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Comment by ViewTrick1002 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you can’t assume ”always on” anymore.

Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?

They don’t and now capacity factors crater.

Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.

See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...

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Baseload is simply the lowest wattage your grid demands in a time period. Solar and wind have not made it irrelevant at all. All of the demand from data centers very much assumes constant reliable power which is in fact a perfect match for nuclear.

Why should your data center buy multiples more expensive nuclear powered electricity when renewables or stored renewables are available? They won’t.

And even if they sign a PPA the renewable arbitrage they could do exerts large downward pressure on the price they are willing to pay.

Which is to say, they would want to sign a contract saying ”deliver cheap reliable electricity when renewables and storage doesn’t do it”.

And now you are trying to fit an extremely CAPEX heavy square into a round OPEX sized firming hole.

it is not at all a perfect match for nuclear. Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing the nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.

Thats what OP means by baseload generation being irrelevant.

Data centers need power at night

How about you try to explain how this changes the economics of nuclear, and I’ll wait.

Data centers are only 5-10% of all US electric power demand. A significant fraction of that load is responsive to spot market price. DCs incorporate their own battery storage infrastructure for backup purposes and some even sell stored energy back to the grid during times of high demand.

What solar and wind have made irrelevant is the assumption that constant supply of the baseload is an addressable market for a power plant. That only works if the supply is the cheapest on the market (something nuclear has even historically struggled to achieve without big subsidies), and solar and wind will supply the baseload much cheaper than any other source when they're running, causing a lot of problems for any plant on the grid that wants to run at a constant output.

There needs to be a market mechanism to ensure there is enough dispatchable spare capacity to meet demand when solar and wind can't supply it. More reliable sources of power are inherently more valuable.

Yes. That’s called ancillary markets. One such are ”capacity markets”.

Nuclear power’s problem is that neither its spread between CAPEX and OPEX, nor its operational profile fits them.

We also have electricity futures. Again with the problem that their cost is far far below what new built nuclear power requires.

Here’s some reading on electricity futures:

https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market

The flawed economics of nuclear are largely do the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.

> Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?

That's why truly free markets are a bad idea? We've been through this.

Repeat after me: the value of the electric grid is in its stability. It must not go down regardless of pesky events like the winter or cloud cover.

You don't get to sell below cost to push out your competitors, thanks to regulations.

But hell, whatever, I agree — let's only use solar & wind and see how it goes :)

Oh, now you want to burn coal/gas? Awww. Remind me, what was the cost of climate change again?

Not sure why you are being condescending.

Perfect reliability is not worth the squeeze. In Sweden, which is a very electrified country with harsh winters, the figure is that it is acceptable to have 1.52 hours per year of not matching demand with production. Paying for more reliability is simply not worth it.

The research has lately focused on system costs. Finding renewable systems vastly cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.

Here are two modern papers on the subject:

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

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