That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Are you serious when putting France in this list? Nuclear is such a cash cow here that EDF manage to make profits even while being forced by the regulator to sell a big fraction of its nuclear capacity below the operating cost and buying it back to them at market price! (We're talking about a multi-billon subsidies scheme, look for ARENH).
And that is despite (rather legitimate IMHO) regulatory constraints that have no equivalent in any other industry.
It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have. Does that mean it's a bad investment? Not necessarily. If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth. Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.
And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive. TBH, i haven't followed developments in the last years in regards to french neocolonialism collapsing in sub-saharan africa, but here's a small article from 6 years ago: https://infokiosques.net/IMG/pdf/uranium_de_la_francafrique-...
Why would an ecologist have to be against more energy consumption? For climate change, what matters is energy from the sun hitting the earth vs. energy being radiated back into space. More energy consumption also doesn't necessarily cause more pollution of any kind.
I'm not saying energy consumption overall is a perfect metrics, but the degrowth movement is a philosophy / science that's not aligned on a specific metrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption as opposed to specific energy sources or downstream effects like pollution, which is avoidable?
We have huge environmental problems ranging from ecosystem simplification, microplastics, etc. The answer is not to keep consuming as we are. We really have to stop the neoliberal system that's based on ever increasing growth and externalisation of environmental impact.
I get being critical of mindless consumerism, but degrowth doesn't seem to be about "order less junk on amazon/temu", but fundamentally reducing economic activity and energy consumption, which is civilisational suicide.
Like, I too would like a pony, but we gotta live in the real world. Ultimately we need more energy of basically every carbon neutral form.
I agree that the ideology of growth at all costs is problematic, but it's how our society is structured right now, so we need to fix our current energy problems rather than bet on transforming society.
To be fair, the declining fertility rate will probably solve a bunch of environmental issues over the next few generations.
Finding better ways of controlling where energy comes from and where it goes, and doing it in a controlled way that has minimal impact on the surroundings is good (from an ecological perspective)- it is the most pure good an ecologist can hope for.
"Reduce, Reuse" has its place, but that place has to be in-line with also finding a way to balance our human needs with the environment.
I don't think reducing our energy consumption is realistic, many things that have a long-tail reduction in energy consumption have a huge up front cost.
For example, electric vehicles are a bitch to manufacture but are less impactful for the environment over a long term; and this is amplified if the energy that is produced to be used in the electric car has a minimal impact on the environment (Solar, Wind, Nuclear) - but nuclear plants have a huge up-front energy cost too.
I'll be forthcoming and say that I have a concern that over-reliance on solar and wind may have negative consequences on the environment too- harvesting wind energy from the atmosphere that animals may rely on, will likely impact the environment in ways we haven't thought about. However it's significantly better than coal and gas, and that's the marker we're going for: not perfect.. better.
Everything is bad at a certain scale after all, we just haven't hit that scale with our renewables- and because of this, on a baseline, I agree with you.
Try to present the idea of "degrowth", to China, India, Indonesia, Brazil. They all on path of growth.
I agree that France, should be paying more to Françafrique countries, but raw uranium cost is only 50% of the finished nuclear reactor fuel. And nuclear reactor fuel is 5% to 10% of the operating costs of a nuclear power plant.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Heinrich Böll Foundation and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, both funded from Germany, published many documents criticizing uranium mining in Africa:
" Addressing uranium-producing countries in particular, whom it seems to want to stop or at least reduce their activities, the report also focuses on the health hazards associated with extraction and the neo-colonial aspect of exploiting the resource. Particularly virulent regarding France, which is the subject of three articles and cited in several others, the Atlas targets head-on Paris's relationship with one of its main suppliers: Niger.
The Atlas likens the uranium mining model to a vestige of Françafrique and accuses the French government of enriching itself on Niger's behalf while orchestrating an ecological, human and social catastrophe in the country. The French company Orano - formerly Areva - which mines and produces uranium in Niger for French power plants, is a particular target."
https://www.docdroid.net/y7NENZB/comment-lallemagne-finance-...
https://www.ege.fr/sites/ege.fr/files/media_files/German_Int...
> Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.
> If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.
" De Gaulle asked asked Kennedy: “Would you trade New York for Paris?” His point was that if he wasn't convinced, would the Russians be? So it's not just about numbers of warheads. It's about the defensive posture overall. "
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/03/nuclear-deterre...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1962/08/de-gaul...
It's not subsidized, quite the opposite EDF is subsidizing its competitors through ARENH.
> It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have.
It's not. It only appears expensive compared to other decarbonized means because the calculations never take the opportunity cost of intermittency. Wind and solar are only cheap because you never count the price of the back-up plan in the cost (and also because magnets and solar panels are bought for cheap from China). If you count the price of running an actual grid all year long then it suddenly becomes the most efficient option after hydro and that's why France has among the cheapest electricity in Europe. The German Energiewende is the canonical example of what the theoretical calculations leave out. It should have been cheaper and less carbon-heavy in the end, but instead hundreds of billions have been spent to get only expensive and high-emission electricity in the end.
>And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.
Come on, the Uranium coming from Niger is a just a fraction of the consumption: https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/questions-et-reponse...
What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.
They only talk about the benefits in the abstract, but not what an energy shock actually means. It means people can’t afford to pay for heating and freeze to death. It means factories close down because the inputs are too expensive. Construction stops because the raw materials (steel, concrete) are too expensive to manufacture, and people don’t have money to pay for new homes.
We have done all these things just in the last 4 years! So why should we do more of it instead of just building more renewable energy?
our current model produces growth without proportionally increasing standards of living, and accepts that livelihoods will collapse all over Europe and Africa as it becomes increasingly hostile to agriculture due to climate change.
think of the viability of degrowth as a policy within the prisoners dilemma of global capitalism as you want, but please come up with a more serious critique that doesn't equally indigte the staus quo
Thanks for showing your true face. But no thanks for your anti-humanism.
Maybe it's for the best. If they're being honest maybe it'll clarify debates and positions.
DEGROWTH NOW!
the coups that happened recently in west africa are largely due to that largely hidden cost.
I’ll stand by the only reason nuclear power is unprofitable (in most cases) is because we decide it is unprofitable.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
You could clean up the high activity thing and let the buildings and their asbestos in place and nuclear decommissioning would still be more environmentally friendly than every other heavy industry.
That is factually wrong. Coal mining has to re-naturalize the areas used for mining after the coal was removed.
And most industries are supposed to not just leave toxic waste and instead have a plan what to do with toxic waste products these days. And no, an empty building cannot be compared to radioactive waste.
Oil and gas extraction platforms here in Norway, I believe.
Does not mean it's a made up issue. That's classic whataboutism. Ecologists are not concerned just about nuclear activity, but precisely about the overall industry destroying our entire environment, and for whose profit?!
Nor do I see a great deal of concern for manufacturing, as long as it is done somewhere else. If it done here: it is super dirty and dangerous, jobs no one wants. Elsewhere: what great opportunity for them to rise out from poverty. The fact that the environmental regulations are nonexistent, either never brought up or dismissed because we can't regulate another government.
Costs are accounted and in some cases you have even price breakdown https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
Its has always been state owned, and it's much better for critical infrastructures to be so anyway.
> suffering from aged power plants having issues?
There was one (1) instance if of a serious common issue between multiple plants found in 2022, unrelated to the age of the NPPs (the most recent were affected as well) which affected the exploitation for about a year. It was bad for a moment, but not that bad, it's like saying the automobile industry can't be profitable because the Tataka airbag problem happened. (And the corrosion issue was much less severe than the Tataka one!).
Over half of french fleet was already upgraded to have safety similar to gen3 reactors through great carenage.
France also set record production this summer vs prev ones
It's currently double its original budget and likely to grow further.
The "profits" are from running decades old reactors that were never transparently costed.
Yes, because they had to borrow at a 7 or 9% long term rate on the market (in the era of ZIRP!), which makes financing costs 70-80% of the overall final electricity price.
Of course that kind of deal was insane, but it says more about financing long term projects on the market than it says anything about nuclear as a technology.
> The "profits" are from running decades old reactors that were never transparently costed.
EDF gave more in subsidies to its competitors through ARENH over the past 15 years than what the entire fleet costed.
French nuclear has been an indisputable financial success over the past 40 years (while giving France one of the cheapest electricity in Europe). Saying otherwise is just ignoring reality entirely.
Well sure, but the alternatives aren't really affected by this, because they don't have to be planned and financed these such long time frames. So this is a problem for nuclear. The core technology seldomly is the deciding factor for these things.
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/producing-a-climate-frie...
But at least the cost is factored in from the start. Those costs often double during construction but at least we know the decommissioning costs are factored into the fake numbers they use to get approval to start builds.
UK Eighth Allocation Round are from 20 July to 7 August 2026, Offshore wind £113 /MWh, Onshore wind (>5 MW) £92/MWh
UK Government also awarded a CfD to Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, set at £92.50/MWh for a 35 year period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
In fact this nuclear plant was the first use of CfD.
It's a great scheme because it (in theory) prevents cost blowouts being added to energy prices. Good incentives to get things built quickly and cheaply.
The actual price for Hinclkey is roughly a third higher than the CfD and that extra cost should be borne by the French taxpayers via EDF.
In reality they shifted some costs onto the next nuclear plant instead, working around the CfD and foisting the excess costs back onto the British tax/billpayer.
Obviously they refused to use CfD for the next UK nuclear plant because unlike wind power, they have no faith in it being completed anywhere near on budget. And if they bid the real cost it wouldn't get built in the first place.
So now UK taxpayers are paying in advance for a decade to get new nuclear built with no cap on cost.
Technically I think the Hinkley prices are what we'd call £2012 [if we could easily write a subscript here I would use that for 2012] that is, they are prices in the Pound Sterling as it was at some fixed point in the year 2012 and so when paid in the CfD contract they'd be adjusted for inflation.
All the early CfD prices were in £2012, whereas those newer CfDs have strike prices in £2024 which is about 40% more money in real terms. You can see this notation in the linked Wiki page.
So, if we adjust all the prices to £2024 that price for Hinkley is about £130 per MWh whereas Solar farms are £75, onshore Wind is £92, off-shore Wind is £113
Except, that's not really what's going on either because those AR8 prices are what's called "Administrative Strike Prices". AR8 like all the other allocation rounds is a reverse auction whose results we won't know for months, and those are the start prices in the auction, if you want to win and you're not the only bidder you will need to come lower. Maybe your competitor says they can do solar for £72, but you stared at your loan sheet and projected sunlight over the next decade and dared to say £71.50, you win that contract. But the strike price is now £71.50 not £75 per MWh. Your competitor might still build their solar farm, but at market prices not the guaranteed £71.50 per MWh you've contracted for. Maybe they get lucky - this summer the CfD "subsidy" for Solar farms paid us back many millions of pounds, because electricity prices were high and the subsidy is effectively a fixed price. Of course this doesn't cancel the hundreds of millions we spend subsidising Drax, but that's a completely different discussion.
Edited to add: Just like a conventional auction there may be no bidders at the start price. Unlike some low stakes auctions you might have seen in person or on TV they don't offer again with a better price, the auction just fails. This happened for offshore wind in AR5 a few years back, the government wanted to pay no more than £44 per MWh in £2012 for offshore wind energy -- cheaper than solar, so the firms who build wind farms looked at their costs and said "No thanks" and there were zero bids that round, and a subsequent government increased the ASP for AR6 wind and got bids at much more realistic prices.
(I think fusion is great, by the way, but I just don’t believe any timelines at this point anymore)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno_of_Elea
i like how he died. guts.
All the data showing that it is still free. There is no cost, generally anthropogenic climate change is increasing the habitability of our atmosphere.
The reactor vessel and the primary coolant loop.
All that steel can be vitrified and stored in stainless casks somewhere fairly indefinitely.
Or just buried. It doesn’t stay reactive very long.
The rest of the site is no different to any other electricity generator, and no different really to the average industrial manufacturing plant.
Everyone likes to just say ”decommissioning costs”, without actually thinking about what any of that means.
It’s not like every nuclear power site is a Chernobyl.
But of course there are no norms for max radioactivity levels at a coal power plant site.
But if decommissioned properly, most of the ash inside the building can be collected and mixed into soil and bricks at a safe concentration not far above background radiation level.
In a nuclear power plant, there is no release of radioactive materials, but it’s possible for parts of the structure to absorb radiation and become radioactive itself, and that’s much harder to deal with.
Steel is taken apart and measured, non-activated steel can be melted down and recycled. Activated steel has to go into storage, either low level nuclear or medium level nuclear waste.
The biggest concern for steel is cobalt. During manufacturing steel with very low cobalt content is usually used for nuclear applications, but there is still small amount of cobalt.
In reactor, under neutron radiation, stable cobalt-59 changes to cobalt-60, strong gamma ray emitter with a half-life of 5 years. So neutron activated steel has to storage for at least few decades.
When done not properly, this is a health hazard.
" Circa 1983, construction was finished of 1700 apartments in Taiwan which were built with steel contaminated with cobalt-60. About 10,000 people occupied these buildings during a 9–20 year period. On average, these people unknowingly received a radiation dose of 0.4 Sv. Some studies have found that this large group did not suffer a higher incidence of cancer mortality, as the linear no-threshold model would predict, but suffered a lower cancer mortality than the general Taiwan public. These observations support the radiation hormesis model, however other studies have found health impacts that confound the results. "
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald (you have to translate that page yourself, the English version doesn't contain the relevant information)
Encapsulating the waste and burying it somewhere on an abyssal plain in the deep ocean should also be a pretty low-risk approach, the IAEA has looked into variations of that.
Like someone else said, I think it's all expensive because some people want it to be.
IE, I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions and culture that allowed this. Will France itself even continue them?
South Sweden, with most of Sweden's population is at 20 gC02eq/kWh and at 36% nuclear
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/SE-SE3/yearly
Also Ontario?
Finland?
It's been phasing out nuclear since then.
Nowadays the Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are the only ones against nuclear power, but thanks to the left block winning the recent election, they may push that one issue enough that they get to continue the destruction of our planet.
https://theconversation.com/peaceful-sweden-once-sought-nucl...
Sweden is currently using almost none natural gas for electricity production. How could the replace the current 25% of nuclear electricity? wind+natural gas? New hydro dams?
I'm sure edf would be happy to get 18bn/y in govt handouts like ren get in Germany through EEG
Ontario, Canada may have something to say about that:
Gaullism and strong governments are not in fashion these days. The main thing that made Messmer plan work was Messmer himself, a strong leader with the power to tell everyone to stfu and do it.
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.
And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.
> ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
> ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.
The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).
Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".
People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.
The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.
To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.
The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.
Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product#Iodine
What are they?
Nuclear gets cheaper if you have several units built in same place and if you increase CF with various methods, incl higher enriched fuel
Isn't this the thing where you require something in one case but not the others?
If every oil drilling operation had to carry enough insurance to cover Deepwater Horizon and every hydroelectric dam had to carry a policy large enough for Banqiao and every solar panel factory had to insure against leaving Superfund sites that leak into the groundwater in some of the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley then they'd be in trouble too.
> the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions.
People often say things like this and then if you actually have someone go through the existing process you find out that more than half of the labor is going to inspect things that aren't actually safety-related, or some corruption is involved which is quadrupling the cost because the contractor bribed a politician to make use of their services required by law or create artificial scarcity for something which is actually important but shouldn't cost as much as it does.
I'd argue at least half of it basically functions as a petroleum subsidy.
And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them, and would be even more so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated.
The only justification in nuclear right now it's deglobalization and energy independence. But I would argue all the money you throw into nuclear for that, it's much better served simply building out solar and wind
> so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated
That sounds very very questionable. We have like tens of countries in Europe that are trying to implement solar and wind energy throughout the decades, and are undoubtful lieders and visioners in that areas. And what is the practical results? Energy costs like 10 times more than if that energy was generated through burning fissile fuel alone.
But, the same is true for solar and wind which starts off much cheaper than fossil fuels in the first place.
Most new build energy is renewables, that's what nuclear needs to compete with.
Is the customer 10, 50 or 500 km from the power plant?
Do I need to build a second backup power plant for each installed primary power plant, 100% backup capacity? Or 40%, or 20% backup capacity?
Costs of pumped hydro/battery energy storage.
What are the costs of CO2 emission? Europe 80 Euro per tCO₂, China/India 8, US zero.
But, the public has made it clear they are unwilling to give up the implied subsidy the unaccounted externally provides.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.
Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.
None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...
Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.
If a western country starts building nuclear today, they will have something to show for it in ten years at the earliest. Renewables and batteries are already cheap, and getting cheaper, so it seems like a very silly bet. Especially in a place like Italy with excellent sun and lots of space.
In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).
From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?
In any case, it's up to the market. If you believe it's possible to make money with wind / solar / nuclear power in Finland, you should be able to get permits in a reasonable time. Right now, those building solar are investing more than the others.
I've seen it claimed that this figure is not equivalent to the time-to-build in West, as the clock starts later in the process. I don't know if that's true, but I've seen the claim.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly
France is at 32 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.
So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.
SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.
It is really ideal for solar.
But the emissions are still much higher than France.
Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.
But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.
Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...
This is despite increasing solar.
True. But France is 70% nuclear plus 15% renewables, with the remainder 5% fossil. In 2026 South Australia was 75% renewables, and 25% CCGT (gas turbine - fossil).
So France is 5% fossil vs SA's 25%, and accordingly has 1/5 the CO2 intensity. No mystery there - and obviously has nothing to do with nuclear vs renewables.
SA says they will hit 100% renewable in next year. [0] I struggle to believe that, but 95% at some point seems likely given the price of CCGT.
[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/hydrogen-and-ren...
* Incredibly sunny
* Incredibly sparely populated
* Functionally winterless
Like it's the perfect setup for solar.
Somewhere like Denmark, Japan, even the US Northeast does not have those.
A long, not insurmountable, cable strings its way across the gap and into Europes tender bits, i.e Spain and Turkey/etc.
Electrons, once redirected/collected, can be redirected far.
Heck, at scale, probably a lot of it could be done with microwave, anyway ..
If only these nations weren't in such constant conflict with one another. Those with all the energy could turn their deserts into paradise. Those with paradise already, could use their free time to find new ways to collect energy, better.
Instead, we drive to work.
At this point I think if you want inexpensive nuclear, you just have to accept some risk. Going from 99.9% safety to 99.99% adds just too much complexity to remain economically viable.
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
Those arguments typically assume Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage, which is a completely clown argument.
From what I've seen, some countries have renewables comparable to nuclear for baseload power, at least for now, but in no country is new construction nuclear cheaper.
Those countries where nuclear does best will be energy ghettos in the post fossil age, as they will be competing with countries (typically sunny places closer to the equator) with cheap renewables.
Solar photovoltaic is so low thanks to its intermittency. The more solar you have as a percentage of the total production the more costly it gets. At the limit of 100% solar its SLCOE is about 4 times higher than nuclear (Fig. 3).
So, the availability and the quality (offshore wind is less variable, causes less backlash and so on) of wind power resources play a big role.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
I see this from nuclear advocates when they talk about "energy density". Energy density (or EROI) are only relevant insofar as they affect cost. Why not just use cost? (The answer is that cost isn't giving the nuclear advocates the answer they want, so they have to lie and use some substitute metric.)
If energy prices are too high, industry suffers. If you let the price rise, maybe China just eats your lunch.
What's the option value vs risk of gas price rises? Gas sets the marginal price of electricity in Italy today for 60% of the year [1]
[1] https://www.terna.it/DesktopModules/AdactoBackend/API/direct... "However, the electricity system remains significantly exposed to gas price volatility, which in 2024 determined electricity prices for more than 60% of the hours."
[1] https://www.emi-bg.com/en/battery-storage-in-california-has-...
Unfortunately, this probably won't work everywhere. Particularly in Northern Europe winter is tough as there's very little sunlight (manageable) and often very little wind (not manageable,as it lasts longer).
Nuclear is an expensive way of solving this problem, but it's carbon neutral which is super important.
Like, to be fair, batteries have improved so much in the last decade that this may be solved, but I'm generally sceptical of one thing that will save us, as I reckon we'll need multiple things to ensure resilience (which is really, really, really important when it comes to core needs like electricity and heating).
> maintain extremely good uptime
Not from a capacity planning standpoint.
CANDU reactors, for one, can be (and are) refuelled live:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_refuelling
Every few decades they do need to be refurbished though.
It’s commonplace for maintenance issues at non CANDU reactors to extend the “refelling” downtime. So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues. The major benefit is when manufacturing plutonium due to shorter fuel cycles, but overall CANDU reactors are less cost effective which is why adoption fizzled out.
Roughly: EPR runs for 18 months, then requires 1-2 months of maintenance (which includes refuelling about one third of its fuel assemblies). A modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant runs 12-18 months, then requires 1 month of maintenance.
Next, I could not resist as other commenters already mentioned it. You wrote: "small country". As the Aussies say: Yeah, no. Italy is 300,000 sq km. That is not small. If compared to the United States, it would be the fifth largest state.
Finally, why does it seem that all discussions about electricity production on HN always devolve into the "Base Load Wars"? For me, it is starting to feel like a meme. (Are there LLM troll bots trained to enter HN discussions and make a bunch of "base load" arguments?) Seriously, can someone please create a text-based role playing game that revolves around a future society locked into eternal "Base Load Wars"? (See: PhD Simulator[1])
There are 70 countries larger than Italy, Russia is more than 50x the size.
America the 4th largest country is still 20x the size of Italy.
> That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Spot on. That, plus... peak oil.
It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.
Interestingly, Venezuelan extra heavy sour crude oil is not profitable to use at $55 a barrel, the price before the Iran war, but is profitable when it's over $90 a barrel.
It's easy to make money when someone else pays the costs but you get to keep the revenue.
Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).
I don't think you were downvoted for that; instead, I think you were downvoted for saying "This is wrong" when GP commenter claimed the peak oil has been predicted decade after decade. GP also just said "peak oil" not "peak conventional oil" so I'm unsure why you brought up that distinction?
A better reply might have been "Peak oil has been wrong decade after decade, but current projections are somewhere between 2025 and after 2050. Additionally, if we restrict it to only specific geographic regions, or to only a subset of oil extraction, it occurred in the mid-2000s instead of the original global projections of between 1922 and 1960."
I'm not the one that downvoted you.
The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
- https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...
- https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-d...
The 138€ is under pessimistic assumptions. Min profitability limit on the other hand is 9ct/kwh. But nobody denies fla3 was a failure.
You didn't understand the electric cap in France. It's a cap on profits. If edf sells at certain thresholds above 70€ due to market, the state will take extra profit. It's sort of like double CFDs for renewables except edf has no minimum compensation
It was nationalized because it had suffered record losses in the previous year and was struggling with a ballooning debt mountain of 65B euro. The French government didn’t need to nationalize it to control its strategic direction - it already owned 84% of it. That was the press release claim in order to present the bailout as “strategic”.
And the point was to address the gp’s claim that nuclear was profitable. Profitable enterprises don’t lose 18B a year or suffer financial instability due to a debt mountain on their balance sheets.
> You didn't understand the electric cap in France.
I don’t see how you drew that conclusion - the reactor needs to earn €138 per MWh (that’s the middle estimate not the worst case which is €180 per MWh). But the most it can earn is €70/MWh due to The cap? You’re just restating what I said. This reactor will be deeply unprofitable for its entire life.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
> EdF responded that it "assumes full responsibility for the technical and financial aspects of dismantling its nuclear plants," and noted that it was currently decommissioning nine reactors, so had a good basis of experience. It also pointed out that its funds set aside for decommissioning were audited by the Ministry of the Environment, Energy and the Sea the previous month.
And, a little bit earlier, the article author's assesment:
> There are well-developed plans for dismantling these (which have been shut down since 1990 or before) and work is progressing.
Please don't cherry-pick articles.
Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.
Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
France net imported in 2022 less vs Germany net imported in 2024 in business as usual situation
Edf also announced yo add cooling towers to bypass old environmental laws, especially for Golfech
Palo Verde is right next to the Sonoran Desert and has been running for forty years in Arizona heat:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
There's no technical reason why nuclear plants can't run in low/hot water situations.
Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.
That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable
This may come as an issue if air con develops fast, though.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
> Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.
We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.
"Solar and nuclear are the only two options" is a false dichotomy, lol.
This is comparing to the base case of fossil fuels. But those have tremendous negative consequences.
The sun is an oil well. Panels are drills or pumps. Batteries are oil tanks.
Not having oil drill and oil tank factories in your country isn't a critical energy sovereignty issue.
If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil? If you want sovereignty then it is critical to have the ability to make drills, tankers, etc in your country if you rely on oil.
This is no different than solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc when it comes to renewables. If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go. If you do, then you need to be able to handle everything yourself otherwise you are always going to be reliant on other countries.
I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.
In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.
There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.
I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.
PS Spanish taxes are absurdly high...insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries. All that and an actual working economy and energy system.
If you are a white male. But what about suppressed minorities and women (and especially minorities women and nonbinary persons) that can't get job because of chauvinistic billionaires?
The price is only good if you ignore the outcomes and what you’re paying on the backend through taxes.
I actually do since I'm Italian lol
Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant
Fellow italian here, let's not act like our third rate ERs never leave people suffering for hours without caring that it may have lasting consequences. I understand it's partially due to understaffing, but this is the reality. My dad had this happen to him as well. Thanks
So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.
> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance
The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff's incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.
My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.
Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.
> The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.
And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.
The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to the cost of living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
Healthcare is the same. It just turns out subsidizing it from wages works because healthy people are more productive.
Profitability isn’t a hard limit. But if something isn’t internally profitable, it requires an external partner to get going.
When something is profitable in the sense that a few oligarchs make more an more money, I see it as a bug, not a feature.
The German nuclear phaseout, had as side effect a national security issue, increased dependence on Russian natural gas.
It was cheapest firm power in german merit order. Instead the guy that was later hired at gasprom had other plans, together with greens. As result coal is still used. New gas plants approved this summer
It was a political decision and in the end a very costly one: much bigger burning of coal then necessary, new gas power plants, increased dependence on foreign energy imports.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it
Plus you can stockpile it super easy.
That's plenty of time to source alternative uranium supplies presuming you haven't stockpiled.
Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.
Russia's is just cheaper.
But it accounts for 5% of the cost of a produced MWh, so if it had to be generated otherwise, we'd know how to do it.
Russia is ore importer itself and Orano+Urenco have enough capacity to satisfy most of Europe, both expanding.
Decentralized is not guaranteed. You mostly deploy ren in productive areas, see northern offshore, or that most of Ukraine's ren were in the South. Guess what happened to that. France has a decentralized grid too- many plants scattered around the country, each with multiple units
You do things with it's output that are profitable instead.
I guess we could argue that these sorts of operations should be state owned?
https://www.tvo.fi/material/sites/tvo/sijoittajasivut/pwmzkr...
So profitable yes. Would the owners/investors have made more money if they just bought random stocks based on some index? Probably. But not a loss.
Technically as a Mankala principle company TVO will never make any profit or loss. Profit here is some imaginary “how much money would they have made if the energy was sold directly to the nord pool”
And if I am not mistaken then for a long time energy prices in France were smaller than that of neighbouring countries.
But to be fair, it is difficult to tell what "profitable" means because a primary motivation has always been the development of nuclear weapons, so the true amortization is across industry and national security.
The point you're touching on is that nuclear power is expensive, so much so that not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the world without significant government subsidies. And even then the LCOE cost is basically the highest amongst all electricity sources. And it only gets that "low" by them pushing out the lifetime of the power plant, at least on paper, to 60 years.
As an example, Hinkley Point-C ("HPC") has that 60 year lifespan, a cost that has doubled since it was approved and a contracted electricity cost that is among the highest in Europe but I believe that contracted price only lasts 35 years. So what happens then? Likely because of increased costs of plant maintenance the costs are going to go way up.
But back to China. China is building over 30 nuclear reactors currently. It has largely standardized on two designs (rather than a unique design for each site). It owns the supply chain and the IP. And each project is getting cheap credit from the state (under 2%). All of this is going to make the end result far more cost competitive.
I cannot stress enough how much standardization matters here and China has proved this time and time again, for example with trains (both long-distance and for metros). A time-consuming and expensive part of any large capital project is procurement. Every city in the West that wants to build light rail has to put out RFPs for the rolling stock. That process is time-consuming and you get no economy of scale. China basically says "this is what you're using" and it saves years and billions off any project. As an example, there are cities in China that had no metro system 20 years ago that now rank in the 10 largest metro systems in the world by track length, number of stations and ridership.
Any private nuclear power plant in the West is going to try to raise profits by cutting maintenance. We see this with every private utility in the US. Even with oversight by the NRC, the NRC itself is subject to budget cuts.
There are large, unsolved problems with all of this too. Processing the fuel, processing the spent fuel and the transportation and storage of spent fuel are all unsolved problems, despite what the pro-nuclear crowd like to say.
But I thought South Korea made a good swing at it, but I haven't kept up on things much
If oil companies are ever on the hook for climate change, the bill will be measured in trillions.
Any argument that environmentalists run amok is the sole cause of nuclear's failure to launch has to address the fact that these two places, where environmentalists are a lot more likely to get a club to the head than a say at the table, are largely not expanding their nuclear power that much versus, say, solar in China.
In any case, your premise doesn't hold. China is hugely invested in nuke and continues to build as fast as they can. Theyve got 58 reactors operating (about 56 GW) and 33 more (over 35 GW) under construction. Theyve consistently been approving at least 10 new units a year. It's literally in the current 5 year plan.
This is the case in the US, too, as public utilities.
> Theyve got 58 reactors operating (about 56 GW) and 33 more (over 35 GW) under construction.
They added 315 GW of solar in 2025 alone, so we agree.
Such statements can come either from ignorance or malice
…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.
The talking point that they’re going green doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti...
When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.
All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.
At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.
Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.
So yes, it can be reasonably claimed that China is greening. "greening", not "green" -- 49.7% coal is still a lot of CO2.
https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/china-pushes-coal-...
They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.
You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.
Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.
It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)
It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Pr...
Wind overtook nuclear production in 2016, Solar FV in 2022. Today both more than double it.
Tables in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Ch... are also very telling. Total power production: 15% wind, 17% solar, 5% nuclear. Nuclear is almost stagnant, but they will probably finish what they are already building, or have planned. That is the way they work. But they are slowing the rate of nuclear installations, it took 5 years to go from producing 400 TWh to 500 TWh, while wind in the same time went from 500 TWh to 1.1k TWh and sun from 260 TWh to 1.2k TWh. These growing rates will drive nuclear from being ~5% of production to be irrelevant in 10 years. But you will read from pro-nuclears that they "plan" to double nuclear output in those 10 years, even when they barely put a +20% in last 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised it they pivot to solar, wind and batteries suddenly (a very China thing to do), abandoning all nuclear that is not already almost finished.
IMO China is not betting on nuclear. Just before solar was economically sound (c. 2015), they believed nuclear could be a solution for their dependency problems, and bet on it. As of today, they are no longer betting on nuclear, or at least the bet is crawling to a halt.
No nuclear debate without Germany. This is my opinion: Germany actually is winning. Not a lot, but their current situation is far from the catastrophe some predicted (massive blackouts! outrageous electricity price!). Nuclear was quickly replaced with solar and wind after an initial coal and gas spike. But now coal usage is going down, and gas is stable. Dependency from Russia is less than 10 years ago. OTOH, France is having serious problems to 1) increase their nuclear production and even maintaining what they have (average reactor age: 35 years, younger reactor: 18 years) and 2) to deal with the install of cheaper energy sources because their base load is so high and can't be easily phased out.
And please, stop with the "bad press" tune, as if everyone that doesn't blindly believe nuclear is the future is dumb and can be manipulated with ease, meanwhile pro-nuclear are very smart and impossible to manipulate. Do you think there is no nuclear or fossil lobby also releasing "bad press" about everything else and selling nuclear as the only solution? It only causes high friction unproductive debates: it is like Democrats firmly believing that Republicans are dumb, and vice versa. Either you accept that you are also being manipulated by the nuclear lobby to support them, or stop accusing others of being manipulated. Italy is running without nuclear power for more than 30 years, but only recently, when it makes absolutely no economical sense to start new nuclear plants if you have your production-demand figured out (not booming like China), some politics, not at all "manipulated" or "bought" by the nuclear lobby, plan up to 10 new reactors against people will (94% of voters against installing new nuclear in 2011). Yes, people are dumb, politics are honest and smart. That is the only possible cause.
If not, reading a list of this helps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
But sure, oil leaks can be bad as well. Solar leaks on the other hand seem bearable.
I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong.
Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).
wouldnt you instead count the net benefits to the whole economy from having that cheap and plentiful electricity?
If your trying to argue that 417 operating reactors and 377 GW of operating nuclear capacity at end-2024, producing roughly 2,600–2,700 TWh/year, about 9% of global electricity isn't profitable at all and that somehow all that money is just lit on fire not generating profit/value? Bold claim -- the ecosystem is about $300-500 B/year globally per isn't profitable?
How can the scientific progress of developing nuclear power + medical isotopes and the entire value chain associated with that development, incredibly long lived assets, nuclear fuel development not have been profitable? The fact that you have baseload generation that supports the entire grid?
What part of the equation are you talking about - at what part of the project life cycle? Are you trying to say they were built and weren't profitable the minute the switch turned on?