1,221 karma · joined October 24, 2023
In hindsight it’s much easier to blame the accidents rather than face the structural problems nuclear power has.
Which has only been exacerbated by renewables and storage disrupting the global energy markets, forcing ”baseload” plants to become peakers. Against their will.
It is hard looking at Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, Hanhikivi and the countless cancelled projects and think: ”That’s what I want some more of!!”
Northern Germany is already overproducing electricity, leading to curtailment of renewables.
What problem are you solving with even more overproduction in the north leading to re-dispatch?
> CfD is going strong in the UK; it seems about the only way of deploying it, given the revenue uncertainty associated with market saturation/cannibalisation.
> Denmark required CfDs too. https://windeurope.org/news/successful-danish-offshore-wind-...
I love you now are trying to smear off-shore wind costs on everything. Of course not lookign at solar, storage or on-shore wind.
Lets lookat those. In Germany, which still do CFD bids for solar, even though a ton get built on pure market value, the CFD bids today are below the market price for the capture-rate of their electricity.
The CFDs are also structured to not pay out when electricity is zero or negative. They trade money for a tiny bit of certainty. That is how far we've come.
> Of course, other subsidies exist. Feed in tariffs. Transmission charges. Capacity and ancillary service payments to provide services that solar/wind do not.
Who pays when half the French nuclear fleet is offline? Who pays when the majority of the eastern european nuclear fleet is offline? Who pays for the N+1 requirements coming from nuclear power being enormous single points of failures leading to large reserves being necessary?
People like you love to complain about these things, but you can never formulate a solution where nuclear power is required to pay for the problem large single points of failures cause in the grid.
That seems absolutely insane.
Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.
Who cares if we get to 95%, 97, 99% or 100% carbon neutral electricity when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Transition that final firming to whatever carbon neutral sources we land on when their emissions matter in the late 2030s and 2040s.
We need to optimize decarbonization per dollar spent with the shortest time to market.
You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.
We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.
The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?
And that is certainly not new built nuclear power.
GenCost has an amazing FAQ section you evidently either ignored, or did not peruse.
For example here they discuss economic life vs operational life, when you live in reality rather than grasping for straws:
> Why is the economic life used in LCOE calculations instead of the fulloperational life?
> The LCOE calculation converts all upfront and ongoing costs to annual costs which is then divided by annual production. The capital cost component of a technology is converted to an annual repayment to the debt and equity providers. The annual repayment amount is determined using the economic life and the weighted average cost of capital. The economic life is shorter than the asset life for some technologies such as coal, nuclear and hydro. Some stakeholders have queried why this is so.
> Debt and equity providers require a shorter payback period than the total asset life for some technologies to avoid the risk that part of the equipment might fail or might need new investment (sometimes called refurbishment or extension costs) to keep operating safely and reliably. To determine the economic life, debt and equity providers might look to the warranties provided with the equipment. They might also look at the typical timing of refurbishments or life extensions for that technology. The economic life is an input provided by the engineering firm that AEMO commissions each year as an input to GenCost.
> Some stakeholders suggested that coal and nuclear could access special financing arrangements to move the economic life closer to the asset life. However, our preference is not to introduce special arrangements for technologies where there is limited Australian evidence. A common approach to the LCOE calculation is important to maintain comparability. The 2024-25 report does explore the impact of longer capital recovery periods in Section 2. It finds there is no significant benefit from the longer operational life of nuclear relative to shorter-lived technologies whose costs have been falling over time.
Even looking at China and South Korea they see essentially zero learning effects across plants after the FOAK build. Small ones at the same plant.
Crying about FOAK vs NOAK is not even close to solving the absolutely stupidly large subsidies new built nuclear power needs.
Again with the loaded terms. Sad. The market is limited until for example Jevons paradox expands it. Which will never happen with new built nuclear power due to how expensive the electricity is, that leads to energy poverty for generations instead. But I digress.
Look at Texas or California. About all new renewable projects in those markets are coupled with storage.
What you call cannabilisation, and try to paint like the end of the world, is simply the market working. Now pure renewable projects aren’t enough, instead you need to sell the electricity when the consumers demand it.
In just a year or two storage has massively smoothed out the price swings in Texas.
But again, that would require curiosity rather than desperately trying to poke holes the study already answered.
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
All those analyses find that renewable grids are far cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
I find it telling that you call it an ”economic problem” and ”intermittents”. It seems like you have an axe to grind, but not much backing your standpoint anymore. So you’ve fallen to using derogatory.
Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.
A single cycle gas turbine would love to get paid running at 100% all year around. It doesn’t because CCGT plants with higher efficiency undercut it.
Just like what happens in renewables. They start crowding out each other. Storage steps in and solves the peaks. More renewables come online until they ”crowd each other out” and around we go.
That’s called being a market. Which you nuke fans seems deathly afraid of given the economics of new built nuclear power.
Either way it is a public resource. On one side access to a countries fishing grounds to make money from it. On the other side access to a countries tax money to make money from it.
I get a feeling that you think fishermen should have some special heritage rights guaranteeing large profit margins rather than having to pay the public for the access to a shared resource.
You can imagine on popular routes where you get to keep the proceeds that you instead pay for the right to operate it.
What’s the difference to paying for being allowed a quota to fish in the waters said ferry service runs a passenger service in?
What’s the difference between a ferry and a fishing boat?
15 year contracts when large investments are required. Otherwise 5-10 years.
And you get a ”quota” for a guaranteed traffic to run for that period based on the requirements in the contract.
Just took the same idea and applied to fishing, to prevent the ”legacies” from monopolizing it while giving the public the income of their shared resources.
All it means is that they were expecting too large profit margins and someone called their bluff.
Middlemen will only work if either these middlemen make the utilization more efficient or you make the requirements to bid so onerous that only these specialized middlemen have the competency to do fulfill them.
So you bid for 5, 10 years or whatever becomes a good balance between stability to invest in the business and an agile market.
Given the current system maybe the most honest one would be if the state ”owns” all the quota and then let fishermen bid for fishing rights.
But I have a feeling that will quickly become politicized with strange carve outs benefiting a few.
The representatives from the parties are free to choose whoever they want, but generally it becomes a leader of the largest party in the governing party/coalition.
Today, renewables and storage are the cheapest energy sources in human history. They are filling the gap nuclear power never managed to fill.
The problem is that electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin. Now that we are moving beyond a purely centralized design.
Think about a homeowner or factory with their own renewables and storage.
They fundamentally operate on marginal price by choosing when they use their own system and when they buy from the grid.
If you add state owned reliable power to this mix they will cherry-pick. Their own cheap electricity when it delivers and the states subsidized reliable electricity when it doesn’t.
We can try add all manner of markets, fixed connection costs and what not to this but all it does is introduce strange arbitrage possibilities in the market.
Which is why we have settled on net energy markets and then the lowest possible amount of ancillary markets to shore up any gaps which would cause problems for the larger society.
Nuclear power’s problem is that neither its spread between CAPEX and OPEX, nor its operational profile fits them.
We also have electricity futures. Again with the problem that their cost is far far below what new built nuclear power requires.
Here’s some reading on electricity futures:
Perfect reliability is not worth the squeeze. In Sweden, which is a very electrified country with harsh winters, the figure is that it is acceptable to have 1.52 hours per year of not matching demand with production. Paying for more reliability is simply not worth it.
The research has lately focused on system costs. Finding renewable systems vastly cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
That paper uses one renewable source, like only solar, and 2018-19 cost data for storage.
A real grid is made up of a mix of sources, which is why the research lately has focused on system costs.
All those analyses find that renewable grids are far cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
It also seems like they are constraining the system to have no overproduction.
It’s like assuming that a fossil based system has all its producers generating the expected capacity factor and then smoothing out the season and daily demand changes with storage. Due to the difference between summer and winter demand such a fossil system would also need to have months of storage to compensate.
Which of course is absolute stupidity. When you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve.
And even if they sign a PPA the renewable arbitrage they could do exerts large downward pressure on the price they are willing to pay.
Which is to say, they would want to sign a contract saying ”deliver cheap reliable electricity when renewables and storage doesn’t do it”.
And now you are trying to fit an extremely CAPEX heavy square into a round OPEX sized firming hole.
Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
To make the figure at least palatable for public funding the project assumes enormous learning effects for subsequent reactors.
It is already stupidly expensive when running at 100% 24/7. Now try running it only when renewables and storage doesn’t deliver.