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Comment by stymaar | Hacker News Reader

> country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA

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.

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France is in that list (hello i'm from france too) because construction is heavily subsidized and decommission is overall not happening, not planned, and more or less not even approaching the planning stage. The few decommissions that are taking place are decades late and billions over budget.

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-...

> 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.

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.

You're redefining environmentalism with a very narrow and technical view. Goodhart's law does not only apply to computer science, but to ecology as well, and says that CO2 emission alone is not a good metrics.

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

I think to most people, environmentalism is mostly about climate change and pollution. You're free to widen the definition of course, but note that even that Wikipedia article basically calls it a fringe ideology (in different words).

Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption as opposed to specific energy sources or downstream effects like pollution, which is avoidable?

The degrowth movement is very fringe indeed. But its ideas are not, some have even been assimilated by the green-washing apparatus such as "reduce, reuse, recycle". I agree with your definition because it includes pollution, which is deciding factor for reducing production overall.

> Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption

The question is good but not the framing. How is pollution avoidable? Energy consumption is not the problem but it's the means by which the auxiliary problems arise, and therefore a correct proxy to measure them. One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.

It's like in software development when people consider CPU/RAM is unlimited and don't provide any optimization. That may be fine in hypothetical settings, but in the real world resources are finite. (the analogy stops because using too much CPU/RAM does not "pollute" the rest of the machine and create memory corruption or whatever)

> One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.

Yes, but my entire point is not only is this solvable without throwing the energy baby out with the dubious quality goods bathwater, it's easier to solve with more and cheaper energy.

If the consumption of abundant energy has negative externalities, then those need to be appropriately priced. At that point, buying pollution causing junk will become more expensive than buying clean junk, but we'll still be able to afford the clean junk we want.

The energy received is always the same as the energy radiated, its just the temperature increases to maintain that balance.

No. Temperature increases until balance is restored. Temperature is currently increasing, which means the planet is not radiating away as much energy as it is receiving.

I think we're talking at cross purposes. There's a clear equilibrium state which is both higher temperature and notably bad whilst completely balanced from an energy perspective. Climate change is not bad because the temperature is increasing, its bad because it has increased and is going to increase more. The fact we still have baked in warming is additional bad.

Yes, at equilibrium the temperature stays constant. I'm talking about the average temperature of the entire Earth over time. We are currently not at equilibrium because we're pumping unfathomable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, so the average temperature is skyrocketing. If we were to stop emitting CO2 today then in a few decades or so the planet would reach equilibrium and the temperature would stay constant at that new normal.

This is of course simplified, but roughly correct as I understand it.

The issue is not only climate change. More consumption means more consumer goods, more resource extraction, more transport, more waste

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.

> We really have to stop the neoliberal system that's based on ever increasing growth and externalisation of environmental impact.

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.

Well it's just American society that really has this so deeply ingrained that it's deemed irreversible.

Europe only turned neoliberal a few decades ago and only some countries are deeply into it like the Netherlands. Before the 90s we were much more socialist and can go back that way.

China also isn't neoliberal. They're good at playing the capitalist game but they're not afraid to pull the handbrake where needed and they are going good things for green energy.

> Europe only turned neoliberal a few decades ago and only some countries are deeply into it like the Netherlands. Before the 90s we were much more socialist and can go back that way.

We all have the same financial system. Like, if you have interest bearing loans, then some amount of growth is required to pay back the principal + interest.

I think calling it neo-liberal isn't really correct, it's fundamental to the economic system we call capitalism.

Neoliberalism is strongly tied to capitalism, but it is more than that, it's a strong belief that capitalism is the only possible way and that it works best with no restrictions on it.

What we need to do is restrict capitalism. Some capitalism is ok, I'm not advocating for a pure communist system, but there needs to be a balance between both. Since the fall of the soviet union, the balance has swayed wayy too much in favour of the unlimited capitalism option, whatever you call it.

And no the system isn't really the same, or at least it wasn't. Interest-free loans were pretty common and when I studied the government even provided them as student loans. Unfortunately they don't anymore.

> What we need to do is restrict capitalism. Some capitalism is ok, I'm not advocating for a pure communist system, but there needs to be a balance between both. Since the fall of the soviet union, the balance has swayed wayy too much in favour of the unlimited capitalism option, whatever you call it.

I don't disagree with this at all, I'm all for red in tooth and claw capitalism, once every person has food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education.

> And no the system isn't really the same, or at least it wasn't. Interest-free loans were pretty common and when I studied the government even provided them as student loans. Unfortunately they don't anymore.

I think that many people are missing my point here. Fundamentally, "capitalism" is structured (today, at least) around people with money giving it to others and getting the interest payments as the reward.

In a world with zero growth, where does the money for interest come from? (hopefully this is also a world with zero inflation, or we're all in trouble).

Again, philosophically I agree with a lot of this (our society is very rich, and yet millions of people starve and die from avoidable illness), but my core question is how we get there.

Preferably in small, incremental steps as that's the safest way for us in general.

> I agree that the ideology of growth at all costs is problematic, but it's how our society is structured right now

With this mindset, nothing ever changes. No social problem was ever solved without looking at it from a social/political perspective. If you agree that growth ideology is problematic, then that's what you need to dismantle.

> To be fair, the declining fertility rate will probably solve a bunch of environmental issues

I think this is just wrong. The problem is the lifestyle: the throwaway culture and abundant consumption of throwaway goods. We could be just as many billions living OK in our environment, but you could have just 100 million average middle-class westerners continuing to fuck up nature (just slightly slower).

> With this mindset, nothing ever changes. No social problem was ever solved without looking at it from a social/political perspective. If you agree that growth ideology is problematic, then that's what you need to dismantle.

OK great, what's the plan then?

Where do we start?

What small problem can we fix to make this better?

If you don't know the answers to the above, then this discussion is entirely pointless, and I would remind you that although I would love a pony, that doesn't mean that I'll get one.

Any "solution" that relies on changing the entirety of how society is structured isn't going to work, absent an incredibly good plan (against which one can make incremental progress).

To ask probably the most important question, in a world of zero growth, how do we pay back all the consumer debt we owe? Thinking specifically of mortgages here, as they're the largest amount of debt held by the populace.

There is a possible future where none of these things are a problem and yet energy consumption is greater than it is currently. I think it's actually the most likely future. The ship may have sailed on climate change, but plastic pollution is not solved by consuming less, it's solved by consuming differently.

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.

> I think it's actually the most likely future.

Well that deserves some actual argument. This abundant future has been promised to us for generations and has served as a justification for precisely fucking everything up in the name of the brighter future. Yet now we have, to my knowledge, no indicator of things getting better, but all indicators going way worse than we thought.

> I get being critical of mindless consumerism, but degrowth doesn't seem to be about "order less junk on amazon/temu"

Yes it is. It's about mindful production of useful products and services. Which is very much the same as reducing economic activity and energy consumption.

> Yet now we have, to my knowledge, no indicator of things getting better, but all indicators going way worse than we thought.

Several forms of pollution are now much better than they were decades ago. Chlorofluorocarbons, lead in gasoline, rivers and lakes around the world, catalytic converters, slash-and-burn agriculture etc. etc.

Electricity generation is also headed the right way.

The solution is usually better technology and political action, not abstinence. We still have fridges, just not with CFCs.

I'm not saying we'll fix climate change in time, by the way. That is uncertain. But if we do fix it, it won't be with degrowth.

> Yes it is. It's about mindful production of useful products and services. Which is very much the same as reducing economic activity and energy consumption.

Why do you think that wanting less cheap temu junk means overall economic activity will decrease? Why can't that economic activity be redirected to a sustainable future with abundance instead? I still want to eat food grown elsewhere in the world, just not sold in plastic packaging and transported with fossil fuels.

We are using that energy no matter how produced to terraform the planet into a less hospitable one for nearly everyone. Some get hung up on the resource extraction and associated pollution for renewable energy. But ultimately you can't fix "wanting the wrong thing" with technology. Our way of life and expected conveniences are not sustainable, they can't last 100k years, probably not even 100.

> 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.

What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.

Taken to it's logical end it's quite literally just anti-human. Their ideal outcome is a suicide pact.

No, it's not a suicide pact. If it was just a suicide pact, they'd get it over with and leave the rest of us alone. It's a homicide pact, a genocide pact for the entire human race.

degrowth is compatible with increasing standards of living for 99.5% of people all the while being able to then actually preserve these standards up in the future.

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

None of that is true.

And we have tried it too! There have been energy shocks before, where the price of energy spikes and causes corresponding drop in energy consumption, leading to degrowth.

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?

> degrowth

Thanks for showing your true face. But no thanks for your anti-humanism.

It's interesting that they're feeling emboldened enough these days to not hide who they are and what their agenda is. That general movement had a slow motion replay of the Bolshevik vs. Menshevik action, where the moderates (like Patrick Moore, Michael Shellenberger) got purged, and after quite a long time of having an established, comfortable monoculture now they're starting to no longer feel the need to create fake narratives around why nuclear or mines are bad, now they're just straight up saying they want civilization to collapse. (Which is what would happen, there's never going to be any such thing as an orderly impoverishment)

Maybe it's for the best. If they're being honest maybe it'll clarify debates and positions.

> construction is heavily subsidized

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...

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. This is the first law of thermodynamics and as far as I'm aware nobody has managed to refute it.

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.

Finally, someone with common sense. Nuclear is bad BECAUSE it produces lots of cheap energy. We DON'T WANT this. More energy = more capitalism = evil.

DEGROWTH NOW!

glad you pointed out something very few people point out in these conversations - the cheap uranium fuel France gets has a very large hidden cost.

the coups that happened recently in west africa are largely due to that largely hidden cost.

Thank you for this post. It is informative and nuanced about a complex topic.

    > Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.

I was born and raised in several countries that are a part of the NATO alliance. Without getting too preachy here, I want to say that I deeply value the nuclear deterrence that France proudly and effectively provides the alliance. Plus, personal here, I like the "je ne sais quoi/don't fuck with me" attitude of the French forces. I welcome the wildcard that keeps our adversaries on their toes!

    > If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.

I am not French, nor deeply familiar with the arrangements here, but what happens if the uranium price is 2x or 5x? I am guessing it has little impact on the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant. Also: There are lots of alternatives. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Namibia control nearly three-quarters of the entire global uranium market. To be clear: I am not doubting that the existing purchasing agreements between France and its former African colonies are fair.

History behind the French decision to build it's own independent nuclear deterrence was interesting:

" 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...

De Gaulle, like most of the French political elite at that time, also got a wake up call during the Suez Crisis: if you don't have the bomb you can't intervene to protect your own interests anywhere in the world, because one of the great power could block you without shooting a single bullet and the other won't come to your rescue.

For France investment in nuclear is a big benefit, as you can see in the amounts of coal and gas burned to generate electricity in neighboring Germany in the last two decades, and still burning today.

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...

"degrowth" ... aand this is how you spot the real agenda of most environmentalists. ofc they'll call that a "philosophy".

Yeah I’m really confused why France is in that list (also, less so, but China - they have come a great way, further than almost any western country save France, I’m just unsure I’d the metric here applies evenly).

I’ll stand by the only reason nuclear power is unprofitable (in most cases) is because we decide it is unprofitable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821997

I'd consider power generation (solar, wind, nuclear) as strategically important and accept that it may need subsidies long term. If this allows the country a degree of independence from external shocks, it would be worth it.

Agreed, I've always been pro-nuclear (although the arguments have been getting weaker as solar+batteries keeps getting cheaper). I just want the vocal advocates to be honest about the cost and timelines instead of blaming everything on environmentalists as a way to side step the argument.

Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.

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...

Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating, even mundane things like business offices real estate or highways wouldn't be economically viable if they had to provision for decommissioning.

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.

> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,

Oil and gas extraction platforms here in Norway, I believe.

> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean

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?!

Funny how all that concern they have never manifests for wind and solar power.

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.

You seem out of touch with actual ecologists. Just because some ecologist discourse you don't hear on CNN doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Of course ecologists are very concerned for solar and wind power, or rather for their industrial counterparts! I know quite a few activists who are very concerned with non-recyclable solar panels and wind plants, but build solar "boilers" and tiny wind generators from spare parts and renewable materials (such as wood).

Ecologists are also concerned with outsourced manufacturing. Not every ecologist is a caricature of a Silicon Valley engineer who says we'll save the planet by buying Tesla cars and building solar plants. In fact, 100% of the ecologists i know (who are actually involved in activism) will say that those people are not ecologists but merely green-washing.

> Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,

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.

You throw the radioactive waste in a breeder reactor and make more fuel out of it. It's really not that hard.

They consider the concrete around the plant's parking lot to be nuclear waste though (I'm not kidding, that's how the French regulations works).

Wind farms are expected to a account for it and it is routinely included in cost calculations.

I have a family member working for a Canadian company that steps in after a mine has stopped operating. It cleans up and remediates the surrounding land and water to minimize environmental impact. This is usually a thorough process that takes a long time. Many months or years.

Do you think it is cheap to decommission a large water power dam?

That's just a bullshit Statement considering all german plants except experimental or soviet units are decommissioned on operator money.

Costs are accounted and in some cases you have even price breakdown https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...

The only reason nuclear power facilities get decommissioned is because anti-nuclear politicians panic and force them to shut down. Sure, there's an ongoing cost of maintenance and replacement, but once you have a nuclear power facility, there's no reason for it not to continue generating power indefinitely. We're not going to stop needing or wanting more energy.

If nuclear is such a big cash cow, why is edf in huge debts, state owned and suffering from aged power plants having issues?

Because being a cash cow does not mean the cash will be reinvested by the owner. The owner might just milk the cow and use the money for other things.

Re debt: check how much debt the SV giants have. Debt isn't a bad thing per se, it's just how you finance investments.

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!).

Couldn’t be because nuclear-hating bureaucrats have over regulated the industry?

No. Either it's profitable or it is not. It is not.

You don’t believe markets exist in a political environment?

Because it isn't. EDF devt to EBITDA ratio is as healthy or healthier vs german eon/rwe. Debt is ok to have for big corpos, unless you think Apple is a failed company.

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

When EDF signed a fixed cost contract to deliver nuclear in England the CFO resigned.

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.

> When EDF signed a fixed cost contract to deliver nuclear in England the CFO resigned.

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.

> 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.

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.

Sure, but sometimes it's better to invest for the long term, and that's among the most fundamental purpose of the State.

France doesn't have an answer for decommissioning costs.

technically speaking they don't have to be decomissioned and when they absolutely have to be I believe at that point we will have fusion which is only 10 years away.

Fusion has been 10 years away for the past 3 decades.

(I think fusion is great, by the way, but I just don’t believe any timelines at this point anymore)

That was infact the joke, but surely by the time this would need to be decomissioned we would have fusion power right? Some reactors we operate today are older than the oldest people on the planet!

>Some reactors we operate today are older than the oldest people on the planet!

That is not correct.

Some reactors we operate today are older than the oldest people on the planet!

You might want to look that up, because I’m older than the oldest operating reactor.

My mom is older than any reactor that’s used for power generation.

like zeno's paradox(es).

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

i like how he died. guts.

some dumbkopf hners can't even handle historical stories and simple straightforward comments on them, so they downvote.

and yet they aspire to run or work in startups. ... hee hee.

There is no reason to assume that fusion will be a particularly cheap power source.

I see what you did there :D Good one, thank you!

What are these decommissioning costs?

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.

I remember reading about coal-fired power plants specifically in Poland, which exceed the radioactivity levels for nuclear plants. This because the burnt-off coal contains small amounts of radioactive elements, which form particles and drop off near the flue.

But of course there are no norms for max radioactivity levels at a coal power plant site.

Coal plants spread radioactivity because it concentrates all the radioactive elements naturally found in the coal into ash, much of which then gets released into the air, deposited on surfaces and breathed in, which is extremely harmful.

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 not vitrified, only high level nuclear waste - spend nuclear fuel with highly radioactive fission products.

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60#Steel_contamination

They have to be stored but storage isn't particularly difficult. Just don't built them into a structure where to close to people.

They are similar to many other landfills.

" The four low-level waste facilities in the U.S. are Barnwell, South Carolina; Richland, Washington; Clive, Utah; and as of June 2013, Andrews County, Texas. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-level_waste

Have a look at this nuclear plant in Northern Germany that is in the process of being decomissioned since 1995. It's still not finished, suspected end date is now in the 2040s and is now projected to cost about 10B €. For a single plant.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald (you have to translate that page yourself, the English version doesn't contain the relevant information)

Yes, a lot of that is just waiting for the active parts to get less 'hot' though. But yes it's incredibly expensive and it's only going to get more so as we start caring more about pollution and proliferation.

Surely that's not because the people in power - the same people who have pushed trhough the decommissioning of these still functioning power plants - are want them to be expensive to decomission because it suits their agenda. Decomissioning costs can always be however high you want them to be but that doesn't mean that they have to be. Worst case you can just encase the whole thing in concrete until radiation levels naturally drop.

Did you honestly just invent a conspiracy about some unnamed people with a hidden agenda of making nuclear look expensive by paying 10B euros for decommissioning a working plant?

Just a suggestion, but alternatively you could also accept that in reality, decomissioning actually is expensive.

It’s not really that much of a stretch to think this is exactly what is going on.

One state in Australia, Victoria, recently disappeared $15 billion of public funds to criminal organisations under the guise of funding a big infrastructure project.

Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. No one knows how much money disappeared, it could be up to $30 billion.

Labor-Green governments do this everywhere.

It’s entirely reasonable to suspect something similar is going on in Germany around their nuclear decommissioning.

> Labor-Green governments do this everywhere

I suppose your name ("rightnutwingjob") gives it away but "Did you know crooks exist" isn't actually a proof that grand conspiracies are true.

I saw a DW Planet A documentary about decommissioning a nuclear plant in Germany. They walked around the plant in some safety gear, but with their faces fully exposed and no breathing apparatus. They said the project was decades behind schedule and it was costing ten times as much as expected. The decommissioning process involved spraying water and gels on slightly radioactive materials from the factory to reduce their radioactivity to effectively zero. The process created much more radioactive material than there was in the first place, which then itself had to be dealt with. The cost of decommissioning is determined by the lobbyists for the companies that do the decommissioning. Voters have no idea what decommissioning should cost, and no one will ever question going over budget. It's a great business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKIaRg3SdTw

Now check how decommissioning is going with Isar reactors instead of soviet ones

Would you like to provide some context?

The context is that all german reactors that aren't experimental or soviet are decommissioned on operators money without state financing.

The example of isar is particularly interesting - isar 2 is one of the latest that started decommissioning but is in much more advanced state vs others. Each operator does it as they wish. If you wait a bit more, rad levels drop so it's easier to decommission with less specialized equipment

Just declare that LNT is wrong and treat materials as non radioactive if they are less than half the radiation level associated with cancer. For the rest you can try and reuse them in new reactors if possible or store it in the same place as other nuclear waste.

We've got the technology to drill deep bore holes, kilometers below where water will move on any time relevant to human existence, where we could stick what small amounts of dangerous material is left.

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.

Why people spread such bullshit statements? Take Germany which enacted EARLY phaseout, yet all it's reactors are decommissioned on operator money except experimental and soviet units

" EDF Group assumes sole financial responsibility for decommissioning power plants. The cost is factored into operation from the start and included in the price of the kilowatt-hour. It is re-assessed every three years to take account of changing technical and financial assumptions, as required by law. "

https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/producing-a-climate-frie...

The 100% state owned EDF group take sole responsibility for the finances? What a relief for the taxpayers of France...

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.

Taxpayers of UK are supporting wind energy producers using CfDs (Contracts for Difference).

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...

You've quoted strike prices at the time, adjusted for inflation Hinckley is the most expensive of the three you quote. And it lasts nearly twice as long.

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.

> You've quoted strike prices at the time

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.

And the world leaders don't have an answer for the cost to keep our atmosphere habitable due to using fossil fuels as hard as possible?

> using fossil fuels as hard as possible?

All the data showing that it is still free. There is no cost, generally anthropogenic climate change is increasing the habitability of our atmosphere.

Only true since 2023/2024, before EDF was nationalized by the Gov. because of the massiv debt and hefty losses, they kicked all shareholders and delisted the company then.

Yes, France is pretty much alone in making nuclear work. It's impressive. That said, it is alone.

IE, I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions and culture that allowed this. Will France itself even continue them?

One can argue that Switzerland is doing a good job too. Also, it is profitable for existing plants for the next 60 years or so.

I am pretty sure anyone could make nuclear work by throwing lots of money around

The only money thrown around in French nuclear is handed out to EDF's competitors by EDF themselves as a compromise with the European Commission who didn't want EDF to reap to massive profits of the nuclear plants for itself (EDF has handed out around €100B over the past 15 years and still made a profit pretty much every year, despite massive forced investments in reaction to Fukushima).

Considering how much money is extracted from edf through dividends and in the past through arenh, it's the opposite - edf is subsidizing french state.

I'm sure edf would be happy to get 18bn/y in govt handouts like ren get in Germany through EEG

For some definition of "work". They don't seem to be able to build new nuclear plants now without massive cost overruns.

What about Sweden?

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?

Sweden has been phasing out nuclear for 40 years, after a referendum where the people had the choice of "No nuclear!", "No nuclear", and "No nuclear". There was no "yes".

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.

It's a strange affair when swedish leftists are the economically responsible parties and the right wing wants to use government subsidies to prop up an industry which is not economically viable compared to all the other electricity generating methods are cheaper and easier to implement.

Every single word you said is wrong.

I know HN comments should be more constructive than that, but your comment is setting all these trumpesque fires in the form of lies, that no constructive debate or rebuttal would be useful. You would not be convinced, and anybody reading the back and forth would be under the misapprehension that "the truth is probably somewhere in between".

I know there was a bit of liberty with the phrasing that the leftish parties in Sweden aren’t always considered the strongest on the economic arena. But that was not my main point, and sorry if I stepped on your toes. My main point is that all science and facts point to the truth that NPP are not economically viable without significant government subsidies. No matter how much I (and perhaps you?) want NP to succeed, it should do it on a level playing field compared to the other energy industries it should never do that with unfair advantages not offered to others.

While we may not disagree on the base facts, I don't think that's a fair characterization. First of all, you say that there have never been solar panel subsidies, which of course there have been. So the advantage has most certainly been offered to non-nuclear.

By law, opting in to "green energy" on your personal electricity means to have a definition that excludes nuclear, so that's government steering of the market towards non-nuclear green energy. Certainly qualifies as incentive, if not downright subsidy by manipulating market forces. (I even contacted my energy provider saying I would gladly check a box if it included nuclear. They said it was out of their control)

Of course on oil lots more has been spent fighting over the resources. For a given country the cost of acquiring the resources may be more political than directly monetary. But I don't think you're defending fossil fuels, so I probably don't need to argue that being controlled by Russia has a cost.

Now, if nuclear is not economical as base load, I'd like to see a comparison with solar & wind for base load compared to nuclear. And it should be a calculation for the (very nearly) 100% use case. So comparing like for like. The cost of wind&solar is extremely different if aiming for 90 or 99.999%.

Some Greens say "shrug, what's so bad about power outages?" (yeah, good luck with that). Some say "we'll just import in the greater European grid!" (greenwashing).

> not economically viable without significant government subsidies.

Nor is gasoline or road maintenance. I'd like to price in those externalities first.

Oh, and as for the left-ish opinion in this issue. IIRC only Greens and Communists were actually against nuclear. The big one (Social Democrats) manifesto could be summarized as "Well, we're pro-nuclear, but we know we have to give that up because we need Greens & Communists to be able to form a government". It was very transparent.

Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are against nuclear because: ‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons. They conflate civilian and military use of nuclear energy

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?

https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Sweden

> [the two parties] conflate civilian and military use of nuclear energy

I would never associate these two parties with competence or intelligence, and there certainly are people who think that a power plant is basically a bomb.

But no, their rhetoric against nuclear power today is at least ostensibly environmental. Well, as it's becoming clearer and clearer to everyone that environmentally it's at the very least the least bad option, they are shifting into trying to make it about economics. Of course completely ignoring that they want to price in (like in this thread) insurance with nuclear, but don't want to price in environmental damage of the alternatives.

Between 1987 and 2006 "the thought crime law" made it illegal in Sweden to even think about constructing a nuclear power plant. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankef%C3%B6rbudet

How much does nuclear power cost? Well, it was literally illegal in Sweden to run those calculations until 2006. Could criminalizing thought for decades maybe drive up the costs, once the law is repealed?

> New hydro dams?

Unlikely. It's already built out where feasible and economical. And besides, the Greens would block new hydro at scale because of their environmental impact.

> How could the replace the current 25% of nuclear electricity?

Most common argument I see is "we'll just import it", which is just greenwashing since that comes from fossil fuels.

> ‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons.

I don't see the contradiction. USSR took 10% of Finland in living memory, hell that was just single digit years before Sweden started looking into becoming a nuclear state. The Baltics were under USSR control too, and during the cold war they (USSR) seized Swedish ships in international waters and killed and otherwise "disappeared" the crew.

I find the article you linked complete garbage. It's viewing 1940s defence choices through a 2020s post-nonproliferation treaties and post MAD game theory lens.

But even if we do that, would it be un-peaceful to have deterrence? Sweden preemptively surrendered to Germany in WW2 (a bit of hyperbole, and doesn't account for secret allies collaboration), rather than have the country destroyed. Having a nuclear deterrence would mean not having to surrender again, when the Russian comes.

Hopefully NATO membership has the deterrence without the drawback. But of course NATO wouldn't be NATO without its nuclear members. And with the US becoming unreliable, Sweden's defence is still backed by the nuclear agreement with France. So own nukes or not, at least by treaty Sweden still has nuclear weapons as deterrence. Is it really vital to discuss the operational control? If that's the sticking point, then fair enough. I'm not saying it's NOT a difference.

A better critique of Sweden is its relatively huge arms exports. But that too is not black and white. Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war).

> I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions

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.

> Yes, France is pretty much alone in making nuclear work. It's impressive. That said, it is alone.

Ontario, Canada may have something to say about that:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply

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