to reach 110 gigawatts (GWe) of nuclear capacity by 2030."
"China installed over 430 GW of renewables in 2025"
In other words china installed last year alone 5x the energy capacity in solar and wind, what the are planning to have in 2030
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/china-bui...
China does expand ren more than nuclear but the reason is not economics but the capacity to scale (as well as inland ban)
On the other hand their nuclear share is declining. It peaked at 4.7% in 2021 and is today down to 4.3%. Entirely irrelevant.
For each plan they put out they lower their nuclear targets and push them further into the future.
Going from a French like buildout 10-15 years ago to having it as a token investment today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DESERTEC-Map_large.jpg
There are enough roofs and waste lands for solar.
But out of curiosity, would you like to live next to a nuclear plant/uran mining/radioactive waste deposit?
This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.
France: 4.12 tons CO2 per capita Denmark: 4.34 tons CO2 per capita
and the electricity price for industrial costumers is also close to identical:
France: 0.153 EUR/kWh (0.130 EUR/kWh without taxes) Denmark 0.122 EUR/kWh (0.121 EUR/kWh without taxes)
CO2 data from EUs EDGAR: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025?vis=co2pop#emissi...
Price data from: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
You end up burning all of the uranium, leaving being only short lived isotopes.
Did you ever handled radioactive material yourself?
Or watched how Uranium mining works and what gets left behind?
I doubt that.
The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.
It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.
Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.
If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.
What about 1000?
How would you know if there are even people left who know what it is??
May be societal collapse isn't a problem. Maybe we're having a nice new beginning but someone finds some nice, warm stuff?
Unless we have civilizational collapse in which case a bit of nuclear waste will be the least of our problems.
It won't have to be monitored for a 1000 years. First, by that time the level of radioactivity is very low, and when it's in a deep-geological repository (like the ones we already use for vastly greater amounts of highly toxic chemicals that never decay) it is gone. We know enough about how geology works.
We also know how a BLU-122 works. Can you be sure the US wouldn't use one on its allies in yet another moment of irrational tantrum? What about Russia?
The fuel and related will have to be monitored for 1000 years and more.
Yes, we know how geology works, which is why we have found a single place where it might be safe. ONE.
No it won't.
That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.
For example: "The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
How does this even help your argument?
Yeah, we have a nuclear winter. 80% of the civilisation is dead. "Hey look, we've found warm stuff". A few years later: 10% of the population died of cancer.
Are you kidding?
> No it won't.
Spent nuclear fuel stays a radiation hazard for extended periods of time with half-lifes as high as 24,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
> That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.
The fact that your single example is Yucca mountain and even the US wasn't able to come up with another place and is still discussing this one, shows that there is not an abundance of places you can put it. Even in such a huge country like the USA.
Other countries have the same issues and they are geological.
Germany had a spot a few decades ago. Everybody thought it would be safe. It has to be evacuated now. An evacuation which will cost the taxpayer millions of Euros.
It's all about risk management.
A dam damming water at a hill is obvious.
Some warm stuff set up like something really special, is not.
How many nuclear actually killed is unknown because it's not as easy as: something happens, people drown.
It's more like: something happens, a few die fast, the rest dies earlier, their children live shorter or have disabilities, their children also, and so on. Meanwhile collecting waste which will do the same for later generations who might not remember what nuclear energy even is.
Did you even bother to read about how we estimate the casualties of nuclear incidents? It really sounds like you didn't, and just shared your first thought about it not being trivial.
> They have been around a bit longer don't you think?
How in the world does that make them less risky? If a dam collapses, it's generally very bad, even if it is an old dam.
The numbers are highly speculative and are either those you get pushed in your face by the nuclear astroturf (killed on site) or are scientific and the range is very wide since it's so hard to calculate. It's cancer and it happened in the Soviet Era.
Your whole comment didn't add anything to the discussion. What's your point?
Yeah, small amounts of solid waste sitting somewhere is as much of a non issue as can be.
It is no argument or discussion happening in real life now.
It is nuclear vs. renewables and nuclear is losing.
...also those are not small amounts. The fuel may be a small amount but there is much much more that needs to disappear in holes we don't have.
We should REDUCE the danger to those generations and not make it larger for no sane reason.
Because the alternatives are much more dangerous.
Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe, meaning it doesn't really matter that much which of these you use, the overall risk is always going to be very low, and the relative numbers are going to be very sensitive to small changes or variations in analyses.
Hydro is significantly more dangerous, and all the fossil fuels are tremendously more dangerous.
Due to the fact that intermittent renewables usually require fossil backup for that majority of countries that don't have abundant hydro, you have to take that into account.
A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html
A 2019 study shows that reduced use of nuclear energy post-Fukushima cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
https://columbia.edu/~mhs119/Kharecha.Sato_Jpn.Ger_post.Fuku...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Whereas the WHO predicts that there will be no measurable health effects on the general Japanese public from Fukushima, and the majority of negative health consequences were from the unnecessary evacuations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
Radiophobia kills!
Who said that?
What are you talking about? How is a solar panel even on the same safety-shelf with nuclear material??
What are you talking about??
> A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.
Which is again related to the Astroturf tactic of playing nuclear vs. coal and is not related to today's calculations where it is renewables vs. nuclear.
Would you please stop derailing the discussion with this?
Nuclear peaked in the 90 and is being overtaken by renewables in certain countries as well as probably worldwide this year: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
It is actually renewables which lead to coal being removed from the mix. Not nuclear:
Not "who". "What". And the answer is "the data". The data say that.
Empirically. Completely independent of whether you understand how.
And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year, 2025 was another record production year, the number of states adopting nuclear power is rising, the number of reactors is rising, the number of builds is rising, the rate of the increase in number of builds is rising.
Empirically.
And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels. Which is why almost all industrialized nations are doing nuclear AND renewables.
Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
In the real world they are complementary. Here's the Finnish environment minister:
"If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines.
Why don't you link to "the data" then?
> And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year,
I just gave you a source which proves my statement and shows that yours is a lie. Just like everything else you added to it.
> And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels.
Weird how they can't but already do. Must be some kind of magic eh?
> Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
Nope. This is a lie also :)
Nuclear clogs up transmission ways when it's not necessary. This is a fact and happens today.
> Here's the Finnish environment minister:
Why not add the French environment minister also? You can add as many ministers as you want, the world doesn't care. The money goes into renewables and they're the future.
Here is the source again: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Your source shows exactly that what I said is the truth, and that you are lying.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
The highest number for nuclear electricity production are 2024 and 2025, with 2025 being slightly higher than 2024.
1965 25.539724
1966 34.43329
1967 41.006016
1968 52.113163
1969 61.783413
1970 78.87466
1971 109.70418
1972 152.17516
1973 203.90158
1974 266.6001
1975 369.8482
1976 432.67142
1977 538.5478
1978 625.7944
1979 650.8599
1980 711.9242
1981 840.75073
1982 912.17755
1983 1033.8127
1984 1254.5685
1985 1488.9216
1986 1594.7357
1987 1734.7332
1988 1891.2493
1989 1945.0106
1990 2000.596
1991 2096.3098
1992 2112.223
1993 2184.9646
1994 2225.9788
1995 2322.5298
1996 2406.615
1997 2390.0642
1998 2431.1948
1999 2523.7056
2000 2540.46
2001 2613.17
2002 2654.78
2003 2601.05
2004 2719.41
2005 2726.97
2006 2761.59
2007 2703.49
2008 2694.72
2009 2656.76
2010 2725.91
2011 2610.34
2012 2432.22
2013 2448.52
2014 2498.73
2015 2532.93
2016 2571.05
2017 2594.23
2018 2658.7
2019 2754.08
2020 2648.33
2021 2762.44
2022 2639.64
2023 2697.74
2024 2777.11
2025 2811.57
> Nuclear clogs up transmission ways when it's not necessary.
Haven't heard that joke in a long time. Good one!
> Haven't heard that joke in a long time. Good one!
It's not a joke.
It's reality.
It has nothing to do with reality.
It ain't me.
As one example of many see previous post on nuclear production records.
What I wrote is and has been an actual topic of real world politics here.
There is nothing speculative or questionable about it.
Nuclear reactors are not flexible. To keep them in any way financially sane, you have to keep them running as long as possible. Even when the energy they produce is much much more expensive then the one from renewables. This is why they block the grid an renewables had to be turned off.
it happened before we turned off the crap.
So you are lying.
That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!
The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10...
So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.
I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.
The more we dance around nuclear, the longer we're still pumping coal by product into the atmosphere... a non storage solution.
Move to nuclear faster. Do it now. You want your EVs right?
Today the alternate project might well be renewables and BESS, and even if it's fossil fuels it will be natural gas. Natural gas waste isn't roses and kittens, but on every measure it's less bad than coal, and it doesn't have such viceral "this a bad idea" vibes. No heaps of toxic ash, no clouds of smoke, the pollution is too abstract.
Several UK solar projects which bid for AR6 in 2024 are live today, when it was daylight earlier those projects helped power the country. They paid us handsomely to do so, because the market price was almost £100 per MWh even at midday but they bid about £75 at the CfD auction back in 2024 so that (adjusted for inflation) is all they get.
I wish people like you, who care genuinely about this topic, would engage with it in a more holistic way.
* Removing fossil fuels requires massively increasing the grid capacity by electrifying a vast range of extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes. The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy * That extra load is almost entirely baseload - running large smelters, furnaces, etc intermittently is infeasible and would use even more energy * This real energy economy is hidden in deindustrialised western countries, where the people depend on energy consuming processes in faraway lands - energy is 'imported' in the form of finished products like cheap building materials. It never shows up in grid usage * The reality is that the countries where energy is consumed will use as much renewable energy as possible, when it is cheaper to do so, but will rely on fossil fuels to supply the bulk of the baseload demand * The UK 's energy policy will be a rounding error in this decision-making process
Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
It's weird for somebody who says they want nuclear power to bring this up - have you been playing too much Fallout ?
The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport and heating, which not only are being electrified already, they're also places where electrification is a net energy win, so that diesel or natural gas power translates into less than half as much electricity for the same results.
For heat it just comes down to heat pumps, since we don't actually want to make more heat we can instead move the heat that already exists and avoid that high price, easy with electricity, impractical otherwise.
But for transport it's even more fundamental, efficient fossil fuel power is about scale and regularity, but for transport you want tiny engines and bursty usage. A transition shrinks the overall energy budget while improving the outcomes, that's why this is such an obvious economic step.
> Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
The vast majority of UK consumers do not have a wholesale tracked price for electricity, so in fact that lower immediate wholesale price is just profits for the retail electricity companies.
Long term price trends matter more, but notice the CfD strike price for the new nuclear power station in the UK was a lot higher (IIRC) £92.50. If, of course, that station ever supplies actual power. So whether the headline price is £60 or £600, the price actually paid was £92.50 and somehow or another that's what you're paying for that electricity even if you were told it was £60.
£92.50 isn't bad for a novel technology. If you were going to deploy it next year and in five years you'd be bidding £80 or less for another new plant I'd have enthusiasm for this concept. But in fact you're going to come back in five years, still without a finished plant but now pitching for £110 per MWh instead of £92.50 -- we have seen this story before.
> The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport ..
A large fraction of transport is not amenable to electrification in this manner; however transport is the low hanging fruit and I support the rapid electrification of transport where possible. Unlike batteries for cars, generation of biofuels/hydrogen for airplanes/ships/heavy trucks will not be significantly more efficient than fossil fuels - it likely will consume more energy, not less. The fossil fuel technologies are already very efficient (50%+) and renewable alternatives are very inefficient. It is possible to electrify/solarise these processes in the long term, but also complicated and capital intensive. I have worked on technoeconomic simulations of such processes, where I learned first-hand from expert researchers in this field (though I am not a chemical engineer).
> .. and heating. For heat it just comes down to heat pumps
This is not true at all, and you've likely misunderstood what heating means in energy breakdowns.
Heat pumps are most suitable for low temperature heat - municipal heating, (industrial) cooking, etc. Things which are already largely electrified in developed countries. But low temperature heat is widely available as a downstream by-product of higher temperature processes (including power generation as in CHP), and it is there a low priority in the scheme of things.
Heat pumps are not feasible (nor are they even theoretically very efficient) for high temperature industrial processes, of which there are a great many (concrete, bricks, metal processing, plastics and other chemical processing, etc). Many of these processes are already practically 100% efficient, so electrification will use at least the same amount of energy. A factory may use for example a steam turbine with a mere 5% electrical efficiency - the high temp steam is used to heat a chemical reactor, and the small electrical output is used for pumps, etc.
Finally, the direct combustion of fuels, (often bundled under 'heating' in stats), also includes the use of fossil fuels as a chemical reagent, primarily carbothermal reduction of metals (plus many petrochemical processing reactions). This usage is highly efficient, and cannot be replaced with electricity directly. Alternative processes will likely consume more energy not less - there will be additional intermediate processes, separations, and so on, likely requiring melting/dissolving/reacting the materials at high temperatures.
No. Things change. To understand how stupid this model of the world is you need some historical perspective
In the UK for Q4 2000, twenty five year ago, there was 33.95TWh of electricity produced from coal power, Q4 2025 that was zero. All gone. In Q4 2000 wind and solar is making 0.25TWh, in Q4 2025 that was 30.72 TWh
So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special". So lets look at another historical example to which I happen to have a connection.
In 1954, the SS Shieldhall was built for Glasgow, her main job was to take (treated) sewage and dump it into the ocean although she'd also have transported passengers (usually at low cost) because hey, why not. Shieldhall is a triple expansion oil fired steam ship, at the time she was a reasonable though slightly dated, design. Some of the aspects of her that make her desirable as a working museum piece today were deliberate (like I said passengers weren't her primary purpose but the buyers knew they existed) because they look cool, but a ship optimized for purpose in 1954 wouldn't have been that different, we don't have any because the restoration team could only afford one and this one is cool.
In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic and if not for a preservation trust which operates her today she'd have been scrapped and I wouldn't have mentioned her, but that's not fifty years it's just thirty and yet the entire notion of steamships went from "Obviously" to "This belongs in a museum" in that time.
At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified because it just makes too much economic sense. What counts as "short" will gradually creep up, there are several electric ferries doing 30-40 minute hops today, it would be silly to imagine nobody is offering say a Channel crossing with batteries by 2050.
So then the question only comes up for the freighters. The crude carriers won't exist, if we're not digging up fossil fuels in order to burn them then they cease to be attractive for other purposes too, but both bulk carriers (e.g. moving cereals or ore) and container ships still make sense. The "luxury" cruise market also ceases to make sense though. For those bulk carriers with perishables aboard and for jet liners you would need synthetic fuel which will be expensive, but for everything else get used to going a lot slower to avoid needing fuel.
> But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special".
You haven't even considered, much less pre-empted, any of my arguments. Energy consumption is special - as it is required by thermodynamics for manipulation of the material world. It's clear that most of it will come from the sun eventually - but as I've pointed out there's reasons to expect this to take a very long time.
> So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared, and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
Coal didn't disappear at all in that time frame - usage increased, significantly! But you only use the finished products now and don't see the cooling towers. UK economy is a rounding-error and not a meaningful model of the global energy economy, because wealthy countries like UK 'import' a huge fraction of their energy consumption. The energy required for their building materials, cars, machinery, consumer goods, etc still needs to be consumed somewhere - but it will never show up in local energy statistics. This represents the bulk of the hardest to electrify energy consumption. When you see a graph of fossil fuel usage increasing in India, China, Germany - do you not realise that is your personal usage too?
You first celebrate the fact that energy prices in UK have spiked (because lower profits for retailers, who recover their losses from whom ??), and now that UK has to import rather than produce steel (because it looks greener on paper ??).
> At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified .. So then the question only comes up for the freighters
Ah yes, it 'only' comes up for the most difficult and energy intensive types of transport. You ignore air travel too.
Bulk carriers and freighters will continue to exist for structural reasons, and their usage will increase: manufacturing has natural network effects - it makes sense to geographically concentrate it (there is less duplication of expensive capital investment), more food will be transported as population booms in regions with less arable land, and biofuels/clean carbon sources will be transported just like crude because production will naturally be concentrated in regions with more arable land and sunlight.
Air transport will continue to exist because people want to travel, and it is the fastest way to deliver many types of goods.
> In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic
30 years at current rates is catastrophic damage to the planet, I don't understand why you want this. Also wiki says this ship was 'obsolete at time of construction', essentially built to be a historical novelty, and that it was laid down around the same time that the UK's first nuclear reactor connected to the grid.
I can't really make out any coherent argument. You seem to believe in a very strange nuclear powered fairytale world, which most resembles the video game series Fallout but you say you haven't played it, OK.
You demand that we should care only about the global picture, where the data is fuzziest, and only about the total energy system, all so far as I can tell in order to swell the focus on... coal, which is obsolete - that for some reason you both recognise can't be used because we'd destroy the climate and yet you believe we'll keep using it anyway because somehow the present is the future and don't accept that things change? I'm sure you think you're making sense.
It took me longer than perhaps it should have to see why you singled out Germany which in most ways is on a typical curve for a wealthy industrialized country. I realised it's the disappearing nuclear plants that make you angry. But they didn't matter, which I expect makes you even angrier. Germany's efficiency savings over that 25 year period were much larger than its total nuke energy buduget, what made the big difference was renewables again, just like in the UK.
> I don't understand why you want this
It doesn't matter whether I want things, it matters that your "argument" consists of believing that nothing changes = over a fifty year timespan no less - and I was illustrating that's entirely wrong.
I explained, in some detail, why a) I expect decarbonisation to take a long time, on the order of 50+ years b) why the UK cannot be extrapolated to global economy c) Why it's not even true that UK residents themselves use less fossil fuels for energy than they did 20 years ago.
Instead of engaging, you try to read between the lines and psychoanalyse me while throwing juvenile insults. It's pointless, hostile, disrespectful, and frankly it says a lot more about the state of your mind than it does mine.
You claim coal is obsolete in 2026, the highest coal consumption year on record, in direct contradiction of the panels of global energy experts who have time and again agreed that these usages are 'hard to abate' (i.e unlikely to become obsolete soon). China expects to be using enormous quantities of coal (and gas) industrially in 2060 - their net zero plan hinges on capturing and offsetting the carbon released. What do you know that legions of global experts don't?
I'm all for decarbonisation, and I've likely dedicated far more of my time, effort, and money to that cause than you have. I think a healthy amount of nuclear in the mix (on the order of 25%) will bring us to net zero sooner, mitigate the enormous damage done to our planet, and help hedge our bets against future developments (as you point out, we can't really be sure how the economy will change).
In 2000 Germany uses about 14 exajoules of energy, somewhat less than 2EJ are nuclear electricity and the rest is almost entirely fossil fuels But in 2025 the 2EJ of nukes are gone, there are 2EJ of renewables and the total is now only 10.5EJ. So both the absolute amount and the proportion of fossil fuels fell in this period in which you believe the UK offshored some of its fossil fuel consumption to Germany.
This is a game of musical chairs and for maybe the next decade or two you'll be able to make increasingly contorted arguments that somehow the same problem was just moved, but it's already looking flimsy because of just how fast solar deployments are.
"Carbon capture" has been a pipe dream for decades at this point. If you don't have a plan B you don't have a plan.
> Germany is an example of the thing you say isn't happening.
I was wrong to include Germany in that list, it was an editing mistake hence why I didn't pick up on your reply. I can see that derailed the conversation. I only meant to list countries which were unlikely to decarbonise as quickly as UK due to a larger share of hard-to-abate uses (which UK residents still depend on), separately I was listing countries with increasing fossil fuels and I merged the sentences carelessly.
I chose Germany because I was looking at lists of exporters of steel and cars to the UK, not nuclear energy stats. As you point out fossil fuels have fallen slightly as a share there, not grown. I didn't say though that Germany isn't rapidly scaling renewables, you've just assumed I'm some kind of anti-renewable luddite. The fact remains you likely drive a car made with fossil fuels in Germany (I do).
You cite the 30% reduction in German primary energy consumption in 25 years as evidence against my prediction of decarbonisation taking 50+ years. In the same period, emissions have fallen closer to 40%. I doubt that the remaining 60% will happen in the next 25 years
* Germany did outsource hard-to-abate energy uses in this time frame (energy intensive industry production indices fell ~30%, 15% since the war, UK closer to 40% - both countries now manufacturer higher up the value chain, and import more high embodied carbon commodities)
* They did not decarbonise the remaining hard-to-abate uses in proportion to the 30% reduction you cite (cement is a possible exception). Closer to 10-20% max across a range of industries
* The biggest change coming in the next 10-15 years is the electrification of transport, which could reduce emissions by another 20+%, the so called 'easy-to-abate' uses.
* Hard-to-abate uses remain hard-to-abate - cement emissions decreased 30% in 25 years, it will be even more difficult to achieve the next 30%, let alone 70%.
A fall in the share of fossil fuels from 84% to 77% during a rapid 30% decline in heavy industry is broadly in line with my slow decarbonisation prediction - heavy industry is harder to abate than other uses, if you export it you can electrify faster.
Does 2EJ/year not matter to you or not? When it is energy savings or renewables, you say it is significant. When it is the reduction in nuclear power you say it is negligible. The proportional fall in fossil fuels in Germany you celebrate is 84-77 = 7% of the mix. (1/0.93 - 1) * 10.5 = 0.8EJ.
> maybe the next decade or two
I'm just predicting it will take closer to 50 years, not that it won't happen. In two decades you can just check global emissions - if they're down by less than say 2/3 I'll be right, there won't be any need to argue. If they're down 80 or 90% I'll be wrong.
> "Carbon capture" has been a pipe dream for decades at this point. If you don't have a plan B you don't have a plan.
China's 35 year decarbonisation timeline assumes CCS for approx 5-15% of today's emissions, up to 5x the UK's current emissions. Are they wrong about 35 years (too high?) or wrong about CCS (too low?) or both? They also expect 10-20 EJ/year nuclear. Are they wrong about nuclear too?
It's not a 10k year problem, it's a ~300 year problem, after which most of it is at the same level as natural uranium ore; and the stuff that isn't can be blocked via aluminium foil (to stop beta particles).
The first 10-20 years post-removal are the most dangerous, and why the fuel is kept in cooling ponds. From 10-300 you still have danger, but that is manageable with concrete casts:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
* https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
Once you're past the ~300 year mark, all the most dangerous isotopes have burned away, and you're at point where the main ways of getting ill from what remains is by either eating the pellets or grinding them up and snorting the powder like cocaine.
The design life spans of bridges are 50-75, with some going towards 75-150. But once a bridge is EOL, the need for it doesn't just go away: it needs to be replaced. And in the intervening years it needs to be maintained.
So we have finite-but-overlapping life spans of infrastructure with the implicit assumption that society/civilization will continue on existing to deal with repair, renewal, and updating said infrastructure. Used-fuel storage is no different.
And if you want to reduce the total volume, spend money on reprocessing (which is currently more expensive than digging new fuel out of the ground; only France makes an effort to do this).
I see quite a difference compared to the bridge example. The bridge provides a utility until it‘s EOL and replacing it, again, provides value for the generations paying for it, since they get to use it.
The spent fuel does not have a utility. In 200 years, it’s a burden left behind by a long-forgotten generation.
You can argue (or rather gamble) that those generations still rely on nuclear energy and still have an ongoing need for such facilities, but even then, a substantial portion of the facilities will be filled with something that the operating generations never received any utility from.
A good geiger counter can be bought on Amazon for $30. Something is either radioactive or it's not. You don't need to have a sophisticated understanding of the chemistry to test if dangerous radiation is present or not, nor do you need sophisticated equipment. My point is that being next to a radiation hazard should not cause the same sort of anxiety-of-the-unknown that living next to, for example, a chemical plant that may produce a menagerie of difficult-to-detect carcinogens.
When Russia bombs that facility, how big will the exclusion zone be? At some point in the next 10000 years, it's not unlikely, it's not likely, it's guaranteed that there will be a war, and the facility will be bombed, or the custodians will be drafted or will just move to the city looking for work, and the nuclear post will be left abandoned (remember Russia's RTGs?), or the descendants will pass the wrong care instructions on to their descendants, and then the containers will rust and start leaching into the water supply. As long as you have a country with operating nuclear reactors you probably have all the infrastructure to keep waste safe. What when you don't?
Imagine that literally, not metaphorically, the devil came to earth in the time of the Neanderthals, destroyed almost everything, and some heroic Neanderthals managed to seal him in a box. If the box isn't taken care of the devil can break out again. Do we still have those care instructions? Is anyone executing them? There are religions from hundreds of years ago (not as long as needed!) which say you must do something or the world ends. We consider them all fairy stories, and they probably are. What if one wasn't? Then we'd be fucked because we wouldn't be following the instructions, right? Nuclear waste storage would be in that bucket.
At least the fallout will be localized. You're not destroying the world with careless handling of nuclear waste. You may make a limited region uninhabitable for thousands of years, and detectably reduce global lifespans by a few years and increase cancer rates by a few percent.
Besides - humanity already has such facilities for vast of toxic waste, prime example being Herfa Neurode. It's not like we ban all electronics due to arsenic waste from copper mining
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
And. Bacteria.
Sounds like abuse to me.
Do you see an obvious issue with the sequence of events I posed?
Bye.
I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".
It's concern trolling at its worst.
Every civilisation for the last million years has categorised itself thus, and, yet, here we are without their technology.
We still don't know how the Romans made a concrete that is as durable as it is (and nothing we have is nearly as good)
You cannot even spell the damned name properly.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/red-forest-c...
It looks like they collectively forgetting about dangers of radioactive contamination they created just 40 years ago.
Dangerous the whole time.
For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?
Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.
Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit.
The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.
Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.
In germany alone, 500 000 m³ of radioactive material is to be disposed somehow by 2050. Having people carry that underground sounds insane. There is more to waste than fuel rods. And even they .. amount to a really high number if you factor in shielding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
> As a general rule, short-lived waste (mainly non-fuel materials from reactors) is buried in shallow repositories, while long-lived waste (from fuel and fuel reprocessing) is deposited in geological repository.
> Overall, the 60-year-long nuclear program in the UK up until 2019 produced 2150 m3 of HLW.
"A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico, US, is a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
But for political reasons it's used only for military nuclear high level waste.
For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository. High level nuclear waste is very small and French nuclear waste from light water reactors is no different from Swiss nuclear waste or Swedish, German, Spanish. (U.K. Magnox fuel rods are different and have special storage requirements). Single waste repository in Finland, Sweden or Norway would be enough, they have lot of old granite and very stable geology.
Because apparently no country wants to be the dumpster for the radioactive waste of the others?
I wonder why that is, when it is a solved problem.
Ironically, there's less background radiation around the casks than away from them, since they are so shielded you also get shielded from part of the background radiation too.
https://prinsfrank.nl/2022/09/12/Visiting-the-only-nuclear-w...
Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes into the air.
A great perk of nuclear waste s that it's so small compared to the power produced, it's way easier to dispose and manage, than, say, expired wind turbines (which aren't recycled currently and take a massive amount of space).
That is what safe looks like, nobody said perfect. It's like how cars are death traps but people can still reasonably call them "safe". You could do the same thing for solar panels but for the fact it isn't newsworthy if there is some toxic sludge in some dump somewhere is associated with solar panels.
There might not be any material that we produce on an industrial scale that doesn't leak hazardous or toxic chemicals. I looked up concrete [0] to find out what it's problem was, and it turns out concrete leaks toxic and radioactive materials into the environment because turns out natural rock is sometimes radioactive. Concrete is nonetheless pretty safe stuff.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...
Would "they" rather we just dumped the nuclear waste off in some corner somewhere? Then it'd be a slow and certain leak too. If they want slow and certain rather than probably-nothing then that can be arranged. It'd still be less damaging than business as usual.
I mean, I get that people are scared but they are scared of their own imaginations as opposed to anything that can be engineered. I still think I'd be much better off having lived through a Class 7 nuclear disaster rather than my actual experience of spending years near a coal mine. Policy made for and by people who just live in fear for no obvious reason is never going to work. They're still going to be scared whatever the actual policy is and the rest of us are going to be forced to do stupid things in the real world.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of electricity generation we have.
Because no technology is 100% safe.
https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-man...
For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025):
690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
So nuclear waste is not a technical problem, mostly political problem.
And it's not very much talk about, but the real issue is geopolitics. Each nuclear trans-uranium waste repository (spend nuclear fuel) could in future be mined to retrieve the stored plutonium for nuclear weapons. And even better, over centuries the most radioactive short lived isotopes are transmuted into more stable isotopes, so the mining and handling of this material is much easier. And even even better over millennia, the undesirable isotope Plutonium-240 (with half-life 6561 year, much shorter then Plutionium-239 half-life 24110 years) will decay away and the reactor-grade Plutonium waste will itself transform, without any external action, into very usable weapon-grade Plutonium.
Therefor spend nuclear fuel and storage of spend nuclear fuel in non-weapon countries is subject to monitoring by the enhanced verification measures of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Additional Protocol.
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07lyman.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation#Addition...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_grade_plutonium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_plutonium
U.S. goes to great lengths to prevent other countries from acquiring material usable for nuclear weapons. Like, for example retrieving plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-...
"The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium (enough for 20,000 warheads) into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants."
"The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US."
Yes? Just have them sit in concrete casks? It's safe enough to do a 'maternity photoshoot' with:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
The volumes of "waste" that is generated, given the electricity produced, is not a lot. The entirety of the US' waste created, over the course of multiple decades, can fit on single football field/pitch, ten yards/metres high (that's the actual fuel bundles: the dry casks they're stored in would increase the volume).
France is just across the border, so Orano can do reprocessing with the "waste" to reduce its volume even further if desired, and extract the unused fuel from the waste.
France got there first.
They built out such a massive infrastructure of Nuclear that they are a net provider of energy in Europe. They are also the only country to date that has officially pushed back on old safety models like LNT.
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-refuels-thorium-react...
And the Chinese have built out a high speed rail system all the way to Ürümqi, China just east of Kazakhstan in western China. (They aren’t messing around).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/9e4...
Citation needed. We saw at-scale buildout during the 1970s and 1980, did it result in result in order-of-magnitude cost reductions back then?
I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.
Japan was able to start construction on a new nuclear reactor and have its construction (and start commercial service) with-in five years, and did so every year from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
The first unit you build will be expensive, the second less so, the third even less. Economies of scale work just as well for nuclear plants as they do for widgets: Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, Unit 4 cost 30% less.
Turns out if you don't know what you're doing, things can get be expensive because you're learning lessons along the way, but if/once you do know what you're doing costs drop.
It's similar to the housing crisis: all this talk about pre-built components to make building homes/mid-rises/etc faster ignores all the planning approval and NIMBY objections that need to be ploughed through first.
Today's politicians can't even be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure, leading to things like the Ponte Morandi collapse, or the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, or the Carola Bridge collapse, and so on and so on.
They can't even properly maintain fairly trivial infrastructure, routinely leading to at most a few dozen deaths per incident. Why would you assume they'd do any better with nuclear reactors - where a second Chernobyl is the potential result of an incident?
Do you trust today's politicians to provide all the money the engineers ask for?
Besides an engineering problem, they are also a political problem for as long as they exist, and even longer. Remember how Russia bombed Chernobyl in the Ukraine war?
I don’t totally disagree though. You can reduce it to economics. Nuclear has a safety profile whose far tail becomes exponentially expensive. It also has a lot of hidden costs that often get hand waved away.
There have been much worse industrial accidents than Chernobyl in terms of life lost, like Bhopal which I think is still the record. But I believe Fukushima may have even passed Chernobyl as the most expensive industrial accident in history.
For the cost of one Fukushima cleanup, Japan could have built wind solar and batteries equal to many Fukushima plants combined output.
That’s really the problem. Amortized over the whole fleet over decades, and also including either waste disposal or recycling (which is also expensive), nuclear may just not be cost competitive. Fission power is a tech that looks spectacular on paper.
I’m talking about fission of course. If we make fusion work that will be different. It isn’t dangerous to those outside the plant and produces a tiny fraction of the waste. (It would make some due to neutron activation but much less and much less “hot.”)
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where 50% of all electricity currently comes from nuclear power:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply
I have no problem with getting more CANDU reactors (which is the current plan).
As an Ontarian, the thought of spending $500B on a couple of reactors makes me furious. Ontario is not going to become competitive again with the most expensive electricity in the world.
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
Until a few years ago it was cheaper than methane/natural gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
At least when it comes to refurbishment, the independent (reports to provincial parliament) FAO found:
> Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
Their projections go to 2064.
New-nuclear is worthy of discussion, but given we have stood up supply chains via the refurbishment process, there's a lot of knowledge out there. My current largest complaint with the new-nuclear plans is the SMRs.
I did find this (potential?) $100B number on Ontario nuclear energy:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...
but if you take that number and 'ammortize' it over the average 40-year life span of reactors, it comes to $2.5B/year (in capex), which is about ~1% of the provincial budget. I'm not sure how much raw GW capacity that would add, or how many GWh would be generated annually, to do the math on the per-kWh (capex?) cost.
The article goes over the pros and cons of various points in the energy mix debate.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...
https://ensi.admin.ch/de/2014/07/07/bohrloecher-im-primaerco...
This is like firefighters opposing using water.
Not if you want 100% reliable power with no CO2 emissions.
People are scared of nuclear plants in the same irrational way they are scared of terrorism. It doesn't kill much, but it is very scary.
I’m against a lot of Hydro power in the US because the environmental damage is high. Plus I like to fish and they have huge impacts on the ecosystems. But these are relatively flat places compared to Switzerland.
Today, it would be infeasible creating new dams. The only thing we can do, is raise the height of some existing dams, adds pumping stations and optimise water flow between the dams.
2. The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years - what's the plan for managing it?
Yes energy generation (and independence) is important, no nuclear ain't it.
This makes no sense. Russia has actual nuclear weapons, it can "obliterate" Ukraine (or Switzerland) on a whim with them, if they decide to. Also, as you can verify by looking at the containment zone of Chernobyl catastrophe, full blown meltdown/explosion of a nuclear reactor doesn't really "obliterate" a country size of Ukraine.
> The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years
No, it is not hazardous for "tens of thousands of years".
BTW you might want to reconsider throwing Wikipedia links and trolling accusation on a Ukrainian like me who is familiar with the matter much more than you and was actually affected by Chernobyl catastrophe in 86. It is neither clever nor insightful and you are definitely overstepping (to cite some goals stated in your account description).
One day nuclear will no longer be neasessary. Until that day comes it is essential. Anyone who disagrees is confusing wishful that being for physics.
Actually, why not ? I mean this as a serious question.
Just like Oregon or New Mexico do not have problems getting (possibly nuclear) energy from California.
You just have to believe in the concept of Europe hard enough.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/849994733672039/posts/136230...
Seems like this is fake news.
It's crazy that the left and green parties are against cheap, sustainable and clean energy for the masses.
Are you suggesting that Germany would be better off by keeping their current emissions until the mid ~2040s waiting for horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power to come online?
Who cares if the emergency reserves are fossil gas when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, aviation, industry, maritime shipping and so on?
When those emergency reserve emissions matter on the scale of the entire economy then force them to be zero carbon fuel, if still necessary.
You’re trying to blow up potential what if’s 15 years from now as the end of the world.
Followed by looking backwards. What you are complaining about is that 2010 solar was expensive and still get paid that expensive price.
What’s the relevance when it comes to choosing what the most efficient spending of money is in 2026?
"Who cares if the emergency reserves are fossil gas when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, aviation, industry, maritime shipping and so on?" - many.
German EEG/y spending is about to increase because it's paid more frequently despite most expensive contracts being over. And for offshore this already didn't pan out well. Solar has the advantage of lower capex but will be hit too.
Again. Are you suggesting that Germany would be better off by keeping their current emissions until the mid ~2040s waiting for horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power to come online?
You do realize that the nuclear lobby group found the easiest reactors to restart were in the north? Which is already constrained by an oversupply of renewables and limited transmission infrastructure.
How will that help?
Also. Why get less decarbonization by wasting money and opportunity on new built nuclear power when we still need to decarbonize construction, agriculture, shipping, showroom, industry?
Do you think we have infinite money?
Also. Why get less decarbonization by wasting money and opportunity on new built nuclear power when we still need to decarbonize construction, agriculture, shipping, showroom, industry? - in this case let's spend zero money on ren deployment too. Electrification will bring much greater results due to efficiency gains even if the grid is powered in it's current form. Such arguments are silly.
Germany does in fact seem to have tons of money. It spent on EEG alone so far double the cost of entire french nuclear fleet. In the meantime it got highest household prices in EU after Ireland. From this year govt decided to funnel additional 6bn/y on transmission. I'm not even talking about tons of fossils subsidies
In Germany the recent solar renewable subsidies are lower than market price for their electricity, but it offers longterm stability for the producer which is why they sign up.
This is not driven by subsidies:
> Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth. For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%).
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
Followed by still only being able to look back. Complaining that 2010 solar is expensive. To what relevence you still haven't been able to explain.
You do realize that to decarbonize society, no matter the source, we need to 2-3x our grid size depending on local industry? The transmission uprating is coming no matter the source of electricity.
Again. Are you suggesting that Germany would be better off by keeping their current emissions until the mid ~2040s waiting for horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power to come online?
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
Transmission upgrade requirements are far smaller with not so distributed generation. This can be clearly seen in case of Germany vs France. You need vastly more transmission for distributed power put based on fertile weather patterns and even more to reduce curtailment with projects like sudlink
I didn't suggest it to keep current emissions what a nonsense. I've suggested tp expand nuclear in parallel with renewables instead of expanding renewables+gas
Please stop asking this stupid question about being afraid of renewables and storage because that's not the topic of the discussion. German pathway includes gas and the fact you leave this "small" detail makes me think you either don't mind it or you haven't read the proposals of Fraunhofer ISE/Habeck/Reiche
Followed by again complaining about 2010 solar being expensie. To absolutely no ones surprise.
In Australia CSIRO assuming a status quo energy system, i.e. not electrified society, put the extra costs for a renewable Australian grid at ~€12B. That's less than the subsidies a single new built nuclaer reactor requires.
Isn't it funny how entire country scale transmission systems becomes cheap when compared to the subsidies required new built nuclear power?
When means you lock in hundreds of billions of euros in nuclear handouts from tax money which could have vastly larger impact if invested in renewables. You know, opportunity cost.
It is this graph:
It scales from a single reactor to a grid. If you waste money on a reactor which could have vastly larger impact if invested in renewables then you will never catch up to the emissions that could ahve been avoided.
You framing the question as stupid is because it hits too close to home. You truly are afraid of renewables and storage. Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry? Is that the issue?
Again. Who cares if we include an emergency reserve of fossil gas? Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough, especially not when we need to consider cumulative emissions.
Do you even grasp the concept of cumulative emissions?
1) Has the lowest deaths/TWH: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
2) Any country that is not US absolutely needs to invest in nuclear technology. This is for your own security. In addition to providing energy security, it also provides physical security (with a bit more work).
Without nuclear, your country will remain vulnerable to:
1) Direct attacks
2) Sanctions which destroy your economy and quality of life of your citizens
3) Fossil fuel disruptions, either intentional or malicious
With nuclear + solar, you have an unbeatable combination of all forms of security. Every country wastes lots and lots of money on many useless initiatives. Nuclear might seem costly, but security is somewhat important.
The rest of the world on clean energy will ultimately help people in US, because there will be less foreign adventures and oil will be a lot cheaper when all that demand is destroyed, supply chains are not disrupted by these wars.
Iran was literally attacked and bombed. Seriously doubt that would have happened if they had nukes.
Meanwhile the other day Moscow was struck by a significant number of drones and most likely it's not the last of such strikes.
Either Russia doesn't actually have nuclear weapons or they don't mean much in the grand scheme of things.
4) renewable energy disruptions, e.g. supervolcano eruption, large meteor strike
I'm atomic, FWIW.
> how having nuclear power prevents vulnerability to direct attack?
OP alluded to a well-known bonus capability of nuclear power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Production
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...
I think solar panels in space (where it's always sunny and the panels can be paper thin and orders of magnitude more efficient) with wireless transmission to Earth would be ideal. But I'm sure there are technologies out there that are either secret, dangerous-to-know or just suppressed that never get the attention they deserve due to vested interests. I also like the idea of speeding up radioactive decay with lasers or (safely??) shooting radioactive waste into space.
"Nuclear power is a hell of a way to boil water."
But good luck finding a better alternative.
Solar panels require very high heat to manufacture and are difficult/costly to recycle. Channeling or capturing energy from a different dimension would be best. I wonder how the ancients did it... or investigate downed UFOs... or take a trip into the future. But then stay quiet because it's more than just a crisis of energy, it's a crisis of conscience!
One should also keep in mind that it has the highest potential deaths per TWh.
Chernobyl was not a worst case scenario.
A scenario where the fire continued for 4 weeks instead of 10 days takes very little imagination and would be much much worse than what actually happened.
>Fukushima is a proof that a better design (albeit far from stellar) will result in orders of magnitude less damage
Fukushima would not have had a graphite fire, but we were lucky to not get a fuel rod fire which would have been very bad as well, although likely more limited geographically than Chernobyl.
As it is, Fukushima will perhaps "only" cost an estimated 500-600 billion dollars for the Japanese taxpayers over the next 100 or so years. Unless another earthquake hits and breaks the ice wall of course, which also requires very litte imagination, it being Japan.
Seriously, why are we doing things like this when we have cheaper, faster and safer options? Why are we not instead going for the options?
"It will require so much batteries" Yes. So let's get started, we can build as many batteries as we need 10 times over. "Synth fuels are inefficient", yes, but that doesn't matter when the electricity is close to free.
What else is the problem? Why does it HAVE to be nuclear?
Yes, in Fukushima it would have been much better, even if there was fuel rod fire, due to... better plant design...
Fukushima costs are blown out because Japanes govt wanted it this way. Just like JP govt forced long term evacuation even if the doses both during and after event were not life threatening.
"Seriously, why are we doing things like this when we have cheaper, faster and safer options? Why are we not instead going for the options?" - like what? Renewables firmed by gas and coal like in Germany? You are aware it spent on it's transition so far much more than France spent on nuclear while achieving worse results, while killing thousands from coal pollution in the meantime? So Germany spent more, achieved much less in much longer time. And on top it plans further gas expansion to firm renewables. This is not a cheaper/faster/safer way. It's the exact opposite in all directions.
"It will require so much batteries" Yes. So let's get started, we can build as many batteries as we need 10 times over. "Synth fuels are inefficient", yes, but that doesn't matter when the electricity is close to free." - electricity for synth will not be free and bess will eat into it's economics. Synth fuel infra isn't cheap either. Using H2 for firming is a pipedream pushed by fossil industry to justify expanding gas infrastructure.
It has to be nuclear + renewables. That's the difference - we already know it works good looking at Sweden and France. Others that tried to follow pipedreams ended up worse
You seriously can't imagine people fleeing instead of sacrificing their lives? You can't imagine an ongoing war or natural disaster making it impossible to stop a fire? You can't imagine anyone wanting to sabotage a plant as a terrorist act?
We are very lucky then that the people actually in charge of nuclear power have better imagination!
>Yes, in Fukushima it would have been much better
Only in the sense that it wouldn't have spread as far as Chernobyl's waste did. It would still have meant hundreds of thousand dead in Japan, and probably made it impossible to stop the groundwater contamination, leaving large areas of Japan uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
Again, you seem to be woefully uninformed, or even misinformed, about the actual dangers involved because you only look at what has happened so far.
The gun was fired, the victim was hit in the shoulder, and the hospital patched him up - your conclusion is "guns are not dangerous". This is the wrong conclusion.
I can only reiterate that you need to look at what COULD happen, not what DID happen.
>You are aware it spent on it's transition so far much more than France spent on nuclear while achieving worse results, while killing thousands from coal pollution in the meantime?
France is nowhere done spending money on nuclear. They got a 64 bn "forgotten bill" just 4 years ago, it has happened before and will happen again.
The truth here is that France basically pretends to have cheap electricity by hiding a large part of the electricity bill in general taxes, that is not only paid by taxpayers today but will be paid for generations to come.
As for Germany, since they closed the 3 remaining nuclear plants in 2023 they have added approx 3x as much power generation in TWh from solar than those plants produced.
So they could never have reached the same amount of power production by going for nuclear instead. No chance.
Now - one might argue that they should not have decided to close the existing plants when Russia was about to attack Ukraine, and I certainly agree with that!
Maybe they too suffered from lack of imagination?
Wth are you saying about Fukushima? It would not have been such a catastrophy- Fukushima is a direct proof that even under extreme conditions of tsunami and earthquakes a proper design leads to better results. And situation got much better after that due to adapted regulations
What kind of terrorist sabotage you think of? Don't be ridiculous. And even if it magically happened it would still not be as bad as Chernobyl
It looks more like you are spreading fear mongering trying to portray nuclear more dangerous that it is. The data is clear. We know what can happen with a twrrible design. We know what can happen under extreme conditions.
France is nowhere near being over with nuclear- but this doesn't disprove my argument. What a nonsense are you implying? What do you mean with a forgotten bill? Germany is spending 18bn/y on eeg and 6bn/y on transmission subsidies. And has still much worse emissions.
The statement about pretending to have cheap electricity is total bullshit and you know it, sorry. EDF debt to ebitda ratio is fine. Household prices are lower than Germany despite EEG. Emissions much better since 90s.
I don't care how much Germany added in renewables after phaseout. I care that Germany shut down nuclear before coal and gas and is planning gas expansion to firm renewables
Germany should not have closed nuclear in general, not because of russian war. Closing nuclear before fossils is a terrible mistake in itself
Every country operating nuclear power has rules, regulations and action plans that match what I am saying about the dangers of nuclear power plants.
If I'm spreading anything it's knowledge that's agreed upon by every expert in the field.
Your arguments rest on the idea that nuclear is harmless because the harm hasn't happened yet, and that's simply not good enough.
>The statement about pretending to have cheap electricity is total bullshit and you know it
No it's not BS. I assumed you were familiar with ARENH but apparently not - in short, France decided that nuclear electricity should be sold at 42 euros per MWh, but it turned out that was not enough to sustain the plants and keep them in good shape. It ended with France having to let taxpayers cover the EDF debt and renovations.
Once the nationalization was done, the new price is 70e per MWh.
This means exactly what I said - during all of ARENH, nuclear power "pretended" to be cheaper than it actually was, but there was a hidden cost that ended up having to be paid for by taxpayers decades later.
If 70 is the true cost or just a less bad price than ARENH dictated remains to be seen, but there is one fact we know already - the price for electricity in France is often less than 70 euros. And when it is, the taxpayers in France take the loss.
A similar hidden cost is brewing in Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, the US, and it has surfaced in Japan (bigtime) and Korea.
I want you to study other sources than the ones you have studied so far, and widen your knowledge about the topic. But you are clearly annoyed with me so it's probably counterproductive to argue this further here.
We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
There will be a referendum anyways, so I think it's unlikely the ban will actually be lifted.
https://www.nuklearforum.ch/de/news/neues-kernkraftwerk-im-a...
Which nuclear inevitably does, both in the form of direct requests for money and by refusing to pay for adequate insurance to compensate everyone who will be damaged in the event of a meltdown externalizing the risks.
(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)
That's a helluva prediction.
Thorium reactors would be practically limitless in fuel supply, but we aren't getting them without seriously funded nuclear research. That is far less likely during a band on commercial stations.
The same reactors nuclear powers with decades of experience haven't deployed?
We will get two or three revolutions in solar power and battery technology before a single thorium reactor is viable. You could invest all the R&D budget of thorium reactors in perovskite panels and it would generate more MW per CHF invested.
You don't need only MW but MW at requested time
That's a very, very risky bet you're taking here. We know nuclear energy really well, and you're suggesting we ignore it for something that we will "figure out" later. Meanwhile the clock is ticking.
> We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
This is so limited that it's not at all an alternative, though.
Seems like wishful thinking. If anything with the current electrical trends there will be even more demand for energy in the future and unless some miracolous clean energy source is invented, nuclear (or fossil fuel) will need to be used
At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.
Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.
And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.
Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheaper plants and more expensive plants that could start up quicker, it would lower costs. The typical grid was baseload coal and gas peakers. But ~20 years ago gas peakers became cheaper than baseload coal and any need or desire for baseload generation went away.
China is building a lot of coal plants to complement their solar buildout. Notably these are not base load plants. Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night.
Similarly, many new nuclear plant designs are not base load designs; they are designs that can be safely and quickly turned on and off.
P.S. the correct term for generation is "non-dispatchable", not "baseload"
That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.
Do you want to hazard a guess as to why?
The answer is because we still do not know how to supply expanding electricity demand with wind, solar and batteries. The side of the story that people on this website love to bring up is the fact that China happens to be the largest builder of solar and wind, which is true, but the increased electricity demand is being met via coal, for the most part.
Because it was only in 2025 that batteries became cheaper than coal, so the lead times involved mean they are still building coal.
They're very rapidly ramping up battery bank installation, it's too early to tell if they're also ramping down coal plant installations, but it seems likely.
It’s being entirely met by renewables.
Baseload won't be price competitive with renewables in average or shiny/windy conditions ever
Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.
Go fully renewable. Add batteries, like Google is doing. Just one example: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/24/google-to-deploy-worl...
Why do you need both? It's possible to get 99.99% reliability with wind & solar & batteries & weather modelling. There are multiple ways to handle a week long dankelflaute without nuclear: overbuilding, continental scale distribution, lots of batteries, etc. All are cheaper than nuclear.
It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid, even a nuclear dominated one. Local distribution has many single points of failure.
Not to mention the environmental damage from producing and disposing of batteries.
Pumped hydro doesn't need natural flow, because it uses pumps. All it needs is a height differential. Here's 22,000 in Australia alone. There are millions worldwide.
https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/anu-stores-an-atlas-of-p...
When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.
When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.
Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power. If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.
So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.
But you can't replace the gas peaker with 3% or 10% nuclear because in essence that gas peaker is supplying 100% of the power 3% to 10% of the time.
So you'd have to build nuclear plants that can supply 100% of the power. But once you have that you might as well use nuclear power 100% of the time because the rest is irrelevant. But that's about as far from cost-optimal as you can get.
As you mentioned, using batteries for seasonal storage is madness. So to get to 100% carbon free you have at least 2 other options:
1. use a different form of seasonal storage. China is experimenting with this. In 2026 they will double the world's pumped hydro storage capacity. But doubling isn't a lot -- the world doesn't have much pumped hydro. But it does mean they might start doing it at China scale in a few years.
2. Overbuild to avoid the need for seasonal storage. Solar works on cloudy days and in the winter. It just doesn't work very well. So you need a lot of it. Which is expensive, but still a heck of a lot cheaper than batteries for seasonal storage.
In reality, most places will probably say that 95% or 99% carbon reduction is good enough and keep their backup natural gas generators around for the occasional dankelflaute.
There is not a single analysis out there that tackles the twin problems of meeting growing electricity demand with a power source that depends on an uncertain and changing climate.
You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.
This is exactly where nuclear shines, because although it is expensive, it insulates a country against the vagaries of external forces. Whether or not that guarantee is worth the price tag is the question a lot of governments are grappling with and they mostly seem to agree that the value is indeed worth the cost.
Yes, these are things we know with a high degree of statistical confidence. Many locations have hundreds of years of hourly weather records.
We know that Europe has never had an hour where there wasn't significant sun or significant wind somewhere on the continent any hour in the past 30+ years. The same can be said for North America, and Asia.
What use is hundreds of hours of weather records when the climate is changing in ways we do not yet understand?
"somewhere" on the continent being windy is useless unless we have the transmission capacity to move that much power across thousands of kilometres. See also what just happened in australia last week - nearly 40% of the country stuck with very low wind speeds for nearly a week. What then?
Yeah, uh, I'm going to go with the "building a nuclear plant is the safest solution" answer, thanks. Technosolutionism is fun up to a certain point.
>It's possible to get 99.99% reliability [...] It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid
Notwithstanding the fact that lol you're happily saying that you're perfectly fine you get 1 hour of complete downtime every year, which fucks over many industries and services, you're ignoring multiple facts: 1/ to ensure safety, that means rolling brownouts when you're at 95% capacity, great solution, 2/ 99.99% works exactly like it does in software: you don't get tiny seconds long drops, you get gigantic, energy grid collapsing catastrophic failures, that are impossible to restart, grid sync because every renewable island is isolated.
>It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability
What kind of incompetent country are you living in? I have had exactly ZERO minutes of power outages for the past 5 years. I'll be generous and include the 30 minutes of downtime for maintenance. The country wide average blackout time is 2m30s, .43 power cuts / person / year. That's 99.996% stability country wide, and that's heavily weighted down by the places that get fucked by a tree collapsing on a transformer station
In the meantime in Switzerland:
"Our cheapest electricity product is nuclear electricity."
New nuclear power plants would be much more expensive at $180 / MWh or more, due to strict modern regulations. Even with these regulations, there is no nuclear plant that is safe against a terrorist crashing an airplane into it.
The unsolved permanent repository problem is left to future generations.
Finally, building a new nuclear power plant will easily take a decade or more.
And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production.
Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years.
Nuclear is economically a dead technology.
Here's how much each energy source contributes to Switzerland's grid: https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/strom/produktion
Right now, solar and other renewables produce enough energy to meet about two thirds of our demand. Solar alone produced around 55GWh of the needed 169GWh yesterday.
Look at new year's day though: consumption was 192GWh (14% higher than yesterday) and yet solar only produced 11.4GWh and that was an unusually good day for winter.
You can't talk about the price of solar, even solar with storage, without talking about the climate it's in. Assuming your prices are for summer or a mild climate like California, you need to multiply those by around 6x to get a system that can replace nuclear for a baseline load in Switzerland.
That brings the price to $180-$510/MWh.
FWIW: I live in Switzerland and have solar panels and a battery on my house. I sell the obscene amount of excess solar I generate in summer to the grid which covers much of the cost I incur buying from the grid in winter. That power is generated by nuclear.
The prices are all-inclusive.
Sizewell C, its £38bn current price tag is looking very very shaky - £60bn final cost wouldn't surprise me. And our electricity bills are going up again in order to help fund it. Lovely
We still have to deal with the consequences of a referendum hold not so long after che Chernobyl accident which made it illegal to build and operate nuclear power plants.
Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how are you going to cool down your reactors? Nuclear in Italy is a non-starter.
Do you have any trustable source for this?
> 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to shut down their nuclear power plants partly or fully because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm (Barber, 2022; Limb, 2022; Miller and Vladkov, 2022). Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature (European Parliament and European Council, 2000; IKSR, 2022b). The resulting unplanned outages — and the efforts by nuclear operators to avoid such disruptions — highlight pressing concerns about the sustainability of nuclear energy, particularly its impact on river ecosystems in an increasingly warming world (see Fig. 1).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...
We still need rotating mass to keep the grid stable, which means either building giant flywheels, keep burning gas or bring nuclear into the mix.
One of these can also produce a ton of energy when needed, the other two cant.
We can and should build more renewables, but we can't risk grid stability!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource#Grid-f...
This competes with the traditional giant flywheel option ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser ), which has the advantage of being a simple and proven technology, and handling brief overload better, but the disadvantage of having moving parts. It's not clear which option is currently best. Both are in current use.
Cooling is never a problem. You design the plants properly, see Palo Verde. But for Italy cooling towers are enough
They are in the process. Last I checked the bill to do so had passed the lower house and how needs to get ratified by the senate.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/italian-bill-on-...
Especially nuclear. It is now economically non-viable.
Keep in mind similar things have been said about solar and wind previously.
If private energy companies won't invest, then either don't invest public funding, or invest but with focus on developing long-term technologies. After all, the primary reason for nuclear being uneconomic today is lack of investment. If solar and wind can be made profitable, I don't see how nuclear is any different.
Still, the positive note of this is the ban lift, not whether new reactor will actually be built.
Can't speak for all countries, but lobbying for green energy in the USA, according to PACs, is higher than nuclear. I don't think Switzerland is different.
Nuclear is fundamentally way more complicated than wind and especially solar. Nuclear is 10s of kilometers of high pressure piping, 1000s of tons of concrete, exotic pressure welding. Solar on the other hand is brain dead simple and amenable to mass production in a way that nuclear can never be. As such, nuclear will never see the same scale of cost reductions.
Likewise, we could see cost reductions with cheaper/better alternatives to concrete, models that don't require so much piping, the exotic pressure welding becoming not so exotic, etc. We also could see better reactor models with yields, increasing energy production.
> It is now economically non-viable.
Nuclear is about the next 50+ years. The economy will explode long before that. Nuclear plants are a way to produce energy in a world without cheap oil. That changes the economical considerations a lot.
SMR make as much sense as space datacenters. You can gaslight investors, you can gaslight HN, you can gaslight a national parliament full of lobbyists, but you can't gaslight thermodynamics.
Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.
SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.
You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.
You do need to have unreasonable goals for things once in a while. In this case, I don't have a particularly fixed stance about SMR's, but the claim that "Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical" feels a bit stronger than it is warranted. Never is a damn' looooong time. And I can easily imagine things being less efficient, but having other advantages that make them more economical. Claiming it's impossible is just stretching.
And the link between thermodynamics and the price of electricity is what?
Sure, that is economics, not thermodynamics. I don't necessarily agree with the SMR manifesto, but it is conceivable that improved financing, construction, operation and oversight could make an SMR cheaper than a larger reactor.
The fact that we haven't seen more widespread use of SMRs suggests that you're right. But it's important to point out that there are cost saving opportunities that could potentially reduce the net price per watt despite worse thermodynamic efficiency.
The additional per-site engineering required to reuse things like turbines and dynamos is almost certainly going to kill any savings it would have. If you're already shipping a building-sized reactor, what's one more turbine? Realistically the main reusable component is the grid hookup itself - but that would incentivize building a large-scale reactor on the site.
As would reusing the turbines, for that matter: you can't exactly power the turbines of a 100MW coal plant with a 10MW reactor, and shipping ten inefficient 10MW reactors to the site just so you can reuse the existing ancient turbine isn't exactly an attractive option either.
you are in this thread a lot, so i am guessing you must be very familiar with the industry. maybe you can help me understand:
is the wikipedia on SMRs incorrect/lying when they say that there are commercially operating SMRs since 2020?
and how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.
>how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
Or solar.
And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.
Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to deploy and cost will be significantly reduced.
We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs and have been for a very long time. Off the top of my head ship power has been exported to local areas for disaster relief
Solar is absolutely fantastic and your average person should not be hawking at solar for your home to offset your power bill. The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
I don't think the likes of Westinghouse, Siemens, Rolls Royce and GE are duped. They are trying to solve a very hard problem!
Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have?
For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop?
The best energy strategies are all-of-the-above.
We could have had mass solar deployment since the 70s. We chose not to, and allocate the money elsewhere. Nuclear will take away billions in public money, put it into the hands of nuclear industries, to get electricity at twice the going rate, maybe, in twenty years. A white elephant and a waste of effort.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-hidden-ways-the-g...
This is a horrible argument. Yeah, let’s not spend money improving technology. We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.
We didn't for decades. The photoelectric effect is known since the XIXth century. Solar panel research could have had far more money behind it since the 70s and the first oil crisis. It was a choice not to. And the current US and Swiss governments are choosing to prop up some industries -coal, nuclear- at the expense of others, with public money that don't grow on trees.
Not that many. Sizewell C the latest nuclear project in the UK is projected to cost around 50 billion and expected to last for 60 years. We can cut that estimate short to say oh well, About a billion a year for the next 50 years.
Assuming that you can purchase storage at $70/kwh with 50 billion you could purchase around 715GWh of battery storage, at the same output of Sizewell C that means you could output 3.2GW for 200+ hours! wow.
One problem. The batteries will realistically only last somewhere between 10-20 years. A moderate 15-year estimate would be more realistic. Now obviously it's very hard to calculate and account for a reduction in pricing increase in capacity etc... But with today's technology you would have to buy the pack 3.33 times over
So now you go into 0.300 * 715GWh gives you 214.5 GWh and now with that 3.2GWh load it could run for just shy of 3 days. This is like the entire capacity storage of China right now.
So yeah, to answer your question 214.5 GWh of storage
There are two ways of achieving economies of scale:
1. make things bigger
2. make more of them
Making things bigger generally is more effective when n is small. You need fewer sites, fewer approvals, each of the steps in the process is done fewer times.
When n is large, you can build and optimize a factory for them and achieve economies of scale that way.
Nuclear plants got large to take advantage of economies of scale because n is small. Nobody's building millions or even thousands of SMR's.
And what's their cost per MWh?
Considering they are fueled by highly-enriched uranium: are you okay with most of the world being handed the capability to build nukes?
>Considering they are fueled by highly-enriched uranium: are you okay with most of the world being handed the capability to build nukes?
There are SMR designs that do not use highly-enriched uranium.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69b2f41497f6f...
" The RR SMR uses PWR technology and industry standard LEU fuel and builds on operational experience from existing PWR reactors."
I cite this as RR is the most advanced out of all the other companies working on this afaik
true, you said "gaslight thermodynamics", which i have no idea what that means, so i took a guess at what you were implying.
>never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
is efficiency really the only metric to be considered? i feel like available space, availability of alternatives, time to complete construction, etc. are worthwhile to consider.
>And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments worldwide considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania. but i am not an expert. you are talking like you are one, which is why i am asking questions.
All of these favor again bigger reactors.
>considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania.
All of the Swiss energy companies are asking to be bailed out in advance of the investment in nuclear.
how does having less available space favor a bigger reactor?
and how is constructing a bigger reactor faster than constructing a smaller one?
If a big nuclear reactor takes 10x more space but has 20x more capacity, then it means not having much space favors the big nuclear reactor rather than building 10 small ones that will take twice more space.
(and same for the time)
just picking random numbers:
i have 1 square mile available. a big reactor takes 4 square miles. i cannot fit a big reactor, despite the bigger reactor being more efficient.
how are these different? one is an example, one is general, but they communicate the exact same point. if you have something that requires 4 sq. miles, you cannot fit it into a place that is 1 sq. mile in size because there is not enough space to fit it.
>as they are still more compact per GWh.
i am really struggling here... if i cannot fit something large, whether the large thing is "more compact per GWh" does not matter. i only have so much physical space to work with. if its too big, its too big.
for a more easily visualized example, you cannot fit a reactor from three mile island into a submarine. efficiency doesnt come into the equation, because physical space constraints get in the way first.
Well, if you have 1000 places of 1 square mile and 0 space of 4 square miles, the available space is 1000 square miles. If you have 100 places of 4 square miles, the available space is 400 square miles.
You cannot say that the first sentence means the same thing that the second sentence, and you cannot say that "there is not enough space" is only something you can say in the first-sentence situation and not in the second-sentence situation.
Maybe what you meant to say is not "there is not enough space", but "there is plenty of small space but not a lot of large space" (which I doubt is true in the real world: space occupancy is usually regrouped in dense areas, leaving non-dense areas).
> if i cannot fit something large ... i only have so much physical space to work with
First, the idea that, for a domestic power plant, you only have limited space, seems very unrealistic. The real world is not a submarine or a 7/11: you want your power plant at the periphery of cities, not squeezed between 2 buildings in the middle. There is only disadvantage of doing so: you cannot distribute high power lines from the middle of the city safely, you probably need facilities to deal with the fuel, probably need water for cooling, probably need a security perimeter as you have around any typical factory, the cost of the square meter is more expensive, ...
But secondly, you need the power plant to produce some power. If your country needs X GWh, and you need either 1 large power plant of 4 square miles or 10 SMR of 1 square mile and you just have few places where you can put a power plant, the "the unit itself is more compact" does not matter . I only have so much physical space to work with. If the surface needed to get X GWh using SMR is too big, it's too big.
> you cannot fit a reactor from three mile island into a submarine
Yep. Similarly, you cannot fit a SMR in a bicycle. But how is that relevant? In real life, domestic power plant do not have the constraints of being in thigh places (on the opposite, it is better for a power plant to be in regions that also happen to not have thigh places).
my bad, i forgot i was on HN where this type of pedantry is the national sport. it sure sucks any tiny little bit of enjoyment one might get out of having a conversation. it's evident from the rest of your comment you knew exactly what i meant.
>First, the idea that, for a domestic power plant, you only have limited space, seems very unrealistic [...] But how is that relevant? In real life, domestic power plant do not have the constraints of being in thigh places
part of the point of SMRs is to be able to have them in space-constrained places where you otherwise cannot build a large facility. that's the appeal! google and meta aren't looking at them so they can power san fransisco or the country with multiple GW. they want to power a datacenter. i can think of other examples of space-constrained places where an SMR is appealing and a traditional facility is impossible, but you've managed to kill any interest i had in having a conversation.
Pretending that saying "we don't have much space" and crying like a baby when someone say "well you may not have plenty of 10 miles squares areas, but you can put a 4 miles square large reactor in one of them, and it will be better than having to build 10 1 miles square small reactors", that's being the pedantic one: you cannot complain that normal people understand normally what "we dn't have much space" means.
> part of the point of SMRs is to be able to have them in space-constrained places
Yes, but this is not a problem that exists in real life. It helps in some scenarios, but it is not the main practical issues that people have.
> that's the appeal! google and meta aren't looking at them
Google and Meta are not looking at SMR _because they don't have enough space_. This is not true at all: if you look at their projects, they have plenty of space.
They are looking at them because they want to generate a small quantity of electricity for their own usage. They want their own small reactor. But it does not invalidate that these small reactors are less efficient than big reactors: they are just happy to pay 2X dollars for a reactor they fully own than to pay X dollars for the same quantity of energy for a share of a big reactor, because it is more difficult to manage if you have to find partners and make sure everyone is agreeing.
As for speed, a 100 MW reactor is not commissioned in 1/5 of the time a 500 MW reactor is.
I don’t think it’s going to work out that way, but that’s how it’s being sold.
But, yes, I get it is how it is sold. Just that even sold like that, people with common sense should say "wait a minute, that's obviously not that simple".
For small quantities, the former is usually more effective -- making things bigger lets you make fewer of them, reducing costs.
For large quantities, a factory can enable insane economies of scale.
SMR proponents are talking about building dozens of reactors. That fits very firmly in the "small quantity" column where economies of scale almost always favor building things bigger.
Yes, we have hydro.
Wind is way too unpredictable, solar is too.
So, we can only have 2 powers to provide base load in Sweden.
The aforementioned subsidies aren't just for the electricity it produces, it is also for the electricity it could produce. The nuclear plant has a right to sell electricity to the grid at a certain price. Market price too low? The government pays the difference. No demand? The government buys the unused production capacity.
In practice this means that during periods of excess you are shutting down dirt-cheap solar and wind just so you can run a heavily-subsidized nuclear power plant. Nuclear doesn't pick up the gaps left by solar and wind, solar and wind pick up the gaps left by nuclear!
Now what?
haha cant even reply to tghe below thanks
"Nuclear base load is a lie."
okay turn it off then bibba
Nobody in the thread has proposed turning off all nuclear, hence you were building a straw man. Please don’t do that on HN.
That's why the government has to indemnify the companies against those risks.
Spot market prices are not total system costs.
Finland just built a spent-fuel repository for ~ € 1 billion. For the entire country. Just the single EPR at Olkiluoto 3 will produce electricity worth €100 billion over its lifetime if you assume a price of 10 cents/kWh.
So at 10 cents, it would be 1% of the price of electricity if Olkiluoto 3 had to finance the whole thing by itself.
Therefore, even assuming for a second your counterfactual that nuclear power isn't cost-competitive, it wouldn't be due to the disposal costs.
Of course it's also not true that nuclear isn't cost competitive. It absolutely is.
Regarding cost competitiveness: if new nuclear is cost competitive in Sweden, how come it needs to be so heavily subsidized?
2. Nuclear is not heavily subsidized. In fact, it is intermittent renewables that are and must be heavily subsidized pretty much everywhere. In Germany, for example, just the EEG is more than €20 billion per year. And that's not the only subsidy by far.
Within these non-competitive markets that feature heavily subsidized intermittent renewables, other sources may need guarantees, though last I checked the biggest guarantee in Sweden is the one protecting from the risks of government action.
Which is the biggest risk for nuclear projects.
The Swedish authorities are right now processing requests for subsidies from prospective owners of future nuclear plants. You can read their announcements here for instance. See the little summary fact box at the bottom. https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2026/06/ansokan-o...
Second is that nuclear reactor efficiency tends to improve with size. The ratio of thermal watts to electric watts tends to be better with large reactors. I'm not super well versed on the engineering tradeoffs here by my rough understanding is that waste heat scales with surface area while useful energy extraction scales with volume.
The big costs are still going to be the cost of siting and building the reactor, the fuel, and the ongoing cost of running it. They pay off over a very long time horizon, so it's also the opportunity cost.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
Are you of the opinion that the comments on that article are conclusive evidence for all SMR startups failing?
If so, how? Please try to be specific.
I don't see evidence of even one startup failing there, never mind all of them.
0 - https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-...
I am not buying.
And neither is anyone else these days.
https://www.rechargenews.com/analysis/smrs-v-renewables-mini...
"What about the costs, both in terms of Capex to build them and the levelised cost of the power they produce?
Gadomski said: “We are very suspect of projections of costs from companies because they're inclined to be more favourable, as opposed to being more realistic. I think that getting a good cost estimate is something that is not possible right now because we haven't built any.”"
>I don't see evidence of even one startup failing there
"SMR developers will all want to avoid the fate of NuScale, the sector trailblazer that saw a pioneering US power deal cancelled when its estimated LCOE soared to $89/MWh from a previous $58/MWh."
Just a 100% cost mistake. Oops.
And even if they could have reached their 58$/MWh target, let's see what is the cost of competition...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/05/06/firm-solar-and-storag...
"Firm wind-plus-storage costs in 2025 ranged from around $59/MWh in Inner Mongolia to $88/MWh to $94/MWh across Brazil, Germany, and Australia, with costs projected to fall to roughly $49/MWh to $75/MWh across those markets by 2030."
Oops oops.
"Construction timelines are also shortening, with projects typically built within one to two years of securing permits and grid connection."
Oops oops oops.
Renewable is running circles around nuclear. Every renewable technology is beating forecast. Every nuclear technology is breaking costs predictions and deadlines.
So a whole lot of sense given the entire US Navy uses them and I already have one datacenter operating up in space (small test unit that over 3 months has provided ZERO issues) and a bigger one heading up into orbit next year when it's done being made.
"but you can't gaslight thermodynamics"
No but you can certainly conflate them like you're doing right now.
Hyperspectral satellite imagery - think ASTER/LANDSAT/MODIS but more modern, for surficial minerals study.
"How did you get it up?"
How else? Paid a rocket company to launch it into orbit after proving various flightworthiness tests and getting various certifications and permissions from relevant gov't authorities.
"How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary."
K-band. Don't need tons of power, just a good LoS from ground on your target. And yea, not Geostat, I'm in LEO.
100kw is literally nothing to generate in space. At typical silicon efficiencies that's football field in size, and about 70% that if you jump to more expensive multi-junction cells. I can make a folding panel the size of a compact car that'd unfurl out to cover that. That's maybe 4 hours in NX just retooling my current design. The only limitation is the capabilities of the launch vehicle.
I've already got one small (single 4U) datacenter in orbit. It works. It works GREAT. It can scale up to constellation quantity.
And I don't have to waste any water for cooling or constantly pollute the air for power generation or throw extra waste heat into our atmosphere, as a side bonus.
It makes plenty of sense to those with the education. What's hilarious is I'm doing all this on a GED.
Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market?
You are the one conflating things that have absolutely no connections.
No but they do use those reactors to power areas in times of disaster relief.
Land-based deployments don't have this constraint.
And of course, all non-naval reactors are naturally going to be larger: they aren't surrounded by a practically-infinite fluid heatsink.
Nuclear has had its moment. That moment is gone.
"Nuclear has had its moment. That moment is gone."
When CO2 caused climate changed is posed to be civilization altering this is a very very foolish thing to say.
Even more importantly, it's very hard to compromise and downscale a project when the inevitable fossil fuel lobbyists vote against you. It's a lot easier to half a solar park project than a nuclear project.
When you boil the issue down to the fundamental facts, our challenge is simply: add as much power production as fast as possible. We have no other hope to tackle the issue but to optimise for this. Nuclear is a dangerous distraction. Solar+wind is now growing faster than nuclear ever did at its peak and they’re showing no signs of slowing down. It’s the only way to get more power fast enough.
We are building power for a future where we cut all CO2 emissions. Not just those from electricity. Our second biggest priority (well third after EVs, but I’m not too worried about EVs right now, it’s a self sustaining transition) is to bring down the capital costs of hydrogen plants. That’s the key to bringing down CO2 emissions in several sectors of industry. This pairs perfectly with variable power. We’ve already seen green ammonia fertiliser plants paired with renewables and now with the Iran crisis there will be higher pressure to build more of them to be self sustained. This way also lets us distribute production which is nice to be less vulnerable in case of war.
Once green hydrogen production has reached critical mass, and growth of renewables have pushed gas power plants into more of a backup role, with low fuel consumption, they will naturally switch to hydrogen. Many of the newer ones are already ready for hydrogen and others have an upgrade path. Perhaps hydrogen consuming industry will co-locate with gas power plants to share production/storage infrastructure. This path has very low capital costs besides the ones we anyway need to make the hydrogen necessary to decarbonise industry. The gas power plants are already built in most countries that will need them.
Turning sun light to electricity on the other hand is more that
Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.
It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.
I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.
France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.
Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.
Edit: Not Norway - Doh!
- We have a lot of hydro, that are very cheap to produces and for some of the power plants we fill up water by using solar and wind when that is very cheap and generate power back when it's demand for it (meaning selling it expensive)
-Norway export more then we are importing. But that could shift in the coming years.
-Nuclear power are expensive, so with the current prices it do not make sense to have nuclear in Norway. Thought that could change (see point 2)
- not sure what you mean by "little land usable", you can absolutely be correct. in terms of size we are bigger then Germany. But I'm not sure how much usable land there is vs other countries. We do not have that big population but it's spread out and no one wants a wind park in their neighborhood
Obviously Norway has massive amounts of offshore wind potential too
50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission.
Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise.
To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potential losses of hydro power as glaciers melt, nuclear + solar is the only real path for switzerland.
I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.
I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.
I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.
I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....
I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.
Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale
We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)
As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.
The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).
Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.
All year? And do you mean you "inject" more than you "pull", or do you mean that you can live without ever pulling anything from the grid?
Because "being a net producer overall" doesn't say that it would work in practice if everyone was doing the same, right?
I have a 40kWp system and a 20kWh battery.
We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.
Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?
Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that.
I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years.
In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears.
But admittedly I haven't not done the exact math
Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s
I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.
https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.
People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
My clean dinner table is completely artificial, but that doesnt mean I should be neutral to someone placing a bowl of shit on it.
The balance being: do you build a ton of those turbines, or one nuclear plant?
The problem is actually that people don't have enough attention to actually read about it. People are stuck in "I am a smart adult, I don't have to think, whatever I believe is right".
Those are actual problems and wind turbines actually deploy mitigations for them. Possible for birds, not for bats. Many endangered bats are killed as a result.
Sure, as compared to not giving a shit about the living condition of, say, billions of chickens, it may sound like it doesn't matter. But not everybody wants to live on a lifeless planet surrounded by the worst species ever (I mean humans).
> It's almost as bad as the "wind turbines cause cancer" BS.
If you genuinely believe it is, then you vastly overestimate your common sense.
The bats and birds is an issue that the oil and gas industry regularly pushes because it sounds concerning, but really isn't.
Are you aware that wind turbines have detection systems for bird migrations and stop to avoid killing too many birds? If it was not an "actual problem", why would they spend money in actual solutions?
Are you aware of the context of this bat killing "problem"? it is almost entirely a problem for older, unregulated wind farms in Germany. The "problem" has a simple solution, which has been proven to work - stopping wind turbines when bats are known to be moving, for a total of about twenty minutes per day.
It's not a real problem. If it were actually a problem you should be able to walk under a wind turbine and find a bunch of dead birds/bats. The reality is you might find 1 or 2, but not enough to actually observe any sort of impact on the population. Outdoor cats are a far bigger menace to birds and bats.
So yeah, you build a ton of those turbines. Because by the time you can deploy 1 1GW plant (10 to 20 years) you can install 10 or 20 times that much power generation via wind. By the time the nuclear plant is operational, you can be talking about refurbishing some of the early installed turbines.
A nuclear plant requires fuel sourcing, waste management, engineering and planning, constant management and monitoring, security, and a fairly large construction footprint for the likes of the cooling towers.
Wind requires someone to go grease the gears once a year.
That's not how it works, but thanks for not thinking about it for more than a few seconds. It is documented, you can read about that. In Germany, tens of thousands of bats are killed by wind turbines every year. For birds, they do have camera systems that detect bird migrations and stop the turbines.
So yeah, it is very much a real problem, you just have to read about it.
> Wind requires someone to go grease the gears once a year.
So it's not only the birds problem: you don't know how wind turbines are maintained either!
I can understand people objecting to plastering the south facing unshaded Alps with panels, but .. it would certainly generate a lot.
Still much better than gas though…
Solar panels on each square cm of roofs together with agrovoltaics and solar on every farm and a few more of those 2TWh hydro storage plants we have, and we are energy independent and can service a large part of our infrastructure ourselves.
Solar requires more materials per kwh even compared to nuclear. But even if it didn't - since hydro potential isn't sufficient - gas is required for firming. This was also mentioned by axpo
Solar doesn’t require more materials per kWh. LCOE of solar is order of magnitude lower than Nuclear.
And we do have more mountains that we can build out.
In fact, if the AMOC weakens/stops then there will be a drastic drop in precipitation across Europe and funnily enough maybe the temperature drop so much that the little snow there will be won't melt in big enough quantities.
Of course this is just a ban lift, meaning that there are no concrete plans to build one or more, but if there is a need to move "fast" (nuclear is not, I know) at least there is one less hurdle. I sincerily hope we invest in other technologies, especially now that Sodium batteries seem on their way to solve grid level storage, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad move per se.
The antinuclear lobby in Germany achieved a wonderful feat https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-025-01002-z
It's not a cheap source of electricity, it's a way for someone to get money from taxpayers to subsidize their business.
...or the externality-free fossil fuel industry?
Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
What on earth are you talking about?
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-adaptation/beznau-nucle...
It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.
Note though that those limits exist just like the emission limits for WiFi: it was a sane number when it was decided. It's not clear at all that raising the temperature a little more will "kill all life in the rivers". It would probably deserve some research.
Or did we choose an arbitrary number that is lower than that limit, with some arbitrary margin?
This is making less and less economic sense. All paid by public money.
The uranium-producing countries are Kazakhstan, Canada, and Namibia. There is zero chance that you cannot get one of those to sell to you.
> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
Wut?
See this comment for more info:
It is reasonable to have a many-year strategic reserve of uranium for what you need. A modern reactor is going to go through 20 tonnes of enriched fuel a year and they refuel every 18-24 months. 5-10 years of security and stability is much, much better than oil and gas.
> The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
There isn't enough room in my house for anymore people but there's enough room for a new couch. How can these things both be true? Probably because the two have entirely different requirements and "there isn't room" is shorthand for many, many things.
Not saying they're right, just that this is a bad counter argument, especially since the alternatives all have the same problem.
> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
Yes, you need water capacity for cooling, about 2x as much as a gas plant for the same output. Definitely a trade-off. I don't know or care enough about Swiss water access to argue here.
"Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes." - what an inflamatory nonsense. Plants without cooling towers are modulated. Plants with cooling towers have marginal impact of less than +0.2dg if we look at french Garone with 4 units.
I don't know enough about wind to say either way about that.
But both wind and solar have the benefit of being able to just abandon the plants if they turn out to lose money. Which you of course cannot do with a nuclear plant.
Rancho Seco in the US has had a taxpayer financed security crew for 36 years without producing any electricity. That costs eats away at the profits (if any) generated by the plant when it was operational, but nobody keeps track of that.
The costs are not relevant to the nuclear operator and are not retroactively counted as costs for the electricity, since the government pays.
But they pay with our money. And our children's money. And their children's money.
Rancho Seco.... what an insane story. Didn't know about that. So if your have a bad nuclear project, people are basically stuck with it, unlike replacing solar panels or wind turbines.
The inherent long-lasting dangers of the fuel and waste are the real cost, and we are still in the first few percent of years where we have to pay for those. In 100 years, the french might be on synthesized fuels from solar and there will be a multibillion budget post dealing with the old nuclear plants that haven't generated anything for years.
Many plants are in the "downpayment of the construction costs" phase and current calculations are made on the idea that once paid for, nuclear is cheap. But that's not true.
There are costs for every nuclear plant that will come due 50-70-100+ years down the line and they are very rarely considered.
The "stuck with it" aspect is what bugs me the most. Once a few politicians today decide to get rich from building nuclear, many, many generations of people are robbed from the ability to make any decision on the matter afterwards. They get stuck with it.
So this is fixing nothing short term.
Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant.
It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability to think beyond a 4 year horizon or not.
I leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.
France tried it. Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives, makes about €3 billion per year in profits and has to invest about €150 billion in new reactors, upgrades, refits and infrastructure.
Nuclear is just not worth the hassle.
despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel
Except for France which came up with the clever strategy of "not banning it", but that was apparently a mistake and they should have just used fossil fuels?
Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives
€50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
Wind and PV build up much faster, are orders of magnitudes less complex and provide cheaper electricity.
There is just no reason to build nuclear.
> €50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all.
"No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all." - french households have lower prices vs german ones per Eurostat too
I guess that's the reason that they went for renewables for capacity expansion - it's much cheaper to build and operate renewables rather than nuclear.
Germany is about to spend over 600bn for grid expansion till 2045 and EEG subsidies for the next 10 years will too, be about 200bn (if not cancelled by govt which is unlikely unless AFD is elected)
France downscaled ren deployment plans while pushing for 6 new EPR2's + another 8 if there aren't major delays.
So not only France needs to spend/subsidize less in this period - it'll also still have cleaner grid and lower household prices than Germany in parallel
Well, we'll see, I guess.
Yes, Germany is going to spend about €600 billion in infrastructure. That has more to do with electrification than renewables - France too need another €250 billion for grid upgrades until 2045.
As for the "6+8" program - EDF still hasn't produced an official cost estimation for the for the full fleet and the original estimate for the first six (€52 billion) is has already been pushed upward to €72.8 billion.
Electricity prices in France have for a long time been a political matter, not market decision. That's a different approach than that of Germany, so the two really cannot be compared.
If fossil fuel weren't massively subsided (impact the environment for free, wars with taxpayer money), Nuclear would have made a massive dent.
Producing the same with other sources will have a massive immediate impact on the land / environment.
(using estimates for Chernobyl --- so, in coal's advantage, as Chernobyl's confirmed deaths are actually very low)
But the truth surfaces of course - you can look at the financials of EDF in France (nationalized in 2022 with 60+ bn euros in debt), KEPCO in Korea (145 bn in debt), or incidents like Asse II in Germany, Sellafield in the UK, Rancho Seco in the US.
Billions of taxpayer money covering costs caused by the nuclear industry, and not appearing anywhere in any statement of estimates of nuclear power costs. Large, double-digit plant operators basically or literally bankrupt.
Different CEOs of the swedish electric company Vattenfall have stated repeatedly that nuclear power is not viable unless the state pays. Here is a recent such statement: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/swedis...
This to me is the bottom line. If nuclear power was cheap and profitable, people would be in line to build them as soon as they get approval! Instead, they want money.
The truth is that the industry sees no way to profitability here, except when they get access to current and future taxpayer money. This has always been the case for nuclear power and still is.
The real issue is narrower: new nuclear is capital intensive and hard to finance without long term revenue guarantees, while old waste sites can impose large public cleanup costs.
Decommissioning and waste are included in serious cost models and regulatory funding requirements, existing nuclear life extensions can be among the cheapest firm low carbon power sources, and KEPCO/EDF’s debts reflect tariff policy, fuel shocks, outages, state interventions, and investment cycles. Not simply “nuclear power is unprofitable.”
The honest conclusion is that nuclear needs strong regulation and disciplined project delivery, not that nuclear is categorically fake-cheap.
Aka what I said earlier: you need the ability for strategic long term thinking and planning and execution.
Asse was an experimental facility without a plan of what to do if experiment doesnt work out. 75% of the waste there is medical+research sectors. Nobody died from Asse incident nor will. Most of sellafield costs are from weapons testing era
Vatenfall in Sweden said this because Sweden has already cheap electricity prices due to existing hydro+nuclear. More nuclear without proper demand means losses. Still, Sweden will have new nulcear https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/swedish-new-nucl...
The bottom line is France with nuclear has far lower household prices vs Germany without it, far better emissions, decarbonized far earlier, spent on entire fleet half of what Germany spent on EEG, the gap getting wider each year
you are acting like there's some race that needs to prove things. But the race already ended. A combo of ren+nuclear gives far better results. It was proven in Sweden. It was proven in France
Note that it’s similar with eoliens wind turbines, they are heavily subsidized
Not only incompetent: the way the F35 was handled really looks like corruption from the outside. And for some reason the head of the defence ministry AND the head of the army left not so long after that...
Or are we only happy with state subsidies when China does it?
I am not happy with subsidies that lets people consume things cheaply now by leaving the bill to the future. That's not what states should be doing.
Subsidizing solar until the production got cheap enough not to need any more subsidies is a good example of the former, building nuclear plants is a good example of the latter.
Uranium is often pumped out of the ground after being chemically extracted.
Coal is almost always carted out after being blasted.
Look into things like lithium mining (for batteries; yes, I am aware that other options exist, but lithium is still a very common one). That one is straight up nasty.
Here's some numbers I was able to find on total carbon lifecycle for the energy types: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... - Coal is 68x more CO2 than Nuclear https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/LCA_final.pdf - Coal is 165x more CO2 than Nuclear https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy - Coal is 161x more CO2 than Nuclear
Enriched fuel can be gotten from Urenco/Orano or you can build Candu units otherwise. Over half of global uranium mining is already in situ (with several exceptions, Canada among them for good reasons) which is more or less ok enviromentally. Especially considering nuclear requires least amount of mining vs alternatives per kwh. "Nuclear being a clean energy is a myth as far as I know" - then you should inform yourself better. You can start for example with UNECE report https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...
Trying to say nuclear mining is as bad as coal without even trying to inform yourself about the topic is fascinating
There are people which want the best we can do (eg, no Ng, coal, etc) in electricity generation. Sensible reductions, that sort of thing. Then there are those that just want no electricity to be used at all, ever, period.
They'll complain about hydroelectric(carbon in cement production), about things which can happen with nuclear(accidents), about birds in windmills, about the production methods of making solar panels, and so on. To such people, doing anything is bad for the environment, so therefore, every type of power generation is bad.
To listen to such people is, of course, madness, as is listening to all extremists. We should simply ignore them completely, but of course the news exists, fake protestors exist which are paid, and so on and so forth.
Honestly, so long as the water table isn't too close, that's not a terrible place to put a nuclear reactor.
Imagine having ports all around the country where a sub can plug in and provide power. Instead of building massive ports to ship stored energy (coal, oil, gas) from somewhere else in the world, its much easier to just have a plug in port and access nuclear energy.
All countries have their own fleet, but can also tap into a global fleet. There is a small problem with clean energy, long term seasonal storage and disruptive events. Germans have a word for it. Dunkelflaute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
With EV batteries as an enormous reservoir of energy storage (dump all excess production when electricity is priced negative; use the EV batteries instead of peaker plants) and nuclear subs, the transition to clean energy can be complete.
Even if nuclear comes after 25y it's still welcome - much better than Germany building gas plants to firm renewables
https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
Great news, just hoping the people understand this as well.
Very interesting stuff, even though the origin probably means we won't get much details on it until decades later. Thanks a bunch for sharing!
The AI revolution will be mostly over by the time any substantial amount of new reactors come online. Whatever power they'll use, it will mostly not be nuclear. It's a lot of gas right now that will likely shift to a mix of much cheaper solar and wind. Nuclear powered AI will be a rounding error.
Maybe somebody will figure out how to do new nuclear plants in under a decade (good luck!). That would be spectacularly fast. But if it's not planned and approved right now (and very little is), we're basically talking the 1940's for any significant new capacity to come online. That would still be a tiny fraction of the yearly growth in renewables. That probably will accumulate to about three orders of magnitude more power generation in the time until then. With hundreds of GW added per year, we are talking at least a few TW of generation cumulatively.
Obviously short term we'll be forced to use gas, renewables, etc. But saying nuclear will be irrelevant is wrong.. Reliable 24/7 clean power without the need for massive amounts of batteries or land is ideal.
It's no less renewable than the Sun.
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
- nuclear waste is not a problem
- nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
- we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
There really is no excuse for people to be misinformed. If you actually want to understand this issue start here, but there are many other sources out there that can also help:
gordianknotbook.com
Or the substack:
substack.com/@jackdevanney
The UK is a grid that is adding lots of renewables and building some nuclear plants, so the site provides good data around the costs for the added transmission, storage and subsidies (for both renewables and nuclear) needed for a renewables heavy grid supplemented with nuclear.
* Forecast cost for 2030: https://www.electricitybills.uk/2030
* Source data is here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SHuFAtxxKUf3Q2b7usoT...
Those plants are not designed to be turned on and off, and both must be done gradually and carefully to avoid cracking the turbines.
A decent bunch of that is going to be sheer inertia as you have to spin up a heavy chunk of metal. Keep that rotating (which is actually a good thing in renewable-heavy grids!) and it can be done even faster. Similarly, keeping some parts warm costs very little energy and allows even faster ramp=up.
But that's actually not relevant because battery storage is far more attractive for that kind of short-term demand. The renewable grid will need gas plants which can fill in the gap left when it is both dark and wind-less - which due to meteorology is trivially known 72 hours in advance, leaving plenty of time to prepare the plant for use.
Moreover, it's crazy that so much regulation was provably written in blood paid by workers and public after a company got greedy. Sure, let's build 50 AND reduce regulations.
Finally, the biggest fucking thing: It is MORE expensive NOW than the green alternatives, AND green energy has proven over the years to actually keep it's promises of improvements, compared to fission and SMRs, which are always just 5 years away.
It’s true nuclear is expensive. It’s also true a lot of that expense was the regulation that has made it so incredibly safe. It’s unlikely a cheaper but still safe enough compromise will be reached in countries with existing regulatory structures quickly, but there is certainly room to improve over time.
- nuclear waste, after a period of the order of ~10e2/3 years is only dangerous if ingested. So it's as dangerous as any other poisonous substance after that point. There is no need for radiation shielding from that point.
- nuclear waste is very dense and so physical surface storage is cheap, and a solved problem (see: dry storage casks). We can fix leaks if/when they happen. Waste is concentrated
- current nuclear power stations (light water reactors) burn about 3% of their fuel leaving 97% unused in waste. There are nuclear power solutions which would burn most of the fuel (leaving very little for waste). So if we developed these technologies (see molton salt reactors being one of them) then nuclear waste would no longer be called "waste" as it would suddently become an extremely valuable feedstock for use in reactors.
- related to the prior point: why is it that we think we will not find a use for this very valuable and rare reasource in the future. We should think of nuclear "waste" storage as "rare element storage" which will be very useful under some states of the world. We just don't know how yet.
- as with any technology it should also be compared to the alternative when considering it's fitness: waste from the alternatives is far worse
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Basically, nuclear waste from power generation is a much smaller problem than people assume it to be, the solutions for managing it are already in place, and there have been few/if any accidents that have ever caused contamination from waste disposal.
Also I'm not an industry shill, but orphan sources from industrial/medical radiography have killed and injured more people than nuclear plants and their waste. Yet there's hardly the amount of opposition to those systems that you see for nuclear power, despite nuclear power having a far more significant impact on the healthiness and stability of global populations if we stopped banning it.
I learned that the spent fuel storage is pretty trivial for a few reasons:
1. The amount of fuel waste produced by a reactor is volumetrically tiny. So it's not too expensive to just have a relatively small guarded yard of sealed storage casks next to the reactor, where the fuel can sit and decay until safe for offsite disposal (typically around 60 years).
2. Safe waste storage containers are relatively easy to make. Most containers only need to be a thick stainless steel inner liner and a stainless steel outer liner filled with a special mixture of concrete. The nuclear waste is dropped in, the lid is bolted shut, then the container can be safely left in a guarded open yard for >100 years. They are safe by virtue of just having ridiculously thick welded stainless steel walls. We designed them to fall off a train going over a bridge, fall 300ft onto solid rock, and not break.
3. Reactor technology keeps getting better at extracting more energy from fuel. So what was "waste" in a past decade, can be put back into a reactor that is better at pulling energy out of the fuel. For this reason, there hasn't actually been much actual "fuel waste" in the history of the nuclear industry. It's all just being stored for future use by better reactors.
https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gordi...
Realistically deep geologic storage is absolutely fine, and even if it's not happening now, all of the waste can be safely stored above ground for hundreds of years.
They could only identify the waste by it's distinct radiological profile. Otherwise it was just another source amongst millions of ionizing radiation that bathes us every day.
Which is what happened.
Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.
Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world vastly cheaper than nuclear.
> - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
All of which are fundamentally expensive.
> - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
Every kw of nuclear production we create is resources we could have instead put into adding more than 1 kw of solar backed with batteries at this point. Moreover the other renewables would come online and displace fossil fuel usage faster. Thus spending money on nuclear results in a more polluted higher CO2 world, not the other way around.
There was a time when nuclear was the cheapest way to build clean energy, that time has passed and isn't coming back.
> - the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
Many people have died from radiation exposure. Many people have gotten cancer from radiation exposure years later. Many many square kilometers of earth have been rendered uninhabitable by distribution of radioactive isotopes. This is misinformation and spreading it is frankly dangerous. A very healthy dose of respect is required whenever handling radioactive materials and people should not be told otherwise.
This is WHOLESALE BOM price, which is about as useful as the price of uranium.
That is horrifically expensive.
Also that's not the cost though. You're looking at vehicle packs not stationary storage packs at that cost. We've seen stationary storage packs get down to $50/kWh last year - with an average pack price of $70: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...
And prices continue to decay. Those are the most expensive prices you'll ever see going forwards.
And there's other benefits. Batteries distribute well, letting us lower grid related costs by making more constant use of the chokepoints in the grid for instance.
The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now.
If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear power industry it's literally 31 - and 28 came from Chernobyl. It's a fraction of rounding error compared to every other energy type.
Nearly all of the dangers of radiation were cooked up by the oil and gas industry based on a series of now discredited fruit fly studies in the 1950s.
There's been a handful of other purely civilian disasters that killed people with radiation from sources meant for nuclear power, and a large number of military ones.
But if we're looking for civilian radiation deaths the majority outside of Chernobyl aren't nuclear power, they're radiotherapy, because the nuclear power industry was appropriately regulated after the early mass casualty events resulting from military nuclear reactors (e.g. the Kyshtym disaster at 200 to 8000 deaths) and the Windscale Fire at (100 to 240 deaths) and it's harder to regulate the more wildly distributed health care applications.
That we're handling things with appropriate care isn't evidence that they're not dangerous.
That's the thing, these numbers have been extremely inflated. The LNT model we've used for nuclear safety has never withstood any serious scrutiny. If anything, we've learned humans are extremely resilient to non-acute exposure.
Excess death numbers at places like Fukushima and Chernobyl have found almost no noticeable change in cancer rates, even for people with serious exposure.
Ironically, if you compare excess death numbers to traditional fuel sources (coal, gas, etc) they are much worse.
"Every kw of nuclear production we create is resources we could have instead put into adding more than 1 kw of solar backed with batteries at this point. Moreover the other renewables would come online and displace fossil fuel usage faster. Thus spending money on nuclear results in a more polluted higher CO2 world, not the other way around." - what a nice nonsense argument. With the same success I can say without nuclear - if you build ren and keep fossils for firming, you'll pollute in fact more over time, because you'll still use them. That's also why DE wants to expand gas capacity. And this plan was laid out not by CDU but Fraunhofer ISE itself
Not that many died from rad exposure or cancers from power plants. I mean, depends with what you compare. Entire Chernobyl deaths are expected to be 4k or less depending on data. That's how many ppl die in Germany in 2y from car accidents. That's probably how many died from early phaseout of nuclear https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-025-01002-z
You are right that radioactive material still needs special handling. Just like many other toxic materials like https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6nly288j4o
You had me until this. “Mostly precisely”? What does that even mean man?
i.e in most reasonable cases the risk is exactly zero and conversely it takes extreme scenarios for the risk to be non-zero.
Our DNA is very similar - DNA damage occurs naturally. Our body has processes that fix DNA strand breaks. Radiation that occurs because of most exposure that has ever occurred is so minimal that the body's natural defences against radiation damange means that the harm is precisely zero. The body literally repaired itself much like that water surface repairs itself.
Harm does occur however when the rate of radiation exposure exceeds our body's ability to repair itself. However this threshold is well above any threshold we regulate around.
For more information the key words are "dna double strand breaks" and "LNT vs SNT"
And coal kills more people in a week than all nuclear incidents killed in all history of humanity.
Not even mention that coal power plants release more radioactive materials too.
If you say "German plants", I'll point out coal consumption for power generation in Germany has gone down since the decision to phase out nuclear.
Coal consumption would likely have gone down even more with nuclear still being used, but that doesn't support your claim as stated.
Still waiting on those countries from the previous poster.
If Germany eventually got more renewables, great. That does not retroactively mean that they didn’t replace nuclear with coal. That’s just replacing nuclear with coal and then doing something else afterward.
It’s like if someone left their first wife and got married to someone else, then did that a second time, you wouldn’t say that, based on who they’re married to today, they left their first wife for their third. That intermediate step happened.
Still waiting for examples of countries that did that.
Also, that's not replacing nuclear with coal. Plants age out and are replaced even if one is not replacing one kind with the other. We retire pickup trucks and build sports cars; that doesn't mean sports cars are replacing pickup trucks.
Antinuclear movement in Denmark put a ban on construction and guess what happened later? DK became one of the biggest coal consumers on the planet with newly built coal plants.
France got a bit of antinuclear frenzy too by dismantling 2 Fassenheim units to allow connection of Flamanville. All this instead of retiring the leftover gas/coal capacity.
Spain retired several nuclear units before all coal and gas capacity too.
No it doesn't mean that at all. In particular, in Germany, the total coal generation went down, so it couldn't have replaced anything. What replaced nuclear in Germany was renewables and gas.
Consider your logic: if we had nuclear and retired it instead of shutting down renewables, does that (by your logic) mean renewables replaced nuclear? If not, why not? The structure of your argument seems to be privileging coal over other sources on the German grid.
Since the goal of energy transition is first and foremost decarbonization, if you close a low carbon source while keeping higher carbon sources, you can say that the worst polluter replaced the closed source
The structure of my comment is privileging coal because it has the worst emissions in the context of the ultimate decarbonization goal (among other nasty enviromental impacts from it). That's why it's coal that replaced nuclear and not renewables nor gas.
Coal is still generating a third of whole world power and polluting everywhere a lot.
In the US, coal generation has been falling for twenty years because it's more expensive than wind and solar. Same reason nuclear is being phased out - grid operators can get power cheaper via wind, solar, import/export, and battery storage.
Here is a complete list of those plants:
https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...
* every dollar spent on building new nuclear will be put to use so late it effectively increases CO2 emissions
* A country like Poland is the biggest emissions perpetrator in Europe, and the fact they are building nuclear means they will stay that way for literally decades
* The fossil fuel exporter countries are pushing nuclear as their agenda. Why do you think that is?
* Not a single country has a working permanent solution currently for waste storage.
* The UK cannot clean up Sellafield at all. They had the bright idea to process waste and are now sitting in hundreds of billions of pounds of estimated costs to dispose of it.
Germany plans gas expansion to firm renewables.
* Antinuclear movement resulted in DK/DE having worse emissions vs France/Sweden even today.
* Finland will give final authorization for Onkalo this summer https://qazinform.com/news/finland-set-to-launch-worlds-firs... Sweden already started construction at Fosmark. But ultimately conceptually it's not much different from Herfa Neurode
* Most of Sellafield problems are from nuclear weapon test experiments with esoteric waste, not classic commercial reactor waste.
Your list is kinda weak
But anyway: Danke Deutschland
As for Finland and Onkalo, so my list is correct and there is no country in the world with a working permanent solution right now? Or have we invented time travel and are currently in later this summer period of the year?
Most of Sellafield's problem are related to faulty thinking that we'll figure it out no big deal, which is the exact attitude I was commenting on. But sometimes you don't figure it out later as they found out. Don't let it happen to you.
The claim of what Germany did for humanity was more beneficial is such a farce considering it's emissions
Your claim about repository somewhat implies that since there isn't a repository there will not he one which is bullshit. Humanity has tons of repositories for handling dangerous substances, herfa Neurode being a good example. Onkalo will soon get final permit. Fosmark is under construction. You are making this sound like some world ending problem
As said. Most of sellafield problems are from weapons testing era which both created waste of various kind ehich was not stored accordingly. This has nothing to do with commercial operation of commercial plants where final waste "type" is more or less the same, just like how it should be isolated.
The only farce in the energy world I can see is that a positive example of emissions reduction like Germany is being singled out on ideological and political grounds, whereas the biggest offenders get a free pass. Examples are Poland which will accomplish nothing for 25 years despite the technology being cheap and available, and globally the US which reduced coal use by almost completely switching to gas instead of renewables like Germany, and additionally it uses almost twice per capital than Germany. Basically Germany could be 100% fossil fuels for electricity and be less bad than the US. Wild no?
My claim about the repository is that there isn't one since 60-70 years nuclear has been used worldwide as an energy source. Instead of wasting time interpreting what I mean, you should just ask me. My answer is: it might not be technologically infeasible (I don't know), but it's expensive and politically difficult since nobody wants to store it. That's just the reality of life -- technology is not deployed in a fantasy but in reality. In general, nuclear is a fantasy technology where large problems are handwaved away as if meaningless, but are difficult to tackle. For Sellafield I already said what I had to say. You either understand it or you don't.
All this maybe made sense 50 years ago, but we have better options now. And despite the occasional brouhaha the world is marching on without it. We'll soon have clean cheap energy and nobody will remember this failed attempt, nobody will remember coal, nobody will remember Trump trying to slow down the transition.
Made in Germany.
I suggest you read actual bookkeeping statements from nuclear operators, national budget items, historical records about radiation incidents, nuclear deposits, agreement texts and the like, instead of reading books that can only be true if they adhere to the information in such sources.
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
It it is inherent to nuclear power, because you really need to spend the money and effort to keep it safe. It's very dangerous.
Here is where people usually say "but stats show it's killed fewer people per GWh generated than other sources". But that's not relevant at all. Nuclear power is dangerous entirely independently of that statistic. The reason so few have died is precisely that we spend all that money keeping it safe!
A gun is dangerous even before you shoot someone with it. It's not safe because nobody has shot it yet.
Science will tell you in detail what would happen if radioactive waste was spread in a populated area. There is so much information, please read up on it. So far it hasn't happened. Even Chernobyl was very far from a worst-case scenario.
- nuclear waste is not a problem
Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily.
The US gov spends millions per year guarding abandoned nuclear waste. They don't do it for no reason.
Again, you need to realize that it is actually dangerous. That's why it's expensive. You need to spend LOTS of money to keep it safe.
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
Not even remotely true, some examples, from a very long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
People have died from radiation exposure every decade since it was discovered. People die from minutes of exposure to barely visible amounts of radioactive elements.
Please follow your inclination to be informed. Don't take my word, don't take Jacks, go to the records of actual events and base your opinion on that.
My take - In 2026 we have developed a type of glass that can fetch electricity entirely for free from sunshine and store it in a container of the most abundant element on earth, or even use the surplus carbon from the atmosphere to generate synthetic fuel that can store energy for years.
That's where we should spend time, money and effort.
Early nuclear builds were cheaper to build:
https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...
Spent fuel is mostly reusable:
https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gordi...
Low-dose radiation risk is a contested harm:
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...
And no, solar is NOT free..............
I am very familiar with the arguments you link to, they are repeated often in these discussions but they don't hold up to scrutiny.
The key mistake for most of these arguments is that nuclear waste is harmless and nuclear plants are safe on their own and don't need to be kept safe at great costs.
Any argument that rests on that idea is not going to hold up.
Just to take one example - one argument presented is basically that nuclear waste only requires a few acres of land where you can place dry casks, then you're good.
Try to find actual scientific and financial support for that idea from anyone else than the author.
>Early nuclear builds were cheaper to build:
Early cars were too, for many of the same reasons. Lower wages, worse quality, less safety.
>Spent fuel is mostly reusable:
How do you handle it while it is being reused? Does it become harmless after being reused or do we still need to deal with it for longer than the US has existed as a nation?
>Low-dose radiation risk is a contested harm:
Low-dose is not what we're talking about here. A kilo of nuclear waste in a van filled with fertilizer is not a contested harm, it's a nightmare scenario.
>And no, solar is NOT free
Building is not free of course but it has no running costs once built.
Nuclear has immense running costs, and they can't be stopped entirely. Even after it has been decommissioned and the company who made the plant has gone bankrupt it keeps costing society money.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
"If we take that a step further, U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
"Spent" fuel these days is 95%+ the same as the original fuel. If fully recycled then nuclear waste volumes could therefore be reduced 20x from where they are today. So that 10 yards deep would be 2 feet deep.
Most costs are actually self imposed. There is no reason for nuclear not to be the cheapest form of energy out there. If you don't like my original website, please see this one, which talks about the "regulatory ratchet". Regulations were increased on a highly profitable (read: cheap) sector until the industry was no longer profitable (read: as expensive as it is today)
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
I don't see why nuclear waste would ever make it into fertilizer.
The problem with nuclear and your cars analogy is that with cars the data is pretty clear that new cars are safer than old - this is not at all clear in nuclear!
"Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily." - ah yes. And a meteor can kill the entire earth. What's the possibility?
Entire US interim storage of commercial waste costs merely 0.5bn/y until a final repository is built like in Finland. That's dirt cheap.
Nuclear is statistically safe as you said, even accounting with major incidents. Nuclear requires least mining, materials, land per kwh - can be proven too and has one of the lowest env impact per UNECE.
It's your choice to be antinuclear but the data is clear - have the world followed the french/swedish path - we'll not talk about climate change in it's current form. We also know what an antinuclear path leads to - both in Germany and even Denmark which still can't reach french emissions and started pissing off neighbors montelnews.com/news/0138d712-3afd-4590-883e-4b9221fd776a/norways-ruling-party-rejects-renewal-of-denmark-cables https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-pauses-plans-...
Both are a possibility but we can't make choices about the meteors. ;-)
Nuclear incidents due to negligence or malice are many orders of magnitude more likely, and get more likely the more waste we make and the longer we keep making it.
Europe was a bombed wasteland less than 100 years ago. Luckily that was before nuclear power plants.
Have a look at the situation in Sellafield, or the Asse II mine. Negligence has caused problems many times already.
Chernobyl is in the news recently due to drone strikes. Had it been a solar plant it wouldn't have been.
Anyway - the point is that the expensive security efforts and precautions are needed, not optional, and the historical safety record is no guarantee for future safety.
>We also know what an antinuclear path leads to
Not yet - we can hope that it leads to solar, batteries and synthesized fuels.
China has shown that it is possible, which was the last hurdle IMO. Now it's just a matter of doing it.
Asse is an experimental facility without plans to extract the waste if experiment fails. Still, no public was or will be harmed since it's mostly LLW, 75% for medical and research sectors. It has nothing to do with proper deep geological repository like Onkalo. It costed 1bn to build and will cost 4bn to operate for a century with periodical topups. That's dirt cheap considering amount of power from nuclear in that period.
Nobody was affected by recent Chernobyl strikes. The tragedy there is of another kind- damaged outer dome which is expensive and equipment that was prepared to start corium cleanup was damaged, postponing the process.
Security efforts are not that expensive if compared to amount of power
China is still one of the worst global polluters and is expanding coal to use it to firm renewables. It also expands nuclear but nowhere near at the rate of France during Messmer or swedish BWR expansion. Synth fuel is nothing more than an expensive pipedream.
0: I personally like the look of wind turbines but I understand many don't. The appearance is likely why the Trump administration canceled such projects.
so let's put our strength into battery storage. invest in research towards it. research it ourselves. build out renewable energy. sponsor such things in foreign places we steal, ehrm, i mean, trade resources from.
this whole nuclear debate feels like a defeat. well, we tried, seems too hard, let's got back to ye' olden times.
i am also aware that we use french nuclear power as a backbone constantly and still boast as being so advanced and green, but that's also helping my point.
[0]or fusion, or just a different way to boil water without creating waste we have to bury in a mountain and think about how we want to make sure that nobody every accidentally opens the toxic caves in the next thousands of years.
The only countries that really tried are France and Sweden and the result was stellar.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Switzerland also studied nuclear weapons production until 1988:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_and_weapons_of_mas...
If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.
Nuclear is vastly more expensive per MWh than renewables. It's better than pumping stuff out the ground sure, but that's about it.
It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision
Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year
Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence
You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand.
They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh.
If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh
So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.
Nuclear requires far less overcapacity and transmission. You can cycle maintenance schedules and if country's demand is smaller, you build smaller units like Candu to make this rotation.
Take Germany for example. It requires a peak of 45GW of power and a trough of 30GW.
That means that you need 45GW running 24/7, with 10% overcapacity for maintenence, so 50GW running 247,
Nuclear's lack of dispatchability means it needs to generate 50GW to produce 35GW-days, meaning the cost per MWh is more like $150 per MWh rather than $30MWh for solar.
Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants, and with advances in breeder technology new plants doesn't nessecarily mean new mining operations, which often are quite harsh on the surrounding area.
I would have said that about the Japanese as well…