> if we had virtually unlimited
That's outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter
1,482 karma · joined June 18, 2007
---
That's outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter
The majority of nuclear-producing nations (Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) will immediately comply.
Wind and sun, however, cannot be confiscated or withheld by blockade or embargo.
Hanno Klausmeier wrote what follows: CDU / CSU : Center right parties, Christian democrats FDP: Right wing liberals, moving to libertarians (Koch line) SPD: Social democrats, oldest party in Germany, old fashioned, a certain proximity to Unions. Greens: Rather left wing liberals, ecologic positions.
Who is in the government right now?
SPD the Greens and the FDP. Do they like each other? No they hate each other but they are forced to work together.
In the current political discussion the CDU/CSU (especially the CSU from Bavaria) are complaining the current government switched off the last remaining nuclear plants in Germany. The FDP which is part of the government is also criticizing the switch off of the last nuclear plants albeit being in the same government.
Now lets take a look which parties switched most of the nuclear plants off since Fukushima?
CDU/CSU: 14 FDP: 11 SPD: 9 Greens: 3
I'm probably misunderstanding because:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-source-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-stacked...
Scientists are on the fence: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environmen...
> Fukushima is more of a political issue
A very, very expensive political caprice, if any: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...
OpenAI bets on SMRs (now an ectoplasm, check NuScale...) and solar arrays: https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/openai-doe-rfi-5-7-202... , and drives breakthroughs on renewable energy: https://openai.com/index/strengthening- americas-ai-leadership-with-the-us-national-laboratories/
Microsoft: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/micros...
Alphabet (Google) buys 'Intersect' which "delivers ((...)) infrastructure for data centers and other energy-intensive industries by co-locating industrial demand with dedicated gas and renewable power generation". 4.75 billion USD. https://abc.xyz/investor/news/news-details/2025/Alphabet-Ann...
Recyclable wind turbines blades are appearing (RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...) and even existing ones (today, decommissioned blades are burned in cement plants, thus providing energy) may become so (check the 'CETEC initiative')
The greater the number and diversity of machines, as well as their geographical dispersion, the greater their availability.
In this respect, a mix of renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, etc.) deployed on a continental scale, along with storage (batteries and V2(G|H), hydro, green hydrogen...) is unbeatable (total cost, availability, risk, etc.).
Pride also leads us to make our work more robust, so that it "always works well."
Thus, two fundamental principles are respected: optimization and robustness.
Is your problem related to various parts of the code being in distinct transactions? Can you try a version having all parts commiting then immediately synchronizing with each other, then SELECT'ing?
There are many reasons for this: most software developers have more than a vague idea about its underlying concepts, most error messages are clear, the documentation is superb, there are many ways to tap into the vast knowledge of a huge and growing community...
Attempting to industrialize breeding is justified because achieving it would considerably reduce dependence on uranium and the burden caused by waste, to the point that even nations with uranium are becoming active: Russia is the most advanced, and it has large deposits via its vassal Kazakhstan.
Should Uranium get more scarce and thus more expensive, the economic incentives change very quickly and then we can pull such an industrial breeder reactor off the shelf.
This is your only solid assertion, and sadly there is no strong (nor even weak) counter-argument. Alas, it is true for nearly all nations.
Moreover this shows that either Germany isn't sound from an industrial standpoint (this would be ridiculous!) XOR Germany didn't consider nuclear as good for its economic interests.
Pretending that nuclear would majorly reduce its dependency towards fossil fuel is a joke: at its peak (in 1999), nuclear power produced only 31% of the electricity in Germany, itself less than 25% of the energy consumed (it only provided 12.7% of primary energy, and therefore about 35% of this in final energy), and by 2011 it was producing less than 18% of the electricity.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec-mix-bar?time=1999&co...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
It says clearly about the respective parts of renewables and nuclear in Japan gridpower, before and after Fukushima (which happened 14 years ago).
If a sustainable massive and very quick restart of such heavy industrial equipment seems possible to you after 14 years I stay alert, popcorn in hand.
Sizewell C seems a good deal to the UK because it will in practice the French taxpayer will have to pay for it. Let's see if it happens, or even will be possible. SMRs are an investment-luring ghost ready to explode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182003
Sure, there will be some new reactors. Most will be built horrendously over budget and late, obtaining refined uranium and managing their waste will be a growing concern, will produce electricity at a high cost not compensated by any benefit as other ways to compensate 'intermittency' will be more and more effective, any incident will threaten the depreciation of investments, the decommission costs will skyrocket (see nuclear decommissions in the UK, right now)... Good luck with this!
My bet: in 40 years the nuclear industry of nations which expand it now what coal industry is to Germany.
No: nuclear and renewables are electricity-generating equipment types, and all the debate is about the proportion of renewables and nuclear in the final system. Seeing them as disconnected (in different universes) is not even funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg
> unless you don't understand the irrelevance of nameplate capacity with intermittent renewables.
This perspective dates back a time when transporting electricity was expensive (lines, losses...), storing it also was expensive ( ), fossil fuels and nuclear were the only way to obtain gridpower... all this is obsolete. Explanations: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/25/will-renewable-energy-d...
> China is also currently seeing the bottom drop out of their renewables industry
Source? (I lived in China from mid-2017 to mid-2025) The renewables industry there is, as in nearly every nation, in much better state than nearly any other one.
> The EPR2 projects could not even have started in 2022, because he law that prohibits increasing nuclear capacity beyond the currently installed 63.2GW was only repealed in March 2023
Nope. This law stated about active production capacity, and never forbade any reactor-building project. The very first EPR (Flamanville-3) project was running while this law was instated (2015) and did not stop. It simply forbade it to start without other reactor with at least a total equivalent powerplate value to be shutdown.
Recent news: https://www.usinenouvelle.com/article/pas-d-epr2-en-service-...
> they still have to deal with a lot of the fallout of the failed "soft exit" policy.
No such thing as a "fallout": France was waiting for its first EPR since work started on the field (2007), it was due to launch a series, after being delivered in 2012, and albeit the project is a huge failure (12 years late, 23.7+ billion € spent with a budget of 3.3) it was not canceled. Moreover the huge 'Grand Carénage' project was not reduced. No reduction either on R&D budgets either (https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/politiques-publiques/energie-re... ) .
No "fallout", simply a massive failure (EPR Flamanville-3).
I already asked: who did hurt the nuclear industry, when, by doing (or not doing) what, what were the effects?
> Here's a long look: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isgu-VrD0oM
Which part (a few minutes only, please) of this unsubstantiated rant seems the most convincing to you?
Declaring "obsolete" is, at best, a weak counter-argument.
> "... the amount of uranium in seawater is truly renewable as well as inexhaustible."
Indeed. The problem isn't on this side but on our ability to industrially harness it with a realistic EROI.
> "New technological breakthroughs from DOE's Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories
That's exactly what I described "new tech breakthrouhs". Many of them. Periodically, since the 1970's... and nothing industrial yet.
The last one dates back one year ago: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2479709-new-way-to-pull...
Nothing industrial. Maybe one day. I'm grabbing my pop-corn while renewables gain momentum.
Breeder reactors had the very same trajectory: many huge new projects, for decades, delivered many (quite promising) lab reactors and even industrial prototypes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reacto... ), however not a single industrial model is ready to be deployed now and dwindling efforts are way less ambitious than they were during the 1970-1990 era ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Future_plants )
> A speculative bubble is not the same as serious serious demand
The last bubble lasted enough for the prospection to surge in global exploration expenditures and new projects, particularly from 2005 to 2009. See the referenced WP article ("Due to increased prospecting...").
> The vast majority of the "prospecting" was just speculators, not serious mining companies
Indeed, however those companies did buy serious prospection efforts. Do you doubt so (source)?
> And for serious prospecting, the 4 year time-frame was way too short
No, obtaining all green lights for a mine is indeed a 5 to 10 years-long project, however finding a new deposit and qualifying it is way quicker (1 to 4 years?).
> Breeder reactors exist
Then please name an industrial model of breeder reactor, ready to be deployed.
> they face the same problem as recycling: mined uranium is still way too cheap to make investment in those technologies economically attractive.
Nope. Officially, industrial breeding is no longer pursued in some nations (France being one) because uranium is cheap, which is a poor excuse because, if that were the case, why have they been searching at great expense for decades, and are they still doing so in various nations (in France, experts are calling for projects to be revived), when the price of uranium has never (apart from a brief bubble around 2007) been a threat?
Attempting to industrialize breeding is justified because achieving it would considerably reduce dependence on uranium and the burden caused by waste, to the point that even nations with uranium are becoming active: Russia is the most advanced, and it has large deposits via its vassal Kazakhstan.
Should Uranium get more scarce and thus more expensive, the economic incentives change very quickly and then we can pull such an industrial breeder reactor off the shelf.
> Same for Thorium reactors: currently not necessary, as we have plenty of Uranium for the existing Uranium based designs. Doesn't stop companies like Copenhagen Atomics from investing, as they see other advantages in addition to very readily available fuel.
Indeed! I'm not disputing that some invest, however past efforts towards breeders' industrialization were vastly more powerful, with no results.
Copenhagen Atomics does not sell nor announce any industrial nuclear reactor ( https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/products/ ).
This company recently obtained 3 million USD funding, and maybe 17 more later, for a potential 100MWt lab reactor ( https://interestingengineering.com/energy/danish-firm-molten... ). The sole French project aiming at obtaining an industrial breeder prototy (Superphenix) burnt 60 billion French francs during 1974-1997.
The real effort towards thorium reactors predates breeders ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center#Rea... ), and before the 1970's it was clear that breeders (esp. fast-neutron) were more promising. The result is known: nothing.
The price of batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
> the entire industrialized world is investing massively in both nuclear and renewables
Nope: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
? Please quote and source, or name a model of industrial breeder reactor ready-to-be-deployed.
((nuclear waste))
> Preventing people from killing themselves is not an issue per-se.
"Wikipedia disagrees": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
A huge uranium bubble between 2004 and 2008, which triggered massive investments for prospection... and a ridiculous result (15%). The cause is known: the quest for atomic weapons triggered during the 1950's and 1960's massive prospection, and there is no decisive way to better prospect and few not yet prospected zones.
> Seawater extraction is starting to be competitive with mining
This is periodically announced since the 1970's, and no-one could industrialize. Bottomline: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium" Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...
> In addition, we currently throw away >95% of the energy potential of the Uranium > So facto 20 of what we've used so far is just sitting in Castors. And fortunately not in deep geological repositories, out of reach.
It would be sound if a ready-for-deployment model of industrial breeder reactor. There is none.
> And then there's Thorium
Indeed, but not industrial reactor. Next.
> the irrelevant "but China is also building renewables".
No, I state the fact: China is building WAY, WAY MORE renewables than nuclear.
> nuclear and renewables are only a contradiction in the minds of anti-nuclear advocates. Industrial nations do both.
They try to do nuclear (with meager effects) just like many of them do coal: inertia, political pressure...
>> Plan to build 6 then 8 more EPR2 → "only a plan"
> That is incorrect. As stated before, the approvals are being sought, 3 sites have been selected and multi-billion € contracts have been awarded.
Here, also, only acts prove anything. Everything started in 2022 and, 3 years later, only one site preparation project has begun.
>> Sites have been selected for the first 6
> https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/bugey-chosen-to-host...
"Selected" is far from "nuclear-specific work is in order"!
> Apologies about pointing at Mitterand, that was incorrect. I meant Hollande.
Which action of F. Hollande did hurt the nuclear sector? Not a single one! No, not Fessenheim (French ahead, AFAIK a software translator does the job): https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/accueil#h....
> Translation: 'Green cabal paralyzes the nuclear industry’
The interviewee, Bernard Accoyer, does not make any specific accusations; it is a conspiracy theory. He is well-known for this in France.