We recently had an election in AU where "nuclear" was on the agenda as the (losing) party/coalition were promoting nuclear as a "solution" to our aging coal-generator fleet.
The trouble is that:
a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"
b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period
c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle
d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables
e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
> "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"
"Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.
First, "providing baseload" is a privilege you enjoy if you are the unconditionally cheapest provider of electricity at all times, not something that anyone ever needs you to do.
If you only need power for short periods of time when renewables are unavailable, then "constant output" plants like coal or nuclear are the last thing you want to build-- they are simply not worth it for the the short periods of time when renewables are down.
You want simple, cheap powerplants instead that trade off higher fuel costs for low capex, and that is currently gas. You want cheap MW (max power) from those plants instead of cheap MWh (energy), basically.
It's easy to be "unconditionally cheapest" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. "Simple, cheap" power plants that burn a lot of expensive natural gas (or even worse, coal) are the current approach to that problem, which is not working very well. The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.
Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time).
If they get undercut by renewables most of the time, there is simply no way they can stay competitive.
Nuclear peaker plants are not ever gonna be a thing, because that makes no sense economically: High capex is the last thing you want for that usecase, and it implies that the economics for your plant have to stay decent for the next 30 years. Meanwhile batteries, solar and wind are still getting cheaper every year right now. This is the worst bet you could ever make as an investor.
> nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.
This argument does not help nuclear power if the equivalent number of gas plants is still cheaper than a single nuclear reactor (and built much faster).
Nuclear can be apparently cheap (its TCO is difficult to establish because gov funding, hot waste potentially breaking havoc in a distant future...) but never is when load-following, because load-following reduces the load factor, and a low load factor bumps up production costs.
Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot). Even France (shock-full of reactors) always needs to produce approximately 10% ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) of its juice thanks to fossil fuel, for a non-negligible part ensuring load-following.
> Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot).
There is load-following thermally and load-following electrically. Newer nuclear designs allow for the steam to be diverted and quenched so they don't reach the generators.
Of course this is inefficient, but as you can see in the following link:
the Ontario nuclear plants basically run at full-tilt 24/7 to provide base load.
Hydro-electric is also supplying a bunch of base load, so if more nuclear can be built so that it takes up more of that hydro is doing, hydro can then be used in a more variable fashion (so perhaps (nat/methane) gas can be reduced and we have fewer GHGs released).
Yes, there are two types of load-following: "bump up the power", or "lower it".
This also applies do renewables: not producing (many wind turbines are equipped with a braking system) or wasting an excess of power isn't as challenging as quickly producing more power, then less, then more... fine-tuning and for extended periods of time.
Yes, running at full-tilt 24/7 is way easier for a nuclear reactor than doing the load-following game (on every account: total cost, maintenance, risk...). They are built for it!
Hydro: yes, to an extent because load-following hydro is mainly done by pumped-storage, many dams are of the "run-of-the-river" type and cannot always load-follow: if there is no incoming (upstream) water they cannot produce any power.
Which is a quirk of hindering renewable deployment.
All over Europe nuclear reactors are throttled down or even shut down for days/weeks because renewables lead to too low prices for the reactors to even cover wear and tear and fuel costs.
Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history this will happen in every grid that is based on a free market principle.
In the monopolized markets the distributed aspects of renewables will mean that rooftop solar and storage enables home owners to largely disconnect from the grid if the monopoly starts to force new built nuclear power costs on the ratepayers.
In other words: Nuclear power is fucked unless it can either get the marginal cost to zero like a solar panel, i.e. impossible or get CAPEX low enough to act like a fossil gas peaker which again seems near impossible given the past 70 years of nuclear powers history and commercialization.
Yes, the OEB report is for a paid off fleet. Sure, some investment in recent years but not even close to a new build.
The cost for the Darlington SMR is somewhere in the 25-35 cents/kWh range with the calculation assuming large learning effects to subsequent reactors and that the entire project goes on time and on budget.
This is inevitable (no other possibility is realistic), and this applies to France, where RTE (EDF's subsidiary that manages the electricity grid) has emphasized that 100% nuclear power is out of the question, and that more than 60% nuclear power would be utopian.
This trend is already clearly visible and welcomed by investors.
The surplus electricity sometimes produced by renewables will be leveraged by increasing storage capacity (electric vehicles, hydro pumped storage, etc.) as well as green hydrogen. It will gradually replace nuclear electricity, which is supposed to compensate for their variability, especially since the latter cannot adjust its production quickly and frequently enough ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796580 ).
All of this will reduce the nuclear load factor and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with strong feedback (the higher the load factor, the more likely it will be).
This will increasingly favor the deployment of a system based primarily on renewables, meaning that nuclear electricity will become less and less useful and more and more expensive, making its fate (and therefore the profitability of the heavy investments required for its infrastructure) easy to predict.
The figures you give don't appear to reflect the fully loaded cost of providing power from new nuclear power plants. It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for.
> It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for.
In Ontario there used to be a government-owned utility, Ontario Hydro. They built all the nuclear plants (and everything else).
But at some point things were re-jigged so parts of Ontario Hydro could be privatized (the government still owns shares), but because of how it was broken up its debt could not be split up or given to any of the resulting components.
So a separate legal entity was created where the debt is now held, and rate payers give money to that corporation to pay off old debt (both nuclear and non-nuclear) as part of their rate.
Also worth noting that the nuclear plants in Ontario are going through a refit currently, so it's not like the plants were built and nothing has done with them except for OpEx; there's a whole bunch of CapEx happening right now (and has been for the last few years):
Yes, nuclear can be cost competitive if you ignore the bulk of the costs: aka construction and decomissioning.
Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.
> Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.
Well the current plants have been running for 4-5 decades and are in the middle of being refurbished to run for another 4-5 decades.
Only paying for itself for the life of the plant is actually a good thing: it means that it is basically being run at-cost with minimal profits being extracted from the public.
That's simply untrue and focusing on it will continue to result in nuclear failure after nuclear failure.
Nobody has some sort of proposal of a different regulatory scheme that is somehow cheaper. Even France, which built a ton decades ago, has completely failed for more than a decade at building. South Korea has been somewhat successful at building, but also sends execs to jail for faking parts approvals. But perhaps that would be cheap to fix.
What has changed since the mid 20th century is that construction labor is far more expensive in comparison to other things that can be done with that labor. Construction productivity has remained roughly constant over time, as manufacturing and other productivity has gone through the roof.
Nuclear is fundamentally a big construction project. SMRs weresypposed to be an attempt to make nuclear power a manufacturing project, not a construction project. But it turns out that construction projects like the BWRX300 are the only real SMRs that can be produced, after a decade of hype. Manufacturing SMRs like 747s is not any more real today than it was when the nuclear PR machine turned to it in the wake of the financial and construction disaster of the AP1000s at Summer and Vogtle.
The real story of nuclear is the need for super cheap labor, and excellent high-tech construction capacity. These two requirements are at odds with each other, because in societies with high tech construction skills, labor quickly becomes expensive.
Even places like China with lots of successful nuclear projects is only building a tiny tiny amount of nuclear when compared to their wind, solar, and batteries. China does everything, and they won't abandon nuclear completely because a nuclear workforce is essential for a country with superpower ambitions, but the nuclear power is there for the superpower ambitions, not the electricity generation.
It's funny you say that. Renewables are "cheap" precisely because a lot of the labor cost is offloaded to cheap labor countries with low regulations. There is basically no solar panel market outside of China, and that says something. It's a very messy process and benefits largely from China's willingness to not care.
Every single big renewable project is heavily backed by government and subsidies. Wind is big in Germany, because gov pushed it very hard, not because it's naturally competitive.
So far, I see a lot of ideologues pushing the "cheaper" argument even though it hasn't been true at all, and the long-term prospect don't look very good compared to nuclear. But it has more political support, so it is made to be more "competitive" and that's basically all there is to it.
Even residential solar only makes sense when people who install it get paid a lot more than the bulk electricity actually cost, if people had to pay themselves for both panels and storage it is largely a loss compared to regulated market price for electricity in many places in Europe.
I just don't think smrs work without figuring out Lftrs. Because lifters can use almost all the fuel, are inherently meltdown proof, you basically take away the two worst dangers of nuclear.
The issue with degradation of the piping and everything from the molten salts can probably be solved by a replacement cycle.
But to be fair, I have no idea how China's MSR is going
If the EU and US would each commit to build, fund 100+ NPPs over the next years then it would make sense to gear up for a scheme.
Unfortunately each plant is a fucking special snowflake. Due to new sites somehow requiring changes which is absurd, since the containment and everything under it should be 1:1 copy, right? Yes, because the NRC doesn't work like that. Designs are tweaked.
Anyway as you said it's a very expensive bespoke weld and pour festival.
They are also built and run by public or quasi-public utilities. I don't think we have a lot of examples of the private sector building nuclear generating plants. Maybe they can do it better, when it's their own money on the line, and they don't have a legally granted monopoly protecting them.
It's actually working great. Gas peakers are expensive to run, but not nearly as expensive and time consuming to deploy as nuclear - you could deploy a solar installation with matching gas capacity and still spend less and have it years earlier than the least expensive, fastest deploying nuclear power plant.
On top of that storage has been undercutting gas lately in terms of cost - especially now that it scaled up.
> The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.
This does not align with reality.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
You should check your sources. Very often the reverse is actually true. The recent years are not really representative because a lot of reactors were put on hold waiting for repairs and improvement.
There is also the fact that France added millions of people while not building new nuclear capacities, so of course at some point there is going to be overload without renewed investment.
Bug people like seems to want to put more money on renewable so that we can import even more electricity from Germany's coal plants (that makes up to 40% of their electricity generation in the winter when the wind is nowhere to be found).
I'm very curious where you find your data, because it's not at all what I have been able to get. If there is some source that clearly shows renewable superiority in the winter, I would really like to see it.
To be self-sufficient without coal, Germany needs to install 150GW of wind power still, and at current rate it will take at least 10 years.
But I'm very curious what is their solution for when they get no wind for weeks on end, like it has happened recently.
So far it seems to be, fire up the coal plant and take the cheap nuclear from your neighbor while posturing and virtue signaling about your superiority of not using nuclear.
Seems like people confuse the old school "gas peakers" which are basically just simple generators burning gasoline or diesel designed to be used intermittently, and advanced combined cycle natural gas, which are incredibly efficient. Natural Gas is super cheap in many markets, and it appears to be common theory that markets with limited natural gas simply haven't been explored sufficiently due to other fuels being cheaper (coal).
ACC Natural Gas + Solar/Wind + Batteries + actively priced load shedding market seems like a tremendous quartet.
It's a byproduct of a lot of oil production while also having its own reserves. My office used to look at an oil refinery that was miles away, and they were just burning the natural gas off in a huge plume, not worth trying to capture and combust for production.
The fracking is also in Arkansas and Texas and many other states. An amazing amount of gas continues to be discovered. I am not a geologist but assume that Australia could dedicate resources to explore fracking gas reserves and would come up with quite bit.
sidebar, but I just realized that Australia doesnt really have mountains to speak of. Tallest mountain is around the elevation of the typical Colorado Rockies valley towns. Australia may not have the 'cap traps' required to retain large amounts of gas in the various layers going down under ground.
We're not seeing a lot of realistic numbers published for the cost of a 100% renewables + storage grid because there is the X factor of "How many outages can you tolerate?"
Storage over a 24 hour period is one thing, the economics don't look difficult at all. In places like Upstate NY, however, usable insolation can vary by a factor of 3x between summer and winter. You can overbuild solar panels by 3x or you can add a few months of storage which costs a lot more than a few hours or days worth of storage. There is also the issue of
It would be great to have a backup energy source which is fully and economically dispatchable and environmentally benign but it's not there. I suspect there is some point of required reliability where adding nuclear baseload makes the grid more reliable economically compared to building months worth of storage. See
it's just not an optimal use of the capital. The Gates foundation has been researching LMFBRs that use thermal batteries to improve load following abilities.
You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios.
The real criticism of nuclear at this point in time is that any new plants are a decade out. It's a reason to start early, but no matter how you slice when the next NPP goes online in the US the amount of solar and wind added to the grid between here and now will dwarf it.
You raise good points, but I think none of the anti-renewable arguments are really show-stoppers, mainly because of how cheap things have become; solar panels are cheaper than glass windows now and prismatic LiFePo cells are down to ~$60 for 1kWh at single digit quantities (!!).
Figuring out the most economical mix of overprovisioning, improved grid connectivity, battery storage and more exotic longer term storage (synthetic gas/heat/fossils + capture/etc.) is a problem that is IMO best solved by the market over time.
I also think it is very telling how even a nation like France, which is basically in the perfect position to stick with nuclear power over renewables is still building out wind/solar rapidly. Nuclear power not even managing to defend its home turf makes it very questionable to fully bet on it elsewhere.
> You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios.
I think you are missing far simpler solutions for what is in terms of TWh needed a tiny problem.
Why not just use biofuels, synfuels or hydrogen?
Whatever the aviation and the maritime shipping industries settles on since they are unable to in the foreseeable future decarbonize with batteries.
The US today produces enough ethanol for gas blending to run the entire grid for 16 days without help.
As we switch to BEVs it is trivial to repurpose that for the grid, while also ensuring that the inputs decarbonize as well.
Salt caverns seem good. And a bit of leakage is likely OK (the pass through storage via hydrolysis is far from 100% efficient anyway) and the only piping might be from hydrolysers and to turbines very close by, so should be manageable...
If you are not an ideologue the reality is that it's not really possible and not a serious option.
Modern society/civilisation relies on reliable power generation on cue, wanting to gamble that ability just to be able to remove nuclear because "it's too expensive" is beyond stupid. The cost of a long blackout is so much worse than anyone pretending otherwise is a fool.
As for storage solutions, even if they were existing and dirt cheap there is the problem of capacity sizing. How much do you build for? One week, two weeks, one month?
If renewable generation cannot recover for a single day more than you planned for, you are done.
In a world where climate is constantly changing and the rate of change is increasing; it is crazy to be willing to put everything in solutions entirely depending on this.
We have to build renewables, they make sense for the low hanging fruit, but only doing renewable is just foolish. And this is exactly why nuclear makes sense, no matter how much it costs.
People on HN all seem to be venture capitalist, only thinking about cost/profits as if that should be sole motivator for doing things. That's just sad.
But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time? And for those once-every-few-years scenarios, why shouldn't we build (far cheaper) carbon-captured natural gas peaker plants?
Besides, you've got to keep in mind that we aren't going to be building for yearly-average kWh consumption. Companies will be building overcapacity to take advantage of high-demand/low-supply peak pricing.
I don't think it is unlikely that we'll end up with a situation where PV on an overcast day is enough for "baseload", with the practically-free electricity on sunny/windy days opening up new economic opportunities.
I agree generally, but is carbon-captured natural gas generation actually a thing? The only carbon capture I've heard of is at the gas production site removing CO2 from the reservoir gas and pumping it back underground - that's not after combustion.
(And the pumping it back underground hasn't been particularly successful, eg https://www.boilingcold.com.au/regulator-limits-chevrons-tro... )
If it was only a matter of 'once-every-few-years' then current emergency capacity will suffice. The problem is that:
A) It happens often enough to be a problem emergency capacity can't handle.
B) Natural gas is not always an option (especially when Russia is the only readily available seller in the area and you DON'T want to be dependent on a potentially hostile neighbor).
C) Existing storage solutions require a massive investment in local solutions, or in the national grid if storage is centralized.
We need to re-think the entire idea about energy always being cheap and available, while somehow preventing those with more money from simply monopolizing supply by outbidding everyone else. You won't solve that with batteries. Many therefore try to maintain the current situation by doing this the old way.
A. We handle dankelflaute's now, and as long as we don't decommission gas peakers, we'll still be able to continue to handle them.
B. Europe has lots of natgas storage. 100 days of storage isn't enough for independence from Russia now, but if we're only using gas for dankelflaute's 5 days of the year, thats ~20 years of storage.
Batteries are extremely cost competitive today for overnight storage, and are marginally cost competitive for weekly storage. That's enough to handle everything except for a dankelflaute. In which case see above.
"Storage" can synthesize hydrocarbons, i.e. fuel, which can then be stored forever, until energy is needed.
This was already possible by the time of WWII, but now there are many methods in development for reducing carbon dioxide by electrolysis, and then use the product to synthesize longer hydrocarbons, which have higher efficiency than the older methods.
The round-trip efficiency of this will always be worse than for batteries, which remain a better option for short time storage, but synthesizing fuel will be a valid method for storing energy for the winter during the summer, and also for applications where batteries are unsuitable, like aircraft and spacecraft.
Long term literally dirt cheap thermal storage coupled with extreme cost optimized PV that would provide 600 C heat 365/24/7 for as little as $3/GJ, on par with combustion of inexpensive natural gas. Complementary with diurnal storage from batteries, this would be a complete solution to the renewable intermittency problem.
perhaps, but the other way around is a possible scenario as well, because it may still be cheaper to have inefficient storage when the way you store the energy is expensive (e.g. some batteries may have very high efficiency, but you need difficult to obtain materials)
Baseload is quite irrelevant, because baseload also doesn't supply those critical needs. "Baseload" is by definition power production that can't follow the demand curve, and thus can't provide the power to keep the grid stable. It's as bad as solar and wind in this way, it's just that instead of having a fixed but variable supply curve it has a fixed but flat supply curve.
What you want is dispatchable power. Gas peaker plants for instance. Or overbuilt solar + batteries. Not baseload.
A typical car battery stores 60 kWh (the average capacity of models is increasing), so, charged during the day using inexpensive renewable electricity (particularly solar), it can power a household during one of the rare winter nights with insufficient wind.
Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.
Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).
In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.
One would think people would learn from the disastrous results of the German Energiewende, where this has already been tried, but no.
The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet.
There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM.
So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland.
Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.
> It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive.
The CSIRO report says that nuclear is almost 2x more expensive than renewables even after factoring in all costs of storage and interconnects.
> Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar.
That depends on the location. Insolation and seasonality vary depending on distance from the equator, among other factors. Also, solar and wind are negatively correlated on both seasonal scales and intraday scales, so it often makes sense to mix the two if you're in Europe, rather than pick a simple winner.
Unlike solar, power wind makes very little sense even if storage improves. This is true even in first principles so technological progress is unlikely to overcome these limitations.
This is a very uneducated take. Wind absolutely makes sense in plenty of locations.
I myself am located on the west coast of Scotland and we get most of our energy from wind. Solar panels make much less sense here we tend to get much less light than most places in the world.
What's with the utterly uninformed takes on energy on HN?
Wind makes extremely good sense and has been making good sense for 30 years or more now depending on where on the globe you are looking. There is a ton of FUD about it but it is practical, affordable, available and relatively fast to deploy. Moreover there is readily financing available to take care of the capex.
Sorry, but you are not arguing in good faith. There 1.1+ TW of installed capacity producing approximately 30 to 35% of that installed capacity continuously. Turbine payback time is less than a decade.
You are in the most literal sense tilting at windmills here.
Unsurprisingly you got downvoted. It is a very unpopular opinion on HN.
But I agree with you, the math does not add up. I have looked at the data and it makes no sense. Germany still needs to build a shit ton of wind turbines (150GW) and they are already decommissioning the first install, which is costing them a lot of money and is requiring them to think about the recycling, which will cost a lot of money.
At some point we will know the true cost of wind power at least, I hope.
Germany's electricity price is almost twice of its "dirty" nuclear neighbor (France). Proof is in the pudding as they say. But most here seem to be unwilling to even look at the pudding, let alone eat it.
In what way was the energiewwende disastrous, give actual numbers.
German electricity production is increasingly dominated by renewables, in the first quarter of 2025 (which had unfavourable weather conditions) 46.9% of electricity was produced by renewables (mostly wind). Coal and gas has been declining steadily and Germany regularly exports electricity to nuclear focused France. Currently on average Germany is a net importer from France, but that does mean little because of the way cross border trade is an integral part of the European grid (note that Germany also is a net importer from Denmark whos grid is largely wind based).
End consumer prices are utterly unusable to determine success or failure of the Energiewende. They are also utterly useless to compare across nations, as they are made up of very different components - e.g. in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors, in France the price is held artificially low by massive subsidies https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france... and so on.
50% of the price in France is also taxes and network maintenance fees so your argument does not make sense.
The retail price is so high because it is a failure of both technology and politics. The taxes are that high because politically they decided to over-invest in a bad technological choice; pretending otherwise is an extremely bad faith argument.
All kinds of fees (e.g. for the grid) and taxes, yes. It differs by year and depending on which surcharges were added/removed through laws. E.g. one part was for renewable subsidies and that's been removed in '22.
Consumer prices are now down to below 0.30 €/kwh again for new contracts (takes a few clicks for anyone) - they were mostly high previously because of Russia's war. This influence on electricity production was removed.
"Disastrous" by what metric? What are you even talking about? Germany went from >50% fossil fuel (mostly coal, not even gas!) to >60% renewables for electricity within the last two decades.
I don't think it's a huge success, considering they're unable to meet their own demands for electricity, instead driving up energy prices in neighboring countries as well.
This. Germany has been strong arming policies around electricity in the EU for quite a while. Forcing their neighbors to sell their electricity for cheap when it is the most expensive in the market while assuming none of the costs and risks.
And they are disrupting neighbors' energy production economics when they offload their overproduction precisely when nobody wants it.
That's German superiority complex in all it's "glory".
The problem of meeting demand is in industrial use and residential heating, both of which aren’t typically electrified in Germany. The problem has more to do with an active war and an industrial sector built on cheap Russian gas.
None of the European countries meat their energy demands by themselves. All of them regularly import and export electricity from/to their neighbors. That's a good thing and is driving down electricity prices not up.
The reason countries buy electricity from their neighbors is because it's cheaper not because they couldn't meat the demands themselves.
Now Germany is by no means perfect, heating is largely gas based which increases emissions. Ironically the law that was trying to change this, had a big counter campaign that likely contributed to the change of government.
So while the greens energiewende are often blamed for Germanys dependency on gas (although the dependency had been going for much longer), it's the conservatives who likely had a much bigger impact on Germany sticking with gas by preventing to move heating to electricity.
It depends on how you measure success… Has that change improved the economy and well-being of the Germans?
I do not know, I’m only pointing out that change to renewables does not necessarily mean “success”.
First: This whole reneable thing was done to reduce negative externalities from pollution and CO2 emissions that were simply not paid for previously.
Arguing that "the economy would be better of without pollution/emission limits" is a bit like arguing that dumping trash in the next river is cheaper than proper disposal: Sure, your industrialists are gonna save a few bucks right now, but someone will have to pick up the bill regardless-- with interest.
Sure, but people's rent and bills are due now and if they can't pay up, you can't gaslighting them with "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.
Why haven't shareholders of energy companies also made sacrifices to save the environment? How come only the consumers have to?
Do you understand why people are pissed off with the switch?
Source? Because EU pollutes less now than before, but my groceries are even more expensive so your point is moot. So why should I accept to be spit-roasted like this with no return on my sacrifices?
Maybe greedy corporate profiteering is the real culprit here squeezing people and not people using the AC or driving to work?
You're dodging my question. I asked why hasn't our economic sacrifice to save the environment resulted in a reduction in grocery prices, if environmental damage is what's causing them to go up? We reduced the economic damage but prices are still going up. So what gives? Is it environmentalism or corporate greed?
Because there are lags in the system? Because we are not doing enough? Do you always expect immediate feedback on everything you do? If that's the case I guess you never invest in anything because that's by definition a bet that it will make things better (or less worse) in the future.
So your proposal is to further delay making anyone pay for changes, because previous generations profited? So at the end of the chain (which will likely not be very long anymore) some generation will be completely screwed.
The environment consists of natural resources. Those resources have value and are "owned" by the people. You can save money by not changing the oil in your car, right up until the engine seizes up. Preserving the value of valuable assets through proper care and maintenance isn't exactly a high concept abstract concept.
> Sure, but people's rent and bills are due now and if they can't pay up, you can't gaslighting them with "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.
My point of view is that "we have to curb emissions now before consequences grow too dire" is not a "luxury belief": the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities. It was a luxury we could not actually afford at any point, basically just got it on credit in the past, and all that credit is coming due within the century.
> Why haven't shareholders of energy companies also made sacrifices to save the environment? How come only the consumers have to?
Because overall most of the benefit did go to consumers. People basically got a gallon of gas for 30 cents in 1960 when it probably needed to be a dollar or more, but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference (or anything close, really) from them.
> Do you understand why people are pissed off with the switch?
I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.
>the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities.
Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?
>but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference
YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?
>I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.
It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.
>Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?
Life isn't fair and time travel doesn't exist. We are stuck with the world we have now and have to deal with the realities, including suffering the consequences for things not your fault. It isn't fair that a son gets cancer because his mother smoked around him all his life, but he is still the one that has to go through chemo.
This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want. You know that, right?
For example, I'm gonna take your house and when you ask why, it's because "life isn't fair".
However, various forms of fairness to balance out past wrong doings can always be achieved if desired, but it usually requires force or democratically if over 50% of people can unite on it.
>This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want
Yes, which is why I wrote more than 3 words. It is why I used the cancer analogy. This generation is left holding the bag, and it has to be dealt with. Stomping your foot and saying it's not fair does nothing to cancer, nor does it do anything to climate change. I’m not saying a specific policy decision is right or wrong. I’m saying this generation has to deal with it, regardless of fairness.
> Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?
Because the vast majority of "profits" (externalities that were not paid for) were not banked, they were simply not paid.
Even if every person that enjoyed cheap fossil products in the past had the price difference on some separate bank account, taking that to fund environmental policies would be very difficult in western countries because of democracy and demographics (very difficult to get majorities when working against the interests of elderly voters).
> YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?
Again, the Shell corporate overlords only siphoned off a very small fraction of the gains, even taking the whole corporation would be completely insufficient. The main beneficiaries in the past were not Shell and BP, but the end consumers instead.
Just heaping blame on corporations or past generations is not helping anything. You could certainly nationalize the whole petroleum industry and confiscate pension funds, but approaches like that have very detrimental side effects.
> It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.
I would argue that if you discover that a past lifestyle was financed by unsustainably pushing the hidden costs of energy elsewhere (and into the future), then still refusing to pay those hidden costs after the discovery is the very definition of selfish.
It's cheaper for the current generation to deal with climate change than to ignore it.
You're effectively advocating for some small subset of that generation to try to disadvantage another larger subset, at a net loss to society, and hope they don't damage themselves in the process.
While complaining about selfishness of previous generations.
Depends on the country, but overall I'll say the opposite is true: cheaper is to ignore it. Climate change will not stop even if Germany switched to 100% renewables. And globally it is also not a top priority.
Basically this.
But he is probably rich enough to not care because the effort that will be asked of him will be small relative to his purchasing power.
So, he can pretend to be "good" for doing the right thing, while more unfortunate people will pay the real cost without any guarantee that the climate situation will improve and that their children will have a chance at a "better life". Not that they care that much because children are becoming unaffordable for much of the lower class.
The problem with the green ideology is that it's a global problem and clearly global fossil fuel use reduction isn't happening.
And the countries using it don't care because not using it is much worse than the promise of a better world in the future.
If your life is shit right now (compared to the rich world) the promise of a better world far out in the future is just propaganda.
There's another Australian state, Tasmania that also runs on 100% renewables, mostly hydro. There are plans to export more of that power to other states.
Hydro is pretty great with a few caveats. Flooding remain a massive problem if there is a failure, as the world most deadliest power plant accident was a hydro power plant with a death toll between 26,000 to 240,000 people. An other major issue is the extinction of species, as is currently occurring in Europe and especially in the northern parts. There are technologies to allow for migrating fish to bypass hydro power plants without chopping them to bits, through the effectiveness of the bypass tend to work against the power output of the plant.
100% renewable until the dams dried up and they flew in diesel generators (worse than coal) to prop up the state, reversing several years of environmental progress.
That event is illustrative of the fundamental problem here. Green energy proponents pretend it never happens and do not factor diesel emissions into the cost of hydro and other solutions.
Another common way they mislead is by pretending that emissions from gas peaking plants are not inherently associated with solar and wind generating, even though they would not exist without them.
It's a kind of sleight of hand or green washing that should be called out more frequently.
100% renewable does not exist. Not in '100% hydro' Tasmania or anywhere else.
g) AU is very well suited for solar, due to the confluence of abundant desert making land-use a non-issue, high irradiance per m^2, low seasonality of irradiance, and large landmass which generates statistical diversification due to lower temporal coupling between plants.
> AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables
I feel we're going to keep seeing "solar doesn't work" posts in decades to come, long past when many areas of the world will already be on 100% renewables. It turns out that incremental deployment is a superpower.
There's no longer any good reason for AU not to be at >100% solar at midday every single day.
> SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way
.. while this is more of a problem. I could jokingly say that SMRs are a conspiracy by Big Turbine to sell more turbines. Also don't forget the need for water cooling, which may be a critical problem in AU.
In Poland we're seeing government slowly taking actions against people owning solar. Turns out, people were paying a lot in taxes for electricity and this money is now not present in the budget. Recent development is an incoming ban on energy storage beyond certain size. They want you to give energy basically for free to the grid during the day (when you're at work) and buy the energy from the grid during the night (charging cars). Electricity prices are not even that high now, bills are mostly some transfer fees. I imagine the same will be/is the case in all countries.
> c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle
One might say this is an advantage, with no home industry asking for local supply chains to be built up (at significant cost and risk). Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are not generally made in Australia, right? For the fuel cycle, Urenco for enrichment, and Westinghouse or Orano for the uranium processing and fuel fabrication would be possible deals with allies.
> e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
SMRs are not the entirety of nuclear, and were not the entirety of the Coalition nuclear plan. Large reactors do exist and are being built around the world. Rosatom are able to do so (Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh), KEPCO has done so in the UAE, and China is exporting to Pakistan. As an aside, a GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 first-of-a-kind (not demo-scale or research) is being built in Darlington Canada, so SMRs are being deployed.
> f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
I'm baffled that anyone could propose this as a good thing. I've worked in industries that are supported - just smaller than the US and the price gouging is substantial. Parts will be designed for the US market, we need to adapt. Bonus points when buying incompatible European / US designs.
Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine have all the necessary ancillary parts in warehouses close to where they are needed. They also have all the expertise, the cranes, the transport regulations nailed down.
It's interesting that this country with all the spare land is also a world leader in rooftop solar.
That rooftop solar is delivering the cheapest consumer electricity in history.
Amazingly, the hardware costs and labor costs for rooftop solar are the same as the USA and sensible regulations around permitting and training have dropped the cost by 2/3rds.
These are very long term bets. MS isn't betting much here, just staying involved just in case. Which is prudent but not much of a commitment. A big commitment for a trillion dollar company would have a big dollar value. Like billions of dollars. That's not what's happening here.
I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress.
In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove.
I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic.
In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.
This for me is the real crux. Safety, nuclear waste, land-use, etc, are all issues of relatively trivial concern. They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.
For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.
Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin.
It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.
> Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.
I highly doubt that will be the case. Even if solar and wind do not get better costwise (which is likely not true) the cost of maintaining and decommissioning SMRs is likely only to go up. This based on every other nuclear power plant to date, I have seen zero good arguments on why SMRs would be an exception to that rule.
It's worth noting that the nuclear power plants of the 1960s follow different scale economics to SMRs. Casey Handmer makes this point in his online interviews and debates. The 1960s plants get their scale benefits from their sheer size. Similar to building a few massive aircraft carriers or massive olympic stadiums, however inefficiently each one is built.
SMRs are more akin to mass manufactured widgets, where the scale benefits come solely from manufacturing efficiencies gained through volume. They'll have a learning rate that governs the price declines for each doubling in production volumes.
From a unit economics POV, it's probably more useful to think of SMRs as a solar/battery-like technology rather than a 1960s nuclear-like technology. The problem for SMR proponents is that solar/batteries have had 50 years of this feedback loop playing out, but SMRs are starting from no volume.
All of the plans that I've seen for SMR 'farms' were hopelessly naive when it came to security, decommissioning and compliance costs. They were just a hair above that 'swimming turtle island' when it comes to design phase realism. I really see them more as a way to milk subsidies than something that will actually happen in the next 30 years or so, especially not given the rate at which we are putting up solar and stringing HVDC interconnects, which in my opinion are the answer to the storage problem.
Agree that this solves many of the same problems as storage (as does overbuilding).
The PR problem with renewables is that the solutions are invariably cognitively complicated and multifactorial. The solution is going to be some kind of optimized result that mixes various storage forms, HVDC interconnects, overbuilding, and diversifying with solar and wind, and the exact nature of the solution is going to vary by geography.
It's just a hopelessly difficult communication challenge. If so many HN people can't grasp these concepts and jump to provably incorrect catchphrases like "storage is too expensive", then what hope is there for the general public.
People on HN don't generally realize that energy has pretty much always been a mix and that adding new energy sources with different availability, slew rates (both up and down, and not necessarily symmetrical), cost, peak capability, base load capability and so on is a well understood problem that markets know perfectly well how to deal with.
Then there is the 'cool' factor ascribed to some solutions, an element of hope that a favorite technology will one day power the planet and all kinds of unrealistic assumptions about what is and what isn't technically, socially and economically possible. You are right that this is a difficult communications challenge but the level at which the discourse takes place is well below the minimum standards for taking part in such a debate.
We're talking about very simple basic and factual knowledge here we are still very far away from the complexity of say the 15 minute ahead market, balancing and long term cost projections of a particular technology, we are more in outright disinformation and denialism territory.
There is economies of scale for creating the thing, and then the economies of scale for the thing making electricity.
You can make nuclear reactors smaller under the assumption that you’ll be able to make them faster and cheaper over time. But the cost of the electricity they make goes up versus larger reactors because the costs for parts aren’t linear. An SMR is a basically a tiny plant for making electrify.
A solar panel doesn’t have this issue. Making the panel 2x, 5x, 10x bigger does not change the unit economics of the electricity it produces.
SMR's have neither of those economics of scale. Ontario is building 4, and there's a couple others at similar scale. Nobody is contemplating the thousands you'd need for the scale necessary to make the switch from bespoke to assembly line worth it. So the worst of both worlds.
And the risk with bespoke but still much higher numbers than regular plants is that you will need all of the overhead for a much smaller amount of output and you'll definitely not have the same QA budget that you have for a much larger plant. Prediction: many small failures. Hopefully not a 'small Chernobyl'.
> They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.
The problem is. The regulation around safety, waste and land-use is what make the economics the problem.
But you are right, it is difficult, or just straight up impossible with the current state or regulation and policy.
Just for reference, since NRC was establish, basically new nuclear has been approved. During the AEC, innovation was rapid. Basically, no longer a balance between concerns, but simply all out focus on safety for a specific set of reactors. That's not the only factor, but its a big one.
It's pretty clear that for-profit entities will optimize to maximize profit at the expense of all other variables, including safety and the environment. We certainly can't trust the CEO class to properly prioritize safety concerns. So we will always need government regulations to keep these tradeoffs balanced.
You seem to be calling for a magical new set of regulations that are just as effective but don't cost as much. That's not going to happen.
Nuclear plants were already operated pretty safely and the saty was constantly improving as people were learning more and research was progressive.
You do not achieve safety by hard-coding all regulation to a specific technology and make everything else practically impossible.
It works like this:
"Your computer needs a C compiler with good error messages otherwise you can't build this",
"Ok but we are building a LISP machine, there literally is no C".
"We hear you but your C compiler needs good error messages".
"Ok, could you maybe tell us who you would accept from, we can show you our LISP compiler will have amazing error messages"
"MMhh sure we can do that, give us a full specification, and then we get back to you, but its going to cost you for every 1h we invest in that. And at the end, will tell you what we will accept as an application"
"Ok, how long will that take and how much will it cost"
"We can not give you a time or a cost, you will just have to wait (implied it will take at least many years and at least 100s of millions of $ with no outcome certainty what so ever)"
That's just the tip of the iceberg. And then each individual country has their own version of something like this.
So we have a market that is ultra heavy capital that needs scale. But scale is basically impossible to achieve.
Thankfully the US government has finally made some steps into relaxing some of these and adopting a smarter approach, but its like turning the titanic, see GAIN for example.
I am not suggesting we hand out plutonium the everybody who asks for it.
In fact what I dislike, is that anybody who even suggest that regulatory form is part of the solution people instantly bring out 'we need some regulation' or 'new regulation wont be magic'. Both are true, and both are irrelevant.
The de/re-regulation of many other industries has had dramatic effects, think of airlines, trucking, software, the Bell System and so on and so on. The current regulatory regime was created at a high point in panic and anti-nuclear sentiment.
What I would like to see is something like what NASA did, for commercial cargo and commercial crew. You start with something achievable (commercial cargo). Create programs where the government want's to achieve something, and has multiple companies bid in a technology independent way. Start with some smaller things, nuclear reactor for space, medical isotope reactors, off-grid nuclear and then do SMR.
Renewables can't meet the base energy needs. You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.
They also have low power density, making them problematic at grid scale.
SMRs fix all the issues of modern nuclear reactors. SMR's are not 'small' in the absolute sense, they're on the scale of traditional power plants, not existing nuclear reactors.
They have a ton of advantages:
- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.
- They produce power comparable to existing power plants. Nuclear plants have huge issues with producing tons of power in a centralized manner, meaning the energy infrastructure needs to be designed around them, and probably you need a centralized infrastrucure for power distribution, which might not jive well with local politics. They also need huge concentrated cooling capacity, which might have negative ecological effects, and present a huge risk should they need to be shut down. The recent issues in France with global warming, where the rivers water level got lower and the water warmer, cutting down on cooling margins dramatically leading to shutdowns comes to mind.
- In contrast SMRs can be slotted into current energy infrastructure. Modern reactor designs can be throttled to match grid needs.
- SMRs are standardized, smaller and don't need to be built on site and can be built relatively quicker and cheaper. This is huge. If a traditional plant costs $20B and takes 20 years to build, the interest on the loans could mean it's never going to be financially viable. If you cound do something that makes quarter the power, but costs $5B and 5 years to build, it's an entirely different value proposition.
China is already building these, and they are the main country of origin for solar panels and equipment. Renewables make a ton of sense, but can't solve every issue.
> You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.
This has been false in the real world. Factories that use a lot of energy do work with the power company and shutdown all the time based on demand. Large steel mills have their own power plant onsite, but smaller ones just buy grid energy and they want the cheapest. They arrange their factory maintenance schedules with the power company so that the power plants are maintained as the same time they are shutdown. They shutdown every December so the power company can sell the power they were using to run Christmas lights. They often run overnight shifts only because that is when power is cheapest. Even the large factories with their own power generation have shutdown for a couple weeks to sell power to the grid (this is very rare, but it has happened).
Wind and solar is a little more difficult because it isn't as predictable, but that is different from unpredictable. The power companies already are running models to predict the wind and solar cycles because it is important for many things they do. You can bet those smaller factories are already working with the power company to schedule shutdowns when power is predicted to be expensive - factories have to do regular maintenance anyway so it is just a matter of being ready (spare parts) when asked, and wind/solar is predictable enough for this.
That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.
And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable. Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity. And SMRs are a rounding error on that. Most of the rest is gas based generation.
Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption based on price signals, user demand, etc. So, it's actually ideal to pair with fluctuating supply and demand from renewables. Using e.g. spot instances makes it easy for data centers to scale down their demand if energy is scarce and expensive. Other things they could do is throttle CPUs/GPUs based on energy pricing or encourage people to time shift non critical jobs to when energy is plentiful.
SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them. Whether you believe this will happen or not, it won't be happening very soon. Realistically, SMRs will remain a niche solution for decades to come; even if they do work at reasonable cost levels.
> And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed.
If we close all the steel mills and ship off manufacturing to China, then yes, we won't have baseload, and we can be happy that we saved the planet using solar!
> Renewables can't meet the base energy needs.
That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.
> And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable.
Do you have solar at home? Because I do, I have 10kW of panels on my roof. I just checked my stats and in December I approximately made about 15% o peak capacity. And even that isn't the whole picture, as there were chunks days where I basically made nothing and even the batteries couldn't pull me through it. And I have no idea how you're calculating this 100GW. If you count adding 2000 500W panels as adding 1MW, then even on the Caribbean your calculation is going to be incredibly generous.
> Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity
As for nuclear, it was made way too expensive because the economy and money became fake, divorced from real value, and pearl-clutchers and concern trolls made it too expensive. But even in the 70s-80s when things were actually built in Europe, it was clear that Gen IV (of which SMRs are an example) was the future of nuclear, its just nobody bothered to build it because it was easier to ship off manufacturing into the 3rd world.
>Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption.
Yeah when you buy millions of dollars of HW, the 'we'll need to run it at 15% capacity in December and during night, not at all' sounds like a sound return on investment. Way to cheerlead to get another industry shipped off from the continent.
> SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them.
SMRs are not small, they are scalable, and can be made in similar capacity to existing coal and gas plants. Once they reach EOL, they'd be a perfect slot-in zero emissions replacement. But since nuclear is the devil's work, I guess we'll get to keep burning gas for another half a century.
That fact that people can't even agree on what SMRs even are tells you everything. You advocate that they are essentially the same thing as a regular power plant, others say they are small boxes that can be put at any neighborhood corner.
But everything because they are going to scale magically. Nobody ever explained how that scalability is supposed to happen. A large portion of any nuclear reactor is still a steam turbine, we have built lots of these without seeing prices fall exponentially (like solar) why should adding a couple (really a miniscule) number of SMRs suddenly fundamentally change the way their price scaling?
I might be wrong but I don't think anyone's seriously proposing on building these truly tiny reactors - I think every one of these is being built is powerplant sized.
SMRs identifying trait is that these reactors are prefabricated and transported onsite and do not have to be built in pace.
> If we close all the steel mills and ship off manufacturing to China, then yes, we won't have baseload, and we can be happy that we saved the planet using solar!
86% of generation added in China in 2024 is renewable.
If you want reliable all-year round-the-clock solar, you have to over build by 20x, not to mention the batteries. (Wind has different but analogous issues)
That's not to hate on solar - I think it's great, and I personally have solar at home, but its not a substitute for everything
Much of the renewable price/cost calculation is plain wrong because we have offloaded the cost to other countries (who gladly still use fossil fuels).
On top of that there is the problem of maintaining a real economy inside the country, to benefit people actually living in said country. I believe most of HN don't care because they get paid to make stuff that is sold globally and they profit from that. They can't understand that not everybody can do that and you need to create value inside of the country so that they can share/benefit from that value creation.
I also have access to solar generation statistics in the middle of France and they make no sense without the generous subsidies and electricity generation purchase from the provider. But plenty are profiting from that so of couse they are happy about it.
> You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.
You're going to need more work than a bare assertion to demonstrate this, given that storage exists, and given that gas peaking exists, and given that interconnects exist.
Throttling a reactor makes no sense when the fuel is dirt cheap, which it is for nuclear. It's not clear given the choice of providing the same amount of power with thousands of SMR's worth a few MW's each or a handful of traditional nuclear plants, that SMR's are inherently the better choice. SMR's make obvious sense as a distributed source in cases where power transmission is itself costly and the density of power use is low, but not obviously otherwise.
>- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.
I don't worry about designed meltdowns, I worry about someone bunker-busting it, crashing a plane into it, detonating a convoy of trucks filled with fertilizer inside it, someone deciding that an old mine close the the ground water is "good enough" to store the waste from it, that war, forest fires, floods or famine will leave the sites unmanned until the storage pools dry out and the waste starts burning, or any number of similar scenarios which become so much more likely the more of these things we have.
But mostly I worry that they are more expensive than anything else even in a best-case scenario.
Why should we invest in more expensive electricity, that also carries a significant risk for immense disasters, when we have solved cheap solar, cheap batteries and synthesized fuels? The path forward seems obvious, even though it's less traveled.
They are so safe that nobody has ever attempted a terrorist attack against them since the first fission reactor (1941). Terrorists have targeted the Twin towers, the Pentagon, the White House, the Bataclan, Nice, but no fission reactors nor waste deposits. (If terrorists are reading this, I suggest them to plan an attack to the Baogang Lake [1], which is considerably less guarded and potentially more effective in terms of people killed.)
And if reactors are really so expensive (5 G€/reactor, while Italy spends 10 G€ per year in subsidies for renewables), why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours?
>They are so safe that nobody has ever attempted a terrorist attack against them since the first fission reactor (1941)
Attempts are made regularly, and nuclear plants all over the world implemented additional security measures after 9/11.
"A foiled Chechen rebel assault on the Russian city of Nalchik in October 2005 would have involved an attempt to hijack and fly one of five aircraft into a nuclear power station. Papers released in the UK in February 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) revealed there were more than 40 cases of potential security breaches at UK civil nuclear sites from 2004 to 2005."
>why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours
It's complex but a simplified answer is that Italy pays what it actually costs, while the French leaves a lot of the cost to their children.
The children (of the people who built the french nuclear plants) recently had to pay over 50 bn euros to cover the debts of EDF, and will likely have to pay another ?? bn to cover lack of maintenance on the aging reactors. (Google it). For 50+ years, france sold nuclear electricity at a loss, mostly unknowingly.
Once they have paid the sins of the parents, the remaining costs to maintain the plants for another 20+ years again will likely be postponed to the next generation, since covering the cost today would make the electricity too expensive to sell.
Note that France is running their economy at a much larger deficit than Italy for the past few years. Nuclear power that is not paid by electricity consumers now, but instead by the government, is of course not the entire explanation but it's part of it.
The Windows 98 license actually did forbid using Windows in nuclear power plants (along with other high risk areas). That was due to some interaction with the Java license and I always considered it a very fortunate fluke.
I’m sure it’s printed out and put in a 3-ring binder, but why wouldn’t the instructions for “what to do when the primary coolant loop pressure drops” be in a Word document somewhere?
In all seriousness, it’s only a matter of time before an LLM makes a critical error in language-translating (or even being used to write) a reference manual for an industrial process, and escapes the attention of regulators. One can only hope that that process is not nuclear…
I’m not sure we’ll notice an increase of these kinds of things. There was a case well before AI where a process chemist replaced propylene glycol with ethylene glycol in over-the-counter medicine and a bunch of people died.
Proponents of the SMR (small modular reactor) overlook the fundamental approach in industry: taking advantage of economies of scale to improve efficiency.
Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production.
Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet.
This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets.
Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out.
On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage.
Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor).
Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications.
Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system.
On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling.
There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...
You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.
The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
The NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, the issue with nuclear is cost, far more then NIMBY.
NuScale was always a bad idea. The PWR is the problem, making it smaller doesn't really solve the issues with them.
Project in Canada are struggling because the market in Canada is just to small. The reality is, you need massive amounts of funding, but with the way regulations work, even if Canada were literally perfect in every way, as long as large markets like the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
You are right that there is nothing new here, except maybe that large private institutions are starting to do some investing.
But the reality is, Rickover was right, Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right. An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
> You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.
I fail to understand which of the challenges I described it may relieve.
> The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
Having all brands of SMRs build interoperable parts is AFAIK beyond the most wild utopia. The very first step (convincing them to adopt the same architecture) is out of reach.
Yes, the NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, however it IMHO is way more powerful against nuclear than against solar and even wind energy, and as those last expand more and more people will understand that they don't have, in order to obtain electricity, to accept any nuclear-induced risk.
> The PWR is the problem
Which architecture seems more appropriate?
> the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
This is indeed a real challenge, however it mainly is because of past nuclear incidents and accidents.
> Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right
About the "Faustian bargain"?
> An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
This is a big deal, not because Microsoft wants to build reactors but because it highlights the real bottleneck: nuclear fuel. There’s already a growing uranium deficit, conversion and enrichment capacity are thin and geopolitically fragile, and next-gen reactors need HALEU, which barely exists today. Building new reactors is the easy part — scaling the fuel supply chain takes years.
Yes, and ... restarting the fuel cycle under the current administration is, according to activity in the US uranium rich areas, kind of happening. I haven't seen anything "official" yet but driving around southern Utah shows signs of 'unexpected economic activity.' Speculation is that the USG is going to re-open a Uranium mine near Moab.
I think I should correct your statement slightly - its not wrong however we don't have a uranium shortage -- we have more uranium than we could possible use.
We do have a HALEU advanced nuclear fuel supply chain issue. Thats being currently tackled. To your advanced reactor point -- they are also still far away so it is plausible that the supply chain catches up before any of the new reactors get deployed - assuming they make it to the finish line.
I should hope they make it to the finish line - I think we could do well with more nuclear providing our backbone of energy.
Enriching uranium to 20% instead of 5% is easy. If reactors require it, the fuel will be found just fine. You already have hundreds of SMRs in submarines and aircraft carriers and what not. A1B reactors in your carriers run on 93% enriched uranium!
That really isn't the bottleneck by any means. If there's demand there will be supply.
The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction. For instance there is an unlimited amount of handwringing over a closed fuel cycle costing a little more than an open fuel cycle but nobody points out that the capital cost of the reactor dwarfs fuel cycle costs for any fuel cycle -- no nukes hate reprocessing so they won't point this out and nukes don't want to remind you of the capital cost problem.
For every NPP that's had a nuclear meltdown there have been 20 that had a financial meltdown before they've even turned it on.
It drives me up the wall that big tech companies want to buy "a reactor" or an unspecified "SMR" but never an AP1000 (reactor that's actually been built) or even a BWRX300 (an SMR that might actually get built.) If there wasn't any bullshit a new build AP1000 would probably have a 10 year lag at least but...
... in the current international tariff situation it's almost impossible that any full-size or even moderate-sized reactor will be built in the US in the forseeable future because the US has no super-heavy press that can forge a nuclear reactor vessel. Japan, China, Korea, the UK, and many other countries have them and in the neoliberal world of a year ago we could have just had one made for us and shipped in by boat. The BWRX300 is the only western SMR that is far along and the pressure vessel will be made in Canada -- it's going to cost plenty no matter what but put 35% on top of that and you're doing the no nukes job for them. Way to go.
I want to see it work but I am not seeing realistic plans from the likes of Microsoft and Google, just the hot air from a 100W lightbulb when we really need 10,000,000 times as much heat!
> The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction.
Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.
I want to see a real explanation of the bungling that makes projects go 3x late and over budget and it is not "environmentalists" who might make it go 20% late.
I've looked long and hard and not found an explanation of the bungling fitting the facts better than that it's like a poker game: the vendor never believed in the sticker price, but the vendors figured that once there were chips in the pot the sunk cost fallacy would mean the buyers would never fold.
I think NuScale was trying to be honest about costs but the buyer in Utah built a process in which they could control costs by folding early and they did. Europe, China, and other places have more engineering thinking and less financialization and they're more likely to "stay the course" but as an engineer I'm not sure this is right -- it might work for China but not for Europe.
On one hand I'm glad to see GE get the BWR, especially the work done on ESBWR, back into the game with the BWRX300, but the costs they are quoting are too freaky low and their talk about "design to cost" makes it seem like they just quote the cost number that they need to be competitive with the solar sticker price without storage which will lure in the public as opposed to being competitive to whatever the (unknown) solar + storage sticker price will turn out to be. (e.g. highly variable because it depends by "how frequent blackouts will your accept?")
Lots of interesting history here, but most relevant was that regulatory and process changes starting in the 80's made it increasingly expensive to build reactors. As a result, reactor construction companies (notably Westinghouse) went bankrupt and no entity was willing to take financial risk to build new reactors. Western Europe is a different story, where political parties aggressively shutdown healthy nuclear plants and passed laws preventing new nuclear.
Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US (by both political parties) and Europe is slowly coming around to allowing new nuclear. NuScale is one of many next gen companies (I hope they're all successful), but the traditional large reactors are also great and can be built cost effectively.
I don't believe it -- although ideology makes explanations like that popular with a lot of people.
The cost escalations and bungling were well in progress before the TMI. The NRC streamlined the reactor approval processes in the 1980s by trying to separate the licensing of a standard reactor from the licensing of the site -- nobody took them up on the offer.
In the case of AP1000 builds both Sumner and Vogtle were held up for years because they were waiting for Chinese factories to figure out how to make parts, in some cases they never figured it out and they had to source them elsewhere. Factory modular construction was supposed to prevent bungling at the site but replaced it with bungling at the factory.
In theory the factories got up the learning curve and if somebody ordered another AP1000 it would be different, in practice the AP1000 is a Chinese reactor and the Chinese gave up on it for the Hualong One which there are (oddly enough) two designs for, which goes back to the designs the French were using back when they were building many plants on time and on budget... which is maybe a good thing, but they look pretty quick to move on to the Hualong Two and before they get up the learning curve on that one they'll be switching to the Three...
I'll agree that the Europe hired somebody who thinks like Amory Lovins to design the EPR and really did bungle the politics more than the engineering, but that's not the story in the US.
Regulatory requirements were definitely a real thing. One of the drivers was that nuclear companies were required by law to match the price of oil and any surplus profits from that had to be reinvested into safety and that set the bar for new safety requirements. What that meant was the 1970 oil crisis created a new level for nuclear safety beyond what was needed and that was locked in for future construction. The entire history of nuclear energy is one of bungled regulation and given the political power oil companies have had and continue to have, it’s not surprising given the existential threat nuclear posed.
> One of the drivers was that nuclear companies were required by law to match the price of oil and any surplus profits from that had to be reinvested into safety and that set the bar for new safety requirements.
Here in Norway there's now talk about nuclear power, after a long time of little to no interest.
However they can't even put up wind turbines anymore, due to NIMBY issues, environmental concerns and whatnot. We had a ton of such projects but it's just about ground to a halt now.
And since our distribution network sucks, we've had a ~100x price difference between north and south for a long time now due to that, you can't just put it in the middle of nowhere.
As such I have very little faith they'll manage to put up a nuclear reactor in the near future, at least not close to initial cost and time. And none of that has to do with the details of building a nuclear reactor.
That said, there's change on the horizon. At least more and more people seem to be realizing that if they don't want wind turbines, they don't want huge swathes of solar panels and they don't want to alter more rivers then there's not a lot of options left on the table.
It's just experience in most cases. We don't build enough so the management and project structures and experience to do it never get a chance to be efficient.
The right thing to do with something like the Vogtle plant for example would be to keep building them since you've just paid some very expensive costs learning what causes delays, but the knowledge of what gets the plant built - because it was built - is still there and fresh.
This is the idea behind the “small modular” part of SMR. Current nuclear projects are huge, largely bespoke efforts that require a bunch of contract firms working together on different parts of the project. The idea of SMR is to push most of the necessary parts one after another from a factory. The best analogy I’ve heard for this is comparing how the Japanese built planes in WWII (in small batches done by craftsmen) to how the US did (with an assembly line following a documented process). I buy the conceptual argument, but there are a lot of details to work out.
I guess the answer might be hyperscalers that want cheap electricity to run LLM inference. They’re already throwing tens of billions at AI, what’s a few billion more to have a chance at super cheap energy for their new data centers?
Nuclear proponents argue that renewables (solar, wind) are not base-load, and nuclear is. They are correct.
But the people building power generation are doing it on a for-profit basis. Since solar is cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy, simpler to maintain and so on, that's what for-profit people build.
In other words, on the one hand you have large generators, requiring years of planning & permitting, a decade of construction, endless court battles from the anti-nuclear folks, generating returns 15 years from now, competing with the exact opposite (cheap, quick to build, beloved by eco folks, easy to run and maintain, off the shelf parts etc).
From a capital point of view its a no brainer. Capital follows profit, and solar is very profitable.
Nuclear may be good policy. Base Load may be very desirable. But unless govt is putting up the capital it just won't get funded. (Nuclear plants are being built, like in China, but using govt capital, which sees a return in more than just cash terms.)
There are lots of strong arguments for Nuclear. But Nuclear proponents need to address the capital requirements above all. Until the capital problem is solved, every other argument is useless.
One radical answer that question which is often neglected for the facile "regulations" explanation is that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nuclear plants because the steam turbine and heat exchanger cost too much compared to natural gas plants.
If that's really the case then a Gen 4 reactor that runs at higher temperature, uses printed circuit or other advanced heat exchangers and a Brayton cycle gas turbine could win on the capital cost but it's easier said than done. There's not a lot of hope I think the LWR but the BWRX300 is at least trying to do it by deleting the heat exchanger and the only way you're going to get costs down radically will be by deleting things. Commercial Gen 4 reactors are at least 20 years out and we should have gotten started 20 years ago.
One radical answer that question which is often neglected for the facile "regulations" explanation is that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nuclear plants because the steam turbine and heat exchanger cost too much compared to natural gas plants.
The timing undermines this theory. The US added one nuclear reactor to the grid in 1996 then zero until 2016 (sort by first grid connection date here):
Combined cycle natural gas units were already cheaper to build in 1995, but the gradually rising natural gas prices over the next ~12 years meant that coal could still compete on cost for electricity generation. The cheap fuel for coal units counterbalanced the slower, more expensive construction process. It wasn't until fracked natural gas drove fuel prices down that coal unit construction ended in the US.
I don't see how this isn't dispositive on the economics question. That markets (overwhelmingly) choose to build combined-cycle natural gas plants, choose to add the Rankine bottoming cycle, means the marginal cost of the steam turbine is *less* than the marginal cost of the fuel saved by the efficiency gain. That's the case even in the USA; and natural gas elsewhere in the industrial world is integer-multiples more expensive.
The natural gas plants without steam turbines are precisely the load-following plants that run for a fraction of the time (or at a fraction of their capacity); the relative weight of capital vs. fuel costs is inverted. (Or those, like xAI in Memphis, which are rapidly assembled in rushed desperation. I wonder if that will be a trend in the datacenter boom: designs limited, not by costs under normal market conditions, but bottlenecks affecting rushed projects. Nuclear SMR's would seem to be worst at this—the designs they expect to use haven't even been built yet!)
Yes, and the bottoming steam turbine is 1/3 the size of a steam turbine rated for the full power output so… radical capital cost reduction.
It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel. Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.
So the "conventional island", which would include the steam turbines, condensers, generators etc. is about 15% of the cost. Reduce that to a 1/3 the size, and cost drops to 5% of the total, a savings of 10%. Probably even not that much, since a steam turbine 1/3 the size probably costs more than 1/3 the cost of a "1/1" size turbine. And then the remaining 2/3 of the power output would have to be generated some other way, so would shift cost somewhere else. Of course, some part of the cost of the nuclear island can be attributed to steam production as well. In any case, all in all I don't see this as making or breaking the economics of a nuclear plant. The issues that cause nuclear plant costs to skyrocket lie elsewhere (and no, just blaming regulations is overly simplifying it as well, though a popular scapegoat).
(I'm not sure, but I suspect what's making coal non-competitive with gas isn't so much the steam turbines, but rather that there's more labor and machinery involved in burning coal than gas, from mining, transportation, pulverizers, and then all kinds of exhaust gas treatment used at least in the civilized world, ash handling etc.)
> It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel.
Yes, that's true. The BWRX300, which of the current crop of SMR's is probably the one with the most realistic prospects of actually being built somewhere, is a BWR, and the maker claims one reason for the supposedly good economics is that they have spent a lot of effort on minimizing construction cost and equipment needed. We'll see, I guess. I think historically the economics of BWR's vs PWR's is mostly a wash.
> Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.
The follow-up ASTRID project, which never left the drawing board, used a sodium-air (or might have been nitrogen, to avoid issues with trace contaminants in air since it was all closed cycle anyway?) heat exchanger and Brayton cycle turbomachinery, to avoid any potential issues with sodium and water. I think it was supposed to have slightly lower thermal efficiency than an equivalent steam plant, but maybe somewhat lower capital cost.
When a big tech wants to build some huge datacenters, where they plan to put hundreds of thousands of ultra-expensive GPUs, they want to run those GPUs as close to 100% of the time as possible. Every hour the GPUs don't run costs them money. From the point of view of Microsoft, having an SMR next to a datacenter makes perfect sense. Solar and wind can do the job, if coupled with batteries and/or natural gas. But than you need a grid operator. If all you need is electricity for a datacenter, and you don't care about being connected to the rest of the grid, then you want as simple a solution as possible. And an SMR promises to be just that, a turn-key solution to get continuous and constant electricity.
I think "promises" is the key word there. Data centre's want power, as you say, but they want it now, not 15 years from now.
So yes, when SMR's are "off the shelf" (aka from "order" to producing) , including permitting, construction etc, within a couple years then they are appealing.
Sure. But this is why what Microsoft did here was just a hedge. It did not cost them much (if anything at all) to become a member of the World Nuclear Association. If the SMRs become reality a few years down the road, and if the demand for datacenters increases significantly because of the increased use of LLMs, then they stand to benefit a lot. If either of this does not pan out, then what's the risk for Microsoft?
The point of the baseload argument isn’t the “desirability” of power sources that can provide baseload, it’s the necessity. Renewables that can be scaled up (i.e. not niche cases like geothermal) are all too inconsistent to replace the entirety of generation without storage. Other tactics like long range transmission can reduce the amount of storage needed but not eliminate it. Fully replacing generation with renewables isn’t just unprofitable without storage, it’s impossible.
Storage is making great strides but for it to get good enough to fully convert the grid we need qualitative advances in the underlying technology, not just manufacturing scale driving down prices.
There is necessity with baseload plants: they have to be run at high capacity factor or else their economics go all to hell. This is especially true of nuclear where capex dominates. So describing something as "baseload" is actually describing a defect: it's a generation technology that cannot be practically dispatched.
It’s only a defect if you try to make the grid 100% nuclear, just like solar’s variation is only a defect if you try to go 100% solar. It’s not a competition where either is likely to “win”, they’re just two different tools for power generation.
How is it the same defect? Nuclear plants can run all the time and have to if they have any hope of recouping investment. Solar can’t run all the time but is super cheap so it doesn’t have to. You still need responsive capacity but even if you keep natural gas around for that you’ve made a massive dent in fossil fuel usage - bigger than solar or nuclear could do without the other.
Both nuclear & solar produce power at times when it's not wanted. Same defect.
If you were building a grid from scratch in a typical American region, and you were aiming for lowest cost, you'd overbuild solar enough that it handles 100% of demand on a sunny evening, add enough wind to handle 100% of demand on a dark + windy evening, then add about 3 days of battery storage. That'll supply you over 95% of your energy needs.
But that's not 95% of the power, it's 100% of the power 95% of the time. So you also need to supply 100% of the power 5% of the time somehow else. That's not 100% of peak, since peak is during air conditioning demand when solar works, but 100% of almost peak.
The cheapest way to do that is low efficiency single cycle natgas. CCS natgas is 1/20th the cost of nuclear, and single cycle is about half the cost of CCS.
So if you make 2.5% of that nuclear, you've doubled the cost. And you've saved a few hours worth of carbon emission, 2.5% of 5%.
If you want to be carbon-neutral, you use syngas instead of natgas. Yes, syngas is 6X as expensive, but fuel is not the main cost of a peaker plant running <= 5% of the time.
Of course electricity at night is highly desirable. But there are no economic incentives to build it.
From a purely financial point of view, base load is not appealing. Whereas cheap solar is appealing. If I have a billion$ to invest, I know which one I'm choosing. I'm maximizing return, not "societal good". Which is why govt is best placed to build base load, since they optimize for societal good, not profit.
To make base load appealing to investors we need expensive power at night. But that's countered by local battery storage.
To be clear, this is not a "what we need" argument. It's a capital argument. Private Power suppliers chase profit, and there's more profit in daytime power than nighttime power.
> Of course electricity at night is highly desirable. But there are no economic incentives to build it.
Wait, what? Who is going to accept having no power at night at their house? Ignoring the fact that the intra-utility trade does provide a direct economic incentive, nobody is going to live somewhere the power companies can’t keep the lights on 24 hours a day most days (in the developed world anyway).
You're looking at this from the consumer point of view. But consumers provide income, not capital.
Consumers may, or may not, have a choice of power providers. They can choose to "accept" what is on offer, or remove themselves from the grid. But they have very little negotiating power.
Actually it's pretty easy for (residential and office consumers to spend their own capital on batteries and inverters. Most homes consume (or can be set to consume) reasonably low power at night. A 20 kw/h battery will cover most homes easily.
(Solar panels aren't necessary for this.)
The capital cost, and savings therefrom, put a hard limit on what suppliers can charge for night time power. And of course storage is just as attractive to suppliers. (More capital-attractive than say a nuclear plant.)
As consumers we are used to simply announcing our needs. And assuming companies will expend any capital necessary to meet those needs. In practice it doesn't work that way, as rural phone/internet/cable consumers will testify.
Once you see electricity generation as a capital issue, not a consumer issue, things get clearer.
The point of separating electricity artificially into "baseload" and "peaking" was the quirk of engineering that made coal and nuclear cheaper if you ran them flat out.
In a world where both solar and wind are massively cheaper, that entire paradigm collapsed. Even more so when you can reuse the same hydro and gas that was working as peaking as "firming" to complement the new model.
I believe Rolls Royce is pretty close as well. But both have yet to deploy a single working example. And it doesn't seem we are anywhere close to see one yet.
There is more than enough uranium on the planet. This is more of a pork cycle problem. If there is a clear path towards an SMR industry supply will be there.
Very interesting, can you provide any more reading on this topic in particular? Curious about how the modern private market is approaching the fuel supply chain issue in creative ways.
If building nuclear reactors is the easy part, and we're barely building nuclear reactors (and when we do they go massively over estimates), this sounds all around kind of bad.
Nuclear fuel, like lithium is a supply chain problem not an Erlich/Simons end-of-resources problem. Nuclear fuel UNLIKE lithium, has bizarre qualities that the waste stream from some kinds of reactors in turn, is valuable fuel. Not that we want prolifration from breeder reactors, but the point "fuel is the bottleneck" has some caveats. Supply chain logistics around fuel, including whole-of-life treatment of the outputs, is a problem.
Fission fuel is so cheap that we currently don't even bother to fully recycle our nuclear waste. We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.
> We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.
> easily
That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.
In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.
Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage. Storage is extremely expensive. Nuke is extremely cheap to generate -once its built. The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!) and each nuke plant is a bespoke effort which gets recertified each time. This is enormously expensive. There is reason to believe that small modular nuke plants will vastly reduce this cost. That means we might have a path to cheap nuke, but there is no immediate path to cheap storage barring a technological revolution (not just incremental improvements) in battery tech.
In the long run solar power will kill fossil fuels, but we desperately need a bridge to get us there and not destroy the carbon balance in the atmosphere. Nuke is that bridge.
"Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier."
This is right now, July 2025. The costs of batteries continue to fall. How much cheaper will batteries be by the time we start churning out SMRs fast and cheap?
By all means keep beavering away at nuclear. Its time will come one day. But I won't hold my breath for it to solve the climate problem in the next 10 years.
“Very sunny” is doing a lot of work there. The storage required goes up dramatically once you run the numbers for somewhere that has seasons. The long-range HVDC lines between hemispheres idea is cute but probably geopolitically impossible; I don’t think the US will let its ability to literally keep the lights on depend on South America.
Storage could get there, but I don’t think it’s credible that manufacturing scale alone will solve the problem. We probably need some new, qualitatively different chemistries to become viable for solar to be viable for the whole grid. From a technical perspective the nuclear plants we could build in the 1960s could do it, whether we can still build them (no matter if the barrier is regulatory or practical) is another question.
How will you get me with rooftop solar and a home battery to buy your extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when I have my own imperfect solution almost the entire year?
Scale this up to a society adding onshore and offshore wind and you quickly realize that the nuclear plant will have a capacity factor at 10% or so.
Vogtle with a 20% capacity factor costs somewhere like 85 cents per kWh, or $850 per MWh.
Nuclear power due to the massive CAPEX is the worse solution imaginable to fix renewable shortcomings.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
Electricity self-sufficiency is only realistic when:
your needs are quite low, you own a house, you have capital to invest for both panels and storage, your heating is not electricity dependent (so most likely fossil fuel or wood, which isn't better)
Yet, most people live in cities, with plenty of appartement or shared houses where most of the requirements are just not feasible. And the trend isn't going in reverse.
So yes, YOU, may have your own individualistic solution but clearly, it's not something that is suitable for most people.
Considering you do not have a real horse in the race, you should quit arguing and enjoy your own egotistical "solution" and let people who want to live collectively decide what's best for them.
I’m sure the French are crying about having much lower energy prices than e.g. Germany, even with the importing. I don’t see why we’d expect they’d pay more if the natural gas plants were in their borders.
You sure wrote a lot here to make one point. Yes, if you're willing to operate your own disconnected microgrid you have enormous advantages. Not every entity can do that or is willing to accept the loss of reliability that comes with.
The additional storage needed when you need to store energy from the summer to feed the grid in the winter (instead of just for day/night and a few cloudy days) is not only orders of magnitude higher in raw capacity, but requires different battery chemistries that can hold charge for that long. 22% cheaper is a drop in the bucket.
> when you need to store energy from the summer to feed the grid in the winter
Surely you don't need to power 100% of winter hours with summer sunshine. Electricity isn't grain to be stored in a silo.
Most places humans live in also get sunshine in the winter. Less sunshine admittedly, but that's where overbuilding panels and interconnecting grids comes in. And even dark, cold places get windy.
Are you so sure that storage is so expensive? It’s been coming down the cost curve extremely quickly, such that opinions formed even an year ago are severely outdated, and it’s now solar+storage that’s being favorably compared to replacing nat gas plants, not just solar itself.
Storage that is good enough to replace peaker plants, and storage that is good enough to handle seasonal variations in insolation are completely different ballgames. The lithium battery chemistry in your phone will self-discharge on the order of a month - there are alternate chemistries but they have other problems right now.
Yes, if you have a magic planet spanning transmission system capable of handling the power flows over building solves the problem. Unfortunately that's orders of magnitude more expensive than storage, which we already can't afford.
Gonna have to see more numbers for "storage is more expensive than nuclear". And not the unit cost of SMRs with the assumption that mass manufacturing is solved, certified, and permitted. You have to account for those costs too. And time, of course. The climate crisis is here now. We can't wait 10 years for cheap SMRs to be ready (though we'll gladly take them when they are).
I’ve never seen anybody give an estimate for the cost of storage required to fully convert the grid of e.g. the US that wasn’t obviously astronomical and not something the utilities could afford the capital for. If you’ve seen different please share.
Battery storage ranges from $150 to $300 / kwH capacity. The entire grid would need something like 5twH of capacity for an 8 hour ride through. I want you to carefully consider those prefixes and the vast, vast Gulf of space between them.
Nah, you can buy retail packs for less than $300/kwh now, I installed some recently. Commercial installs in China are reportedly hitting like $60 installed.
Also, 4 hours is the target Jigar Shah talks about for getting solar to a load factor roughly equal to most thermal plants.
Also, I believe that’s 4 hours on the nameplate of the variable generation, not 4 hours on the entire grid load. People generally aren’t advocating for going fully variable generation.
Also please give a source as to why the US grid would need 5 TWh of battery storage. So we know it is not simply a number you invented out of thin air to say ”impossible!!!!”
> Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage.
For say an AI training-oriented data center, you could scale down the power usage when supply is limited. You could change power limits on the CPU/GPUs, put the machines in sleep mode or powered off entirely. So the required storage would just be a slightly bigger UPS.
Not sure if the economics works out, but at least technically it's possible as it's more flexible than user-based loads.
You don't want to waste your GPU capex by not running those suckers at 100%. (Other datacenter workloads it makes some sense to demand-regulate, but not AI.)
AI based training is an almost ideal match with this kind of supply. You could even imagine migrating long running training jobs to different parts of the world based on energy availability to optimise costs.
So the model is buy some of the worlds most expensive hardware and let it sit idle for half the time? If I want to save the same throughput I need to buy at least twice the hardware!
Load throttling is one of those ideas that seems great as long as someone else is doing it.
Ha, that's a great point. I guess if you have some latency sensitive inference workload the capacity will effectively be dynamic, but that is likely uncorrelated with local energy prices I imagine.
Solar benefits from storage yes but it's not at all worthless even without it.
If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.
Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.
I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.
> The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!)
So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.
This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.
You're approaching this with the nuance of a child. Yes, nuke regulation is burdensome, and yes it is necessary because nuke can have quite severe failures when failures occur. The solution is not to dogmatically suppose that one of those two basic facts is false. It's to engineer around the problem by making many exact copies of the same design, reducing the amount of regulation that needs to be applied on a per unit basis. That's what small modular reactors are. Certify once, build many.
You can bury the casks in my (literal) backyard if you'd like (please put the grass back). It's an overhyped issue much less impactful than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.
> than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.
As I'm fond of saying, environmentalists didn't kill nuclear. I'm not denying they had motive. But they lacked means. They can't stop anything else they've set their minds to: fossil fuels, automobiles, deforestation, industrial livestock farming. Even whaling is alive ffs.
No, there was another party with both motive (competition) and means (lots of cash and political influence) to do the deed: the fossil fuel industry. And nuclear didn't help itself with accidents (and ensuing costly clean ups, one of which helped take down the Soviet Union), and budget overruns even when things went smoothly. Both found a convenient fall guy: the green movement.
Tl;dr nuclear hasn't grown because of money. It cost too much, and the competition had the cash to slander its reputation.
God I hate this argument. Casks. The answer is casks. The short term solution turns out to be a fantastic long term solution. If that isnt good enough, demand it be reprocessed with thorium or something.
There. No more silly anti nuke gotcha. You can give up on that one permanently.
I am steelmanning this, and assuming you are making a hilarious joke at the expense of anti nuke activists. Instead of defending the storage issue, this is just a pivot to another unrelated and already well resolved issue. Thats exactly what the silly anti nuke folk get up to. Well played, solid joke, 10/10.
Have we seen Microsoft actually put any skin in the game yet? All the pre-purchase announcements are virtually risk free for Microsoft. They've agreed to buy a certain amount of power at a certain price, if the counter-party can deliver it. But they're not pre-paying, they only pay when the electricity gets delivered. If they never deliver, Microsoft isn't out any money.
I'm intensely pro nuclear. But the tech is still in the stables. We need research into driving down costs. In the meantime, we need to think harder about where we're putting datacentres and how we can, if not make power cheaper for average Americans, at least not raise its real cost.
It’s a smart move on their part. It’s also a way for VC/investors to have some concrete value prop in their math. Aka if x works, I’d get at least y return (where y is guaranteed to not be zero)
I see a lot of skepticism in the comments, but if you’re going to gamble, SMRs seem like a pretty good bet. Nuclear is still in its mainframe era, where everything is bespoke and costly. Modularization enables repeatability, which is the heart of optimization. Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!
There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like the idea of proliferation of nuclear reactors on every corner because I don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to handle that many reactors. I'm all on for huge ones but they have obvious issues.
Have you been to a failed state? Bulgaria was in a state of disrepair when it comes to its industry, as kids we wandered to abandoned factories and I'm %100 sure that I don't wish a nuclear reactor to end up in a place like that. As 12-14 y/o kids we were going in, tear apart stuff the get interesting objects out like bearings, flat plastics etc. that we can use for games or making machines and if small reactors were a thing back then I'm certain that many disasters would have happened. AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.
Nuclear reactors are very cool, they all have its place but please don't make it available to an average bozo that lucked on crypto or some greedy maniac in a failed state.
I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail and things end up in wrong hands but where I grew up you can find remains of a few ancient empires + 1 quite recent ones with machinery and electronics unaccounted for.
> AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.
If only you knew how deadly is average chemical factory that you probably do not know is just a few miles from your home, you would not worry about SMR-s that much :)
I know how deadly it can be. The thing about the chemical stuff is that it smells bad, it look dirty etc. Once we wandered in an old building that had a huge pool like thing filled with something that smells like freshly roasted nuts. A pleasant smell but its out of place, therefore run away.
Playing with lead, you notice that it lives traces on your hands, it looks wrong so you try not to play with the lead anymore.
A lightbulb with a shiny liquid in it? Don't break it or break it in open air at safe distance. Even if you touch the liquid make sure you wipe it out clean as it looks unnatural.
You easily develop instincts to detect what's dangerous with machines and chemicals, with nuclear you can't do that.
Ans as for the active ones, I hope they are taking good care of them. Bhophal 2.0 is indeed possible.
Seriously, you are concerned small nuclear reactors left behind? The main idea is, that you will be able to load them onto a truck and ship them back to the factory. So the chance of anything left behind is very small.
Why would the risk be small? I've seen pretty expensive machinery been left behind. I destroyed such machinery to take out the copper wires from its transformars to make a net.
What makes you think that this can't happen? It can happen in so many ways, i.e. the owner is criminal and runs away or fucks up and loses everything and the court takes years to decide who gets what from the factories, the new owners put it on sale it takes another 10 years to sell because the repair costs incurred are massive and equipment is getting obsolete therefore you can't find a buyer. People get old, move on and all that decays for 50 years until the land becomes valuable enough for someone to buy it with all that obsolete garbage.
I think you underestimate the amount of mismanagement and human error that happens every day. May I remind you of the Goiânia accident? Additionally, Wikipedia has a seriously long list of “orphan source incidents”.
> There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
Thing is, traditional nuclear plants generate so much power that we only need a few "bespoke" plants to fill in all baseload demand and even provide enough redundancy. Renewable sources are quite a bit cheaper though wrt. to the sheer amount of bulk power that they supply over time, it's just unreliable and highly intermittent. Smaller reactors just aren't very useful in that kind of scenario - it's unlikely that they'll be cheaper per watt than a few large plants.
I technically agree, but modularity also works on large reactors. And they are generally cheaper to build and operate per energy produced than smaller reactors.
Modularity could work on mainframes too but it mostly didn’t. Mainframe cost per transaction can be very low, and yet here we are. Tech at scale always passes through a cheap/worse is better phase.
Take a look at the open compute project for example. Instead of having power supplies in each server, they have a lesser amount of large ones for example.
Economies of scale wins in big compute projects too
Which is why comparing mainframes and nuclear reactors is a bad analogy. A better one would be datacenters vs individual PCs. If the goal is efficiency, datacenters win everytime.
> Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!
And yet, for most things, we see the opposite trend. We build big factories, big ships, big warehouses and yes, big power plants. We tend to make things as big as physics lets us do, because of economies of scale. For power generation specifically, big things tend to be more efficient, thanks to the square-cube law. For example look at big ship engines, they use specialized piston engines with cylinders you can fit into, not dozens or truck engines, even though the truck engines would be a good example of modularity.
And speaking of the "mainframe era", in a sense, that era was more distributed/modular than today. Companies had their own mainframe, whereas nowadays, it is centralized in huge datacenters. The servers themselves are modular, because we can't make a datacenter on a chip, physics get in the way, but having big datacenters help make economies of scale on cooling, power generation, security, etc...
I am not against SMR, they are an option worth considering, but if I had to bet between SMR and conventional, large size nuclear reactors, I'd go conventional. Someone mentioned China as taking SMR seriously, and yes, they do, but they are also building lots of big nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well at it.
Depressing, but it shows the typical faults of most Canadian projects these days. Massive government spend on a project doomed to fail by economic analysis before it's even online; and no takeaways for the Canadian people to actually get momentum going.
If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on".
Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way.
What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?
It’s usually about well connected companies lobbying for free money. It’s the sort of thing that keeps Bell and others afloat and guarantees they never have to get competitive.
I'm still half cheering it because at the very least it's still nuclear progress, and will help ensure we still have nuclear energy workers for another generation here. I worry a lot about what's been done to the Atomic Energy Workers in terms of whittling away at our capability to produce good energy workers with tribal wisdom and the Canadian nuclear culture of safety.
Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much.
Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. Many billions of PV cells have been manufactured. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity.
If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival.
>But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity.
Because the level of permitted development without being crushed by onerous regulatory burdens has been absurdly hamstrung on nuclear. All of the issues you add as "but" cases are things that many different innovations in a fluid market for research could have refined. The same has been done for many complex technologies over the decades, yet for nuclear there's always some excuse like the ones you mention. The comment you replied to is right. We're talking about something that since decades ago could have been improved enormously, and hasn't been thanks to a multitude of stupidities.
The United States Navy trusts extremely compact reactors (designed and working despite the DoD's notoriously lax financial and schedule stringency with defense contractors) to power its absolute most important, costly, defense-crucial war machines, and regularly docks them right inside the country's (and world's) largest urban areas, but somehow there's just no way to make nuclear power for civilian use more compact, cheaper and effective?
The regulatory burden argument doesn't explain why renewables are trouncing new nuclear in China. I view it as a universal excuse nuclear fans trot out to explain away inconvenient realities. They also never explain how the regulatory burden would be reduced in a way that doesn't compromise safety. And regulated safety is the price the nuclear industry pays for liability limits.
> Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience.
I am imagining a field of shipping-container sized units, each of which is a small modular reactor. Probably with solar panels on top ;) Still a few orders of magnitude different, but the idea here is that each unit is small enough that it can be manufactured, so that nuclear plant bring-ups don't take 30 years. Most of the cost is because of the tremendous generational effort involved in just a single project; what does it take to reduce the cost of the plants themselves to the point where they can really shine, economically?
The goal is to have reliable base load power generation so that we don't have to deal with the massive complexity and carbon footprint of battery plants all over the place to deal with peaky generation technologies like solar. I don't believe that that is a solved problem: using tremendous amounts of rare earth materials for limited-lifespan installations that don't even produce energy is possibly not the best use of our resources, considering it's almost all fossil fuel going into those logistics operations anyway, right? EROEI for a battery plant is going to be hard to achieve.
NPPs that small are a nonstarter, due to loss of economies of scale. Even SMRs are creeping up in size now to try to recapture the economies of traditional gigawatt power plants.
Your shipping container mention reminded me of The Box, a book that explains how shipping was so erratic, risky, slow, unreliable and incredibly expensive before the standardization into containers. Containers literally changed the world economy.
I think you are onto something. But this requires upfront investment, which alas, politicians are not for.
Thermal storage has very poor discharge rates unfortunately (usually slower than a day), as well as surprisingly high cost once you factor in inefficiencies and turbine cost
As was repeatedly explained in that other thread, thermal storage of the kind described there is inherently a long term storage technology, and this drives the design to minimize capex, not maximize round trip efficiency. The focus on efficiency is fundamentally misplaced there, as it becomes orders of magnitude less important compared to diurnal storage (which batteries appear to be well on their way to dominating.)
Long term storage and diurnal storage are complementary technologies, sort of like the different levels of cache and main memory in a computer memory hierarchy. Combining them appropriately reduces cost vs. using just one of them.
Anyway, the technology as described would produce heat at 600 C for as little as $3/GJ, which nuclear would have a hard time competing with.
You misplaced a decimal point. A MWH is 3.6 GJ, so it's $10.8/MWH.
$3/GJ is about the current Henry Hub price for natural gas, and as you should know cheap natural gas like this is what killed the "nuclear renaissance" in the US.
Sure. 600 C is about the temperature of steam in a coal fired power plant, so one of the use cases here is to take an old coal plant and replace the heat source. It's much higher temperature than the steam in a LWR, so the turbine can be smaller and cheaper. Also, no steam generator is needed as in a PWR.
Yes? That doesn't mean the capex of a steam turbine for this application would be unaffordable, or that this wouldn't have superior economics to nuclear (which also has a steam turbine, and a more expensive one).
This is concern trolling. The key to nuclear economics is speed of construction, and controlling costs, and not caving to safety pearl-clutchers (that is, adding cost and delays for 'safety measures; meant to appease the public, not things deemed necessary by experts and regulators).
But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.
You're just trying to smear a conclusion you don't like with fatuous insults.
The argument that this time, for sure, nuclear will be much cheaper has worn quite thin. Why do you think anyone in power is going to listen that song again?
BTW, do you think the dominance of renewables over new nuclear construction in China is due to "pearl clutching" there?
There's no conclusion or root cause in the article. It just suggests that since the Canadians had cost overruns and delays, it's impossible to build reactors on time and budget.
Yet China has managed to build those plants exactly around those costs and budgets - I have seen this argument so many time, around high speed rail, where Americans failed at infrastructure and deemed it 'uneconomical', then when China succeeded they smeared them for building probably in 'an evil way' or what.
Let me turn your question back at you - if China is doing so well on renewables, why is it that they're still building tens of gigawatts of nuclear capacity with hundreds more planned?
Even the linked article admits that 'Solar GWh' is not comparable to nuclear GWh because if you add the wattage of panels together you get a meaninglessly big number.
If you are planning around a 24/7 available power source, you need to overbuild solar by 20x I estimate, and the article admits, their calculations do not take storage into account (which you simply would not need if you had an always available power source.
China leads on solar panels, equipment and batteries, yet they are the biggest investors into nuclear today, I think that says enough about solar (and wind) not being able to economically substitute for nuclear.
Also a different angle - economics. If you take 20 years to build a reactor, then the interest that investment assuming an 5% YoY, would be ~2.7x the original purchase price. Your yearly profits wont be enough to pay the interest at that point.
You are right - by these standards it makes no economic sense to build a nuclear reactor, but the standards only exist because of the positively lethargic Western work moral.
You seem to misunderstand me - I'm not some nuclear fanboy, but I'm looking for a powerplant solution that's 3 things: universal (unlike hydro), always available (unlike renewables) and sustainable (unlike gas and coal).
It seems that with SMRs, nuclear is finally getting to that state. I would like to ask you - what is your problem with it?
For me I wouldn't like to live next to a nuclear power plant, but I'd overwhelmingly prefer living there compared to a chemical plant - and there are a lot more of those everywhere.
Plants are huge investment of time and effort and I believe the costs mainly come down sabotage to pearl clutchers like the Greenpeace folks who think every plant is going to turn into Chernobyl, bureaucrats with their own loyalties and agendas of preserving a lucrative status quo and a huge civilizational laziness in the West results in a lack of will to get together and see things through in a timely manner.
Oh, who would have thought. Fusion and nuclear is a money pit.
Because complexity is expensive and those two are by far the most complex ways of generating energy, one of which is even so complex it hasn't even achieved net plus anyway.
Even a giant like Microsoft doesn't have unlimited funds to burn.
I am user of Microsoft Nuclear Cloud Plant Manager Xp SP3 and after update my control panel restarted causing power outage.
Now every time i click power status it is crashing, while power output is rising, making pipes hot.
I already tried msreactor /scannow but don’t want to reinstall reactor as last time I did it I lost my city (and support only told to use boron or move to another area).
The article mentions Helion. Those guys were supposed to have their Polaris demo machine running by now. But they've become very quiet about that. Press releases about it in 2024, but not much in 2025.
Polaris is supposed to pass theoretical breakeven, and maybe even technical breakeven - more electrical power out than they put in. That would be a huge event.
Fusion is dumb I don't understand why people care about it. Fission is save, has cheap inputs and the energy density is already absurdly high. Fusion adds 1000x the complexity for little gain.
Probably a good idea to have sufficient nuclear reactors on time, before we geoengineer stratospheric albedo and the output of renewables drops as a result.
Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU? Well here we are building nuclear reactors to run our brute force "scaled" LLMs. Really, really dumb.
> Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU?
No? The tradeoff is entirely one between the value of labour versus the value of industry. If dev hours are cheap and CPUs expensive. If it’s the other way, which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs.
This makes sense if and only if you entirely ignore all secondary and tertiary effects of your choices.
Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid, depriving local citizens of resources for your datacenter, and let's not forget ewaste, pollution from higher energy use, pollution caused by manufacturing more and more chips, pollution and cost of shipping more and more chips across the planet.
> Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid
This is a peculiarly USA-localized problem. For a large number of reasons, datacenters are going up all over the world now, and proportionally more of them are outside the US than has been the case historically. And a lot of these places have easier access to cheaper, cleaner power with modernized grids capable of handling it.
> pollution from higher energy use
Somewhat coincidentally as well, energy costs in China and the EU are projected to go down significantly over the the next 10 years due to solar and renewables, where it's not so clear that's going to happen in the US.
As for the rest of the arguments around chip manufacturing and shipping and everything else, well, what do you expect? That we would just stop making chips? We only stopped using horses for transportation when we invented cars. I don't yet see what's going to replace our need for computing.
Both chips and developer time are expensive. Massively so, both in direct cost and secondary and tertiary elements. (If you think hiring more developers to optimise code has no knock-on effects, I have a bridge to sell you.)
There isn't an iron law about developer time being less valuable than chips. When chip progress stagnates, we tend towards optimising. When the developer pipeline is constrained, e.g. when a new frontier opens, we tend towards favouring exploration over optimisation.
If a CS programme is teaching someone to always try to optimise an algorithm versus consider whether hardware might be the limitation, it's not a very good one. In this case, when it comes to AI, there is massive investment going into trying to find more efficient training and inference algorithms. Research which, ironically enough, generally requires access to energy.
And you would have been mocked by your peers for being so concieted that you'd dare to look down on other people for not inventing an algorithm that doesn't exist and for which there's no evidence it's even possible for one to exist.
There's a ton of research into more efficient AI algorithms. We've also seen that GPT-5 has better performance despite being no bigger than previous models. GPU/ASIC vendors are also increasing energy efficiency every generation. More datacenters will be needed despite these improvements because we're probably only using 1% of the potential of AI so far.
You see this in other sectors where demand outstrips improvements in economy. Individual planes use substantially less fuel than they did 50 years ago, because there are now fewer engines on planes and the remaining engines are also more efficient; but the growth in air travel has substantially outpaced that.
You have a point. But it doesn't make sense to seek for the next unrealized breakthrough (low energy, brain-comparable power consumption) AI leap yet, when existing products are already so transformative.
There's no efficient algorithm for simulating a human brain, and you certainly haven't invented one so you've got absolutely no excuse to act smug about it. LLMs are already within an order of magnitude of the energy efficiency as the human brain, it's probably not possible to make them much more efficient algorithmically.
Your brain has a TDP of 15W while frontier LLMs require on the order of megawatts. That's 5-6 orders of magnitude difference, despite our semiconductors having a lithographic feature size that's also orders of magnitude smaller than our biological neurons. You should do some more research.
>Your brain has a TDP of 15W while frontier LLMs require on the order of megawatts.
You should do some basic maths; the megawatts are used for serving many LLM instances at once. The correct comparison is the cost of just a single LLM instance.
Yes, the cost figures published by LLM labs imply a power consumption measured in megawatts for each instance of top performance frontier models. Take the L.
dating myself here but I remember in the 90s reading a really funny spoof article about Microsoft announcing they had developed nuclear weapons. Didn't even seem that implausible at the time.
I would have linked it here but none of the search engines are turning up anything at all, and in fact I don't think it's even possible to find stuff like that with search engines anyore.
I had thought maybe it was on the old 0xdeadbeef mailing list, but no luck, but probably it was this from rec.humor.funny which in the end isn't quite as clever as I remember it being.
Awesome. I'm convinced nuclear is the only realistic path toward an energy-laden sustainable future, I've yet to understand the fear mongering beyond political faction bearing and token counting in terms of district employment numbers or some such third-order nonsense... there's nothing safer in terms of human lethality.
Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization.
It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years.
It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors.
Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI.
I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?
Nuclear may be a big part of the future (assuming storage prices don't plummet) but it's not going to be the bulk of the power we ever receive. It'll be the 10% that stabilizes the grid and provides baseload, at most.
Also relevant given the post is also about fusion.
At this conference for progress nerds, with big arguments between solar and fission nuclear "no one wanted to defend fusion".
> Fusion promises cheap clean limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap clean limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.
...
> the only pro-fusion sentiment I saw at the conference was a series of graphs comparing “fission” and “fusion” and showing strong performance advantages for
”fusion” in all categories. But it turned out the pro-solar faction had mischievously labeled solar as “fusion” since it ultimately comes from the sun’s solar core. It was a good trick - think of solar as a new high-tech wonder, instead of as the annoying thing environmentalists keep nagging us about, and it really does look like a miracle.
Uranium shortage, expensive builds, long timelines, unproven technology(no commercial molten salt deployments). Just do solar and batteries. It is way cheaper and proven. Going to get even cheaper when sodium batteries become mainstream, less than half the cost of lithium batteries.
The problem is that I don't trust corporations to run nuclear plants reponsibly; and if they fail to do so and I get hurt, then I don't trust society to take care of me or to hold the corps accountable.
I don't outright buy the claim that a "failure" results in you getting hurt. Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events. You're getting 3x the yearly radiation from one cross-country flight NYC to SF than you would if you lived at the gates of a nuclear power plant for a year.
You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many.
Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood.
I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.
>Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events.
Not at all.
Fukushima costs 7 billion per year now, after 15 years, with no end in sight. Boar with meat measuring over 30 000 bq/kg was shot 30 years after Chernobyl in areas over 1000 miles away.
The things that have already happened were not acute, immediate or local, they were wide-spread and long-lasting.
And they were far from the worst that could have happened. Imagine if the fire at Chernobyl was not put out, for example.
Financially and technically nuclear makes little sense since solar and batteries are faster to deploy and much cheaper.
Nuclear power is very interesting for nations and companies that want to extract money from the taxpaying population. Microsoft gets cheap electricity now, and when the US discovers that its promise to handle the waste and liability is crazy expensive, taxpayers will have to pay for it. Not Microsoft.
Politicians and corps generally want to start multi-billion dollar projects to deliver comparatively tiny amounts of electricity 10 years from now, because it's about the money today, not about the electricity tomorrow.
Don't fall for it. We want to build cheap, distributed, uncomplicated electricity ourselves, controlled by the people who consume it.
Even if nobody gets rich from selling electricity in that scenario, there's plenty of money to be made from consuming almost free electricity.
I'm just not sure we can trust the numbers in today's America. I'm sure it's safe if they are run responsibly, but we've already got stuff like Cancer Alley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley). I'm less worried about a disaster than I am about long term radiation exposure due to cut corners.
It's too expensive compared to solar with storage.
The numbers from published analyses are clear. The revealed preferences from local market participants and foreign geopolitical rivals strongly aligns with these analyses.
If Bill Gates wants to put his money into making it cheaper per Wh, then that's great, and I support him doing this.
There was popular resistance to nuclear, and nuclear was held back, but that doesn't mean nuclear was held back by popular resistance. It certainly doesn't explain why nuclear is struggling to compete with renewables globally, even in countries without popular resistance (like China).
McMurdo was powered by a modular reactor in the 60s. It's not "hypothetical" - though I do agree it's not economically scalable, but neither is training an LLM and before OpenAI did it DARPA did it, and you'd better believe the DOD did it too. I'm saying that the technology exists, it's been proven, and it can work - the hangup is political and cultural, and it burdens me with sadness to see conversation focus on things like "omg what if microsoft put clippy on an ICBM" it's appealing to ridicule and we've enough of that tendency these days. Instead we should celebrate this! Explore and discuss it from merit and principle.
I want to like nuclear, but it's clear that many of it's proponents are red-eyed bitcoin-maxis with that strange fanatical juvenile vibe going, and it all just turns me off because it's obvious they are spouting BS. It's all just an act to pump a penny stock or because they are an angsty teen.
PRC nuclear isn't "slowing" it's on pace/steady relative to latest 5 year plan, but pace of renewables like solar have simply exploded relative to forecast. The TLDR is there was dicey 2010-2020 period post Fukushima reassessment and AP1000/EPR drama... where PRC realized even they can't build western nuclear tech economically due to foreign drama (technical issues, political issues i.e. sanctions, Westinghouse bankruptcy). Took them a few years to unfuck situation with indigenous nuclear tech stack, but then solar LCOE plummeted and industrial capacity made prioritizing solar no brainer. As in they're still on trend for nuclear targets, but far above trend for solar... party because after cracking down on real estate, resources went into industry, and solar factories went brrrt + a lot of excess labour redirected from building apartments to building solar farms. So not so much nuclear slowing, as it looks slowing relative to solar speeding. We'll know more if they scale down nuclear in next 5 year plan, which they may depending on status of storage.
They only revised down 12th since it was mid Fukushima. 13th they missed targets due to AP1000/EPR and having to pivot to domestic but didn't revise down. Special circumstances. 14th latest, midterm review a couple years ago (amidst solar boom) said most indicators were meeting expectations. Last I checked they're on trend to hit 65/70GW by 2025 with ~30GW under construction, and 70GW by 2026/27, i.e. reasonably late, which given nature of nuclear I'd give a pass and categorize as on trend give nuclear leadtimes. +1-2 year of execution delays isn't unexpected, but they're not dramatically cutting targets/plans. Have to wait until next long term strategies, i.e.see if they revise down their ~100 GW by 2030, or ~200GW by 2035 plans, reality is they're basically on first wave of domestic plants with associated growing pains. If things go well, they can quickly scale.
> In December 2011 China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) announced that China would make nuclear energy the foundation of its electricity generation system in the next “10 to 20 years”, adding as much as 300 gigawatts (GWe) of nuclear capacity over that period.
> This was followed by a period of delay as China undertook a comprehensive review of nuclear safety in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
> Subsequently, moderated nuclear energy targets were established, aiming for a nuclear energy contribution of 15% of China’s total electricity generation by 2035, 20-25% by 2050 and 45% in the second half of the century.
> However by 2023 it was becoming clear that China’s nuclear construction program was well behind schedule. The target for 2020 had not been achieved, and targets for subsequent 5-year plans were unlikely to be achieved.
> In September 2023 the China Nuclear Energy Association (CNEA) reported that China was now aiming to achieve a nuclear energy contribution of 10% by 2035, increasing to around 18% by 2060.
China has also revamped the funding model for nuclear power with it now having to compete on costs with alternative generation. They have an enormous backlog of reactors which has achieved regulatory approval but have yet to start construction.
In 2025 only 4 reactors have so far started construction, in 2024 the total number was 6 reactors.
At current expansion rates nuclear power's slice of the Chinese grid is shrinking. Let alone multiplying.
Quotes from article repeating my points but missing context. 2011 was 12th 5-year plan, post Fukushima + desire to indigenize nuclear stack, they revised down nuclear ambitions / timelines, but it's not indicator they're cancelling / downgrading nuclear rollout. As in 13th, 14th plan hasn't deviated from nuclear targets revised 15 years ago, i.e. generation goal has been consistent given reasonable adjustments 100GW by 2030, 200GW by 2035 vs 300 GW in timeline without Fukushima + indigenization. Nuclear contribution downgrade as % of energy mix wasn't because they plan to curtail / cut back nuclear GWs, it's because their projection for future energy demand has grown above prediction, so planned nuclear share is going to be smaller %, i.e. nuclear share falls even if GW targets consistent. It just so happens they lucked out that solar/wind matured rapidly to fill gap.
Current construction / execution issues involves in dealing with 1st wave of indigenous plants, again it's shrinking as % of grid/mix because denominator is higher than expected, which is independent of central gov desire to multiply nuclear build rate, which they can't reliably commit to until tech is mature. So the best we can say is they're a few years off their planned nuclear GWs and if tech matures, they can go forth and multiply. Of course if alternative LCOE makes nuclear not economical that could change, i.e. if storage blows up. But there's no actual policy hints that nuclear is being revised down, as in not in the last 15 years, which even then is mostly target being pushed a decade due to factors listed. Now they're on trend and the delays are single digit year execution related, not 10+ year we have to rebuild the tech stack delays.
We’re in the realm of math here, not your opinion or imagination.
The second derivative is negative for all data shown (except 2018). That means, factually, objectively, in reality, as measured, the rate of growth decreased.
If you need help understanding this, I can provide a spreadsheet with the calculation and plots.
No offense, "Realm of math" is useless autistic framing. We're in the realm of politics and policy. Numbers rising or falling are execution noise, downstream of intent and implementation. PRC's 13th/14th Five-Year Plans all kept medium term target (~200GW by 2035). Shortfalls (i.e. numbers decreasing) come from first-gen domestic reactor growing pains not strategic abandonment. Pointing at a latest points graph line and yelling "decreasing" without context is spreadsheet nitpicks vs what policy signals suggest future trend will be. The reality is PRC rollout is slightly behind schedule, single digit years. LCOE of solar and other renewables are increasing projected energy generation targets, so nuclear is less as % of energy mix even though policy for nuclear has been steady, i.e. behind schedule =/= decreasing nuclear commitment.
From what I can tell, Helion energy has already broken ground on what would be a commercial fusion reactor connected to the WA grid despite their best prototype still not producing net positive energy. It's a gamble, but presumably everyone involved is willing to take the risks. A data center that runs on fusion would be a real watershed moment and everyone wants to be first.
If Helion delivers a working fusion reactor that produces net electricity, at commercially competitive rates, I think that's an even more significant event than the recent AI boom.
> I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.
There may be some of that, but I think a lot of it is people who believe in what they're doing. A good example in another field is Stockton Rush and his submarine - assuming he wasn't suicidal, he clearly believed in what he was doing, even though to any sane and informed outsider it was fundamentally and life-threateningly flawed.
"Breaking ground" and "wanting to be first" makes no difference to the physics, engineering, and economics involved here. They're just going to end up with an expensive plant that eats money.
No-one has yet demonstrated a break-even fusion reactor purely from a physics perspective - let alone an engineering or, even more challenging, an economics perspective. In other words, we're essentially still in the fundamental physical research phase.
It's like building international airports for jet planes when you've just invented the Kitty Hawk - but worse, really, because at least the Kitty Hawk proved we could fly in practice. With fusion, there's no evidence that we'll ever be able to create a sustained, economically viable reaction.
Ugh, I rdread this topic because nuclear is as close to as a religion as you get on HN. SMRs just arne't better in any way that matters [1].
And while I personally hope we have economical commercial power generation in the future, I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons, which have the added problem that they destroy your very expensive containment vessel. Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core (depending on the size of the star) and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.
I'm reminded of the push recycling of plastic. Evidence has surface that this was nothing more than oil industry propaganda to sell more plastic [2]. A lot of "recycling" is simply dumping the problem into developing countries and then just looking the other way. We used to do this to China until they stopped taking plastic to "recycle".
I can't help but think that Microsoft issuing some press releases about nuclear is nothing more than marketing to contributing to the data center explosion that will inevitably drive up your electricity bills because you'll pay for the infrastructure that needs to be built and will be paying the generous (and usually secret) subsidies these data centers engotiate.
Ironically, I'm fairly sure that it is in fact big oil propaganda claiming that plastic recycling is big oil propaganda.
You could for example look at China, a country that has embraced nuclear and solar and wind and batteries and EVs because they don't have good access to oil and don't have much government influence from that group.
Do they recycle more or less of their plastic waste than the USA?
Google suggests in 2023 it's 30% in China vs 12% in the USA.
It's a confusing topic, as some anti-plastic campaigners seize on this intentional failure of the US to recycle more and better to try to push total plastic bans.
Which are good policy for specific items, and again we see these being done in China too, as a complement to recycling, not a replacement.
> I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons
That's just one of many massive problems? You touched on the reason for this:
> Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core ... and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.
As a result of this, we actually have no good reason to believe that commercially viable fusion power could ever be possible.
While we can create conditions comparable in relevant ways to the core of a star, it's extremely uneconomic to do so, for obvious reasons.
And we haven't even achieved the scientific breakeven point for a sustained reaction, let alone one that remotely approaches being viable from an engineering or economic perspective.
Neutron energy loss would be a good problem to have, because it'd mean we're much further along than we are now. The fact that, after half a century and enormous expenditures, we haven't even reached the point where neutron energy loss is the main problem, gives an idea of just how unrealistic this all is.
The one company I really want to see involved in dangerous things with clean up and serious environmental risks is the company that has serious production QA problems, an attention span of about 2 minutes, regular bouts of corporate schizophrenia and a policy of forcing half the planet to abandon working hardware.
Nothing good can come of this.
Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it.
Are there serious environment risks with fusion reactors?
My understanding was that very little radioactive waste was created from a fusion reactor and what little there is will decay pretty quickly (decades).
A fusion reactor creates a much more intense flux of neutrons than any fission reactor, which will transmute into radioactive isotopes any substance from which a shield will be made.
So the quantity of radioactive waste will certainly not be little, but more likely much greater than in a fission reactor.
Nevertheless, because there is more freedom in the design of the neutron shield than in a fission reactor, it is likely that it is possible to find such compositions where most of the radioactive waste will decay quickly enough, so that there will remain only a small quantity of long-lived radioactive waste.
However, until someone demonstrates this in reality, it is still uncertain how much radioactive waste will be generated, because this depends on many constructive details.
A lot of components of a fusion reactor, e.g. pipes for cooling fluid and the like, will become damaged by the neutrons and they will have to be replaced periodically, after becoming radioactive. The amount of such waste will depend a lot on the lifetimes of such components. For now it is very uncertain how much time such components will resist before requiring maintenance.
To show the scale of the problem: if the world were powered by Helion's reactors (for all primary energy), and the tritium produced were just released into the environment and mixed completely with all water on the planet (including oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, and ice), then it would lift all that water above the US regulatory limit for tritium in drinking water. All the water, including everything in every ocean.
You are correct. Radioactive materials from fusion reactors are not a significant environmental threat. The bigger problem with fusion reactors is that nobody has yet built a controlled terrestrial fusion reactor that produces net power.
Well we don't have working fusion reactor topology yet but the current "reactor" components are low level waste so safe within 40-100 years. Which is still a hell of a long time. Also they still will require biological shielding and associated materials are quite difficult to deal with (concrete etc).
I expect that the longevity of their attention is considerably less than this, particularly if the LLM boom crashes. ROI will not pay for the disposal later down the line.
The claims of low level waste from fusion reactors implicitly assume that impurity elements (like, say, niobium) that would produce long lived activation products can be reduced to very low levels. This may drive up the cost of materials dramatically.
"Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it."
Do they? I hope they don't. I would enjoy seeing MSFT implode and losing trust of its shareholders with its cash - itll be forced to return it rather than reinvest.
Ah yes a nuclear race to the bottom. Sorry but that will be a monumental fuck up if you have any historical knowledge about how we handle nuclear materials.
Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now.
It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste.
I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are interested in it enough to put money into it. That suggests there is a market need for it, or at least interest, within the current context.
We should assume they're acting rationally, so the real question is, why do they find this interesting at all? Why not dump the money into private solar farms instead?
The world will spend about a quadrillion dollars on energy in the 21st century. Piddling little billion dollar investments look like long shot bets on low probability outcomes. The big spending is on renewables now.
Gates in particular seems to have been a disciple of Vaclav Smil, a person whose arguments against renewable cost reduction were wildly mistaken.
We recently had an election in AU where "nuclear" was on the agenda as the (losing) party/coalition were promoting nuclear as a "solution" to our aging coal-generator fleet.
The trouble is that:
a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"
b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period
c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle
d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables
e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
[1] https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/ele...
> "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"
"Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.
First, "providing baseload" is a privilege you enjoy if you are the unconditionally cheapest provider of electricity at all times, not something that anyone ever needs you to do.
If you only need power for short periods of time when renewables are unavailable, then "constant output" plants like coal or nuclear are the last thing you want to build-- they are simply not worth it for the the short periods of time when renewables are down.
You want simple, cheap powerplants instead that trade off higher fuel costs for low capex, and that is currently gas. You want cheap MW (max power) from those plants instead of cheap MWh (energy), basically.
It's easy to be "unconditionally cheapest" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. "Simple, cheap" power plants that burn a lot of expensive natural gas (or even worse, coal) are the current approach to that problem, which is not working very well. The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.
Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time).
If they get undercut by renewables most of the time, there is simply no way they can stay competitive.
Nuclear peaker plants are not ever gonna be a thing, because that makes no sense economically: High capex is the last thing you want for that usecase, and it implies that the economics for your plant have to stay decent for the next 30 years. Meanwhile batteries, solar and wind are still getting cheaper every year right now. This is the worst bet you could ever make as an investor.
> nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.
This argument does not help nuclear power if the equivalent number of gas plants is still cheaper than a single nuclear reactor (and built much faster).
> Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time).
In Ontario, Canada they are the third-cheapest (after hydro, and nat/methane gas); see Table 2:
* https://oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20241018...
In previous years they have often been second-cheapest (after hydro): their 'ranking' depends on methane gas commodity prices.
Nuclear can be apparently cheap (its TCO is difficult to establish because gov funding, hot waste potentially breaking havoc in a distant future...) but never is when load-following, because load-following reduces the load factor, and a low load factor bumps up production costs.
Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot). Even France (shock-full of reactors) always needs to produce approximately 10% ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) of its juice thanks to fossil fuel, for a non-negligible part ensuring load-following.
> Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot).
There is load-following thermally and load-following electrically. Newer nuclear designs allow for the steam to be diverted and quenched so they don't reach the generators.
Of course this is inefficient, but as you can see in the following link:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply
the Ontario nuclear plants basically run at full-tilt 24/7 to provide base load.
Hydro-electric is also supplying a bunch of base load, so if more nuclear can be built so that it takes up more of that hydro is doing, hydro can then be used in a more variable fashion (so perhaps (nat/methane) gas can be reduced and we have fewer GHGs released).
Yes, there are two types of load-following: "bump up the power", or "lower it". This also applies do renewables: not producing (many wind turbines are equipped with a braking system) or wasting an excess of power isn't as challenging as quickly producing more power, then less, then more... fine-tuning and for extended periods of time.
Yes, running at full-tilt 24/7 is way easier for a nuclear reactor than doing the load-following game (on every account: total cost, maintenance, risk...). They are built for it!
Hydro: yes, to an extent because load-following hydro is mainly done by pumped-storage, many dams are of the "run-of-the-river" type and cannot always load-follow: if there is no incoming (upstream) water they cannot produce any power.
Which is a quirk of hindering renewable deployment.
All over Europe nuclear reactors are throttled down or even shut down for days/weeks because renewables lead to too low prices for the reactors to even cover wear and tear and fuel costs.
Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history this will happen in every grid that is based on a free market principle.
In the monopolized markets the distributed aspects of renewables will mean that rooftop solar and storage enables home owners to largely disconnect from the grid if the monopoly starts to force new built nuclear power costs on the ratepayers.
In other words: Nuclear power is fucked unless it can either get the marginal cost to zero like a solar panel, i.e. impossible or get CAPEX low enough to act like a fossil gas peaker which again seems near impossible given the past 70 years of nuclear powers history and commercialization.
> Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history
Not according to the energy contracts in Ontario as shown in the OEB report linked above.
Yes, the OEB report is for a paid off fleet. Sure, some investment in recent years but not even close to a new build.
The cost for the Darlington SMR is somewhere in the 25-35 cents/kWh range with the calculation assuming large learning effects to subsequent reactors and that the entire project goes on time and on budget.
Does that sound cheap to you?
Indeed!
Experts (International Energy Agency, McKinsey, etc.) are clear: renewables will produce the majority of electricity by 2050.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/tripling-renewable-power-ca...
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/energy-and-materials/our...
This is inevitable (no other possibility is realistic), and this applies to France, where RTE (EDF's subsidiary that manages the electricity grid) has emphasized that 100% nuclear power is out of the question, and that more than 60% nuclear power would be utopian.
This trend is already clearly visible and welcomed by investors.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
The cost of producing renewable electricity is increasingly lower than that of nuclear power.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
During their operation, they do not consume fuel, produce waste, or expose people to a major accident, and are therefore and will be preferred.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-09/european-...
The surplus electricity sometimes produced by renewables will be leveraged by increasing storage capacity (electric vehicles, hydro pumped storage, etc.) as well as green hydrogen. It will gradually replace nuclear electricity, which is supposed to compensate for their variability, especially since the latter cannot adjust its production quickly and frequently enough ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796580 ).
All of this will reduce the nuclear load factor and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with strong feedback (the higher the load factor, the more likely it will be).
This will increasingly favor the deployment of a system based primarily on renewables, meaning that nuclear electricity will become less and less useful and more and more expensive, making its fate (and therefore the profitability of the heavy investments required for its infrastructure) easy to predict.
A renewable-nuclear mix will doom the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg
The figures you give don't appear to reflect the fully loaded cost of providing power from new nuclear power plants. It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for.
> It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for.
In Ontario there used to be a government-owned utility, Ontario Hydro. They built all the nuclear plants (and everything else).
But at some point things were re-jigged so parts of Ontario Hydro could be privatized (the government still owns shares), but because of how it was broken up its debt could not be split up or given to any of the resulting components.
* https://www.oefc.on.ca/debtmanage.html
So a separate legal entity was created where the debt is now held, and rate payers give money to that corporation to pay off old debt (both nuclear and non-nuclear) as part of their rate.
Also worth noting that the nuclear plants in Ontario are going through a refit currently, so it's not like the plants were built and nothing has done with them except for OpEx; there's a whole bunch of CapEx happening right now (and has been for the last few years):
* https://www.brucepower.com/life-extension-program-mcr-projec...
* https://www.ans.org/news/article-6280/bruce-power-refurbishm...
* https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/darli...
Yes, nuclear can be cost competitive if you ignore the bulk of the costs: aka construction and decomissioning.
Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.
> Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.
Well the current plants have been running for 4-5 decades and are in the middle of being refurbished to run for another 4-5 decades.
Only paying for itself for the life of the plant is actually a good thing: it means that it is basically being run at-cost with minimal profits being extracted from the public.
No wind? In Canada? With or without subsidies?
>Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already
Because they are over-regulated. Why? Because of nucleophobia, which is fueled by fossil fuel producers.
That's simply untrue and focusing on it will continue to result in nuclear failure after nuclear failure.
Nobody has some sort of proposal of a different regulatory scheme that is somehow cheaper. Even France, which built a ton decades ago, has completely failed for more than a decade at building. South Korea has been somewhat successful at building, but also sends execs to jail for faking parts approvals. But perhaps that would be cheap to fix.
What has changed since the mid 20th century is that construction labor is far more expensive in comparison to other things that can be done with that labor. Construction productivity has remained roughly constant over time, as manufacturing and other productivity has gone through the roof.
Nuclear is fundamentally a big construction project. SMRs weresypposed to be an attempt to make nuclear power a manufacturing project, not a construction project. But it turns out that construction projects like the BWRX300 are the only real SMRs that can be produced, after a decade of hype. Manufacturing SMRs like 747s is not any more real today than it was when the nuclear PR machine turned to it in the wake of the financial and construction disaster of the AP1000s at Summer and Vogtle.
The real story of nuclear is the need for super cheap labor, and excellent high-tech construction capacity. These two requirements are at odds with each other, because in societies with high tech construction skills, labor quickly becomes expensive.
Even places like China with lots of successful nuclear projects is only building a tiny tiny amount of nuclear when compared to their wind, solar, and batteries. China does everything, and they won't abandon nuclear completely because a nuclear workforce is essential for a country with superpower ambitions, but the nuclear power is there for the superpower ambitions, not the electricity generation.
It's funny you say that. Renewables are "cheap" precisely because a lot of the labor cost is offloaded to cheap labor countries with low regulations. There is basically no solar panel market outside of China, and that says something. It's a very messy process and benefits largely from China's willingness to not care.
Every single big renewable project is heavily backed by government and subsidies. Wind is big in Germany, because gov pushed it very hard, not because it's naturally competitive.
So far, I see a lot of ideologues pushing the "cheaper" argument even though it hasn't been true at all, and the long-term prospect don't look very good compared to nuclear. But it has more political support, so it is made to be more "competitive" and that's basically all there is to it.
Even residential solar only makes sense when people who install it get paid a lot more than the bulk electricity actually cost, if people had to pay themselves for both panels and storage it is largely a loss compared to regulated market price for electricity in many places in Europe.
I just don't think smrs work without figuring out Lftrs. Because lifters can use almost all the fuel, are inherently meltdown proof, you basically take away the two worst dangers of nuclear.
The issue with degradation of the piping and everything from the molten salts can probably be solved by a replacement cycle.
But to be fair, I have no idea how China's MSR is going
If the EU and US would each commit to build, fund 100+ NPPs over the next years then it would make sense to gear up for a scheme.
Unfortunately each plant is a fucking special snowflake. Due to new sites somehow requiring changes which is absurd, since the containment and everything under it should be 1:1 copy, right? Yes, because the NRC doesn't work like that. Designs are tweaked.
Anyway as you said it's a very expensive bespoke weld and pour festival.
They are also built and run by public or quasi-public utilities. I don't think we have a lot of examples of the private sector building nuclear generating plants. Maybe they can do it better, when it's their own money on the line, and they don't have a legally granted monopoly protecting them.
Privatizing electricity in California resulted in massive underinvestment and forest fires as a result of poor maintenance.
Privatization only saves money if you ignore the price paid by surrounding communities.
I would not like to see a fully private nuclear plant.
Privatization of electricity hands a company a monopoly
Depends on how you do it. The electrical supply and demand markets can be privatized and that works quite well with few ancillary services needed.
Privatizing the grid is a shit show since it is a natural monopoly.
> which is not working very well
It's actually working great. Gas peakers are expensive to run, but not nearly as expensive and time consuming to deploy as nuclear - you could deploy a solar installation with matching gas capacity and still spend less and have it years earlier than the least expensive, fastest deploying nuclear power plant.
On top of that storage has been undercutting gas lately in terms of cost - especially now that it scaled up.
That is all affecting the economics of nuclear.
Combined storage and solar/wind will probably drop under combined cycle gas in a couple years, certainly it will for China.
> The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.
This does not align with reality.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
You should check your sources. Very often the reverse is actually true. The recent years are not really representative because a lot of reactors were put on hold waiting for repairs and improvement.
There is also the fact that France added millions of people while not building new nuclear capacities, so of course at some point there is going to be overload without renewed investment.
Bug people like seems to want to put more money on renewable so that we can import even more electricity from Germany's coal plants (that makes up to 40% of their electricity generation in the winter when the wind is nowhere to be found).
I'm very curious where you find your data, because it's not at all what I have been able to get. If there is some source that clearly shows renewable superiority in the winter, I would really like to see it.
To be self-sufficient without coal, Germany needs to install 150GW of wind power still, and at current rate it will take at least 10 years. But I'm very curious what is their solution for when they get no wind for weeks on end, like it has happened recently. So far it seems to be, fire up the coal plant and take the cheap nuclear from your neighbor while posturing and virtue signaling about your superiority of not using nuclear.
Seems like people confuse the old school "gas peakers" which are basically just simple generators burning gasoline or diesel designed to be used intermittently, and advanced combined cycle natural gas, which are incredibly efficient. Natural Gas is super cheap in many markets, and it appears to be common theory that markets with limited natural gas simply haven't been explored sufficiently due to other fuels being cheaper (coal).
ACC Natural Gas + Solar/Wind + Batteries + actively priced load shedding market seems like a tremendous quartet.
Yes it's super cheap because there isn't carbon taxes.
In the US it is also super cheap because it is a byproduct of our fracking in The Dakotas.
It's a byproduct of a lot of oil production while also having its own reserves. My office used to look at an oil refinery that was miles away, and they were just burning the natural gas off in a huge plume, not worth trying to capture and combust for production.
The fracking is also in Arkansas and Texas and many other states. An amazing amount of gas continues to be discovered. I am not a geologist but assume that Australia could dedicate resources to explore fracking gas reserves and would come up with quite bit.
sidebar, but I just realized that Australia doesnt really have mountains to speak of. Tallest mountain is around the elevation of the typical Colorado Rockies valley towns. Australia may not have the 'cap traps' required to retain large amounts of gas in the various layers going down under ground.
We're not seeing a lot of realistic numbers published for the cost of a 100% renewables + storage grid because there is the X factor of "How many outages can you tolerate?"
Storage over a 24 hour period is one thing, the economics don't look difficult at all. In places like Upstate NY, however, usable insolation can vary by a factor of 3x between summer and winter. You can overbuild solar panels by 3x or you can add a few months of storage which costs a lot more than a few hours or days worth of storage. There is also the issue of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
It would be great to have a backup energy source which is fully and economically dispatchable and environmentally benign but it's not there. I suspect there is some point of required reliability where adding nuclear baseload makes the grid more reliable economically compared to building months worth of storage. See
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
also nuclear power plants are capable of load-following
https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
it's just not an optimal use of the capital. The Gates foundation has been researching LMFBRs that use thermal batteries to improve load following abilities.
You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios.
The real criticism of nuclear at this point in time is that any new plants are a decade out. It's a reason to start early, but no matter how you slice when the next NPP goes online in the US the amount of solar and wind added to the grid between here and now will dwarf it.
You raise good points, but I think none of the anti-renewable arguments are really show-stoppers, mainly because of how cheap things have become; solar panels are cheaper than glass windows now and prismatic LiFePo cells are down to ~$60 for 1kWh at single digit quantities (!!).
Figuring out the most economical mix of overprovisioning, improved grid connectivity, battery storage and more exotic longer term storage (synthetic gas/heat/fossils + capture/etc.) is a problem that is IMO best solved by the market over time.
I also think it is very telling how even a nation like France, which is basically in the perfect position to stick with nuclear power over renewables is still building out wind/solar rapidly. Nuclear power not even managing to defend its home turf makes it very questionable to fully bet on it elsewhere.
> You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios.
I think you are missing far simpler solutions for what is in terms of TWh needed a tiny problem.
Why not just use biofuels, synfuels or hydrogen?
Whatever the aviation and the maritime shipping industries settles on since they are unable to in the foreseeable future decarbonize with batteries.
The US today produces enough ethanol for gas blending to run the entire grid for 16 days without help.
As we switch to BEVs it is trivial to repurpose that for the grid, while also ensuring that the inputs decarbonize as well.
Hydrogen has a major storage problem.
Let’s start with a syngas blend and work ourselves to perfect if that, of all things, is the problem that will make hydrogen infeasible.
We’re seeing the first prototype ferries with hydrogen propulsion being built and delivered as we speak.
Hydrogen does not work for ocean crossing routes, then it takes too much space in compressed form.
Liquid is always an alternative, but that comes with its own challenges.
Places where we already store natgas / methane interseasonally are good candidates, and more are available.
Hydrogen will leak out of about anything, and then there's hydrogen embrittlement.
Salt caverns seem good. And a bit of leakage is likely OK (the pass through storage via hydrolysis is far from 100% efficient anyway) and the only piping might be from hydrolysers and to turbines very close by, so should be manageable...
I'll check and see where the nearest salt cavern is --- ---- nope, nowhere around here.
Have you heard of this thing called a grid? I hear it is amazing at moving electricity around!
If you are not an ideologue the reality is that it's not really possible and not a serious option.
Modern society/civilisation relies on reliable power generation on cue, wanting to gamble that ability just to be able to remove nuclear because "it's too expensive" is beyond stupid. The cost of a long blackout is so much worse than anyone pretending otherwise is a fool.
As for storage solutions, even if they were existing and dirt cheap there is the problem of capacity sizing. How much do you build for? One week, two weeks, one month? If renewable generation cannot recover for a single day more than you planned for, you are done.
In a world where climate is constantly changing and the rate of change is increasing; it is crazy to be willing to put everything in solutions entirely depending on this.
We have to build renewables, they make sense for the low hanging fruit, but only doing renewable is just foolish. And this is exactly why nuclear makes sense, no matter how much it costs.
People on HN all seem to be venture capitalist, only thinking about cost/profits as if that should be sole motivator for doing things. That's just sad.
But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time? And for those once-every-few-years scenarios, why shouldn't we build (far cheaper) carbon-captured natural gas peaker plants?
Besides, you've got to keep in mind that we aren't going to be building for yearly-average kWh consumption. Companies will be building overcapacity to take advantage of high-demand/low-supply peak pricing.
I don't think it is unlikely that we'll end up with a situation where PV on an overcast day is enough for "baseload", with the practically-free electricity on sunny/windy days opening up new economic opportunities.
> But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time?
'“Energy Droughts” in Wind and Solar Can Last Nearly a Week, Research Shows':
* https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/energy-droughts-wind-and-sol...
See also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
I think it would be location-dependent (low risk that (e.g.) the UK would be windless for long stretches of time, especially off the coast).
Not at continental scale, and grids are or will soon be at this scale.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811...
I agree generally, but is carbon-captured natural gas generation actually a thing? The only carbon capture I've heard of is at the gas production site removing CO2 from the reservoir gas and pumping it back underground - that's not after combustion. (And the pumping it back underground hasn't been particularly successful, eg https://www.boilingcold.com.au/regulator-limits-chevrons-tro... )
If it was only a matter of 'once-every-few-years' then current emergency capacity will suffice. The problem is that:
A) It happens often enough to be a problem emergency capacity can't handle.
B) Natural gas is not always an option (especially when Russia is the only readily available seller in the area and you DON'T want to be dependent on a potentially hostile neighbor).
C) Existing storage solutions require a massive investment in local solutions, or in the national grid if storage is centralized.
We need to re-think the entire idea about energy always being cheap and available, while somehow preventing those with more money from simply monopolizing supply by outbidding everyone else. You won't solve that with batteries. Many therefore try to maintain the current situation by doing this the old way.
A. We handle dankelflaute's now, and as long as we don't decommission gas peakers, we'll still be able to continue to handle them.
B. Europe has lots of natgas storage. 100 days of storage isn't enough for independence from Russia now, but if we're only using gas for dankelflaute's 5 days of the year, thats ~20 years of storage.
Batteries are extremely cost competitive today for overnight storage, and are marginally cost competitive for weekly storage. That's enough to handle everything except for a dankelflaute. In which case see above.
"Storage" can synthesize hydrocarbons, i.e. fuel, which can then be stored forever, until energy is needed.
This was already possible by the time of WWII, but now there are many methods in development for reducing carbon dioxide by electrolysis, and then use the product to synthesize longer hydrocarbons, which have higher efficiency than the older methods.
The round-trip efficiency of this will always be worse than for batteries, which remain a better option for short time storage, but synthesizing fuel will be a valid method for storing energy for the winter during the summer, and also for applications where batteries are unsuitable, like aircraft and spacecraft.
We can also do things like desalinate water and pump it uphill when solar is plentiful and prices are negative. No need to get hydrocarbons involved.
Creating fresh water and pumping it uphill to a reservoir that is uphill of a turbine would help solves two problems in Southern California.
If you compare the combination of renewables and batteries to pumped hydro it loses badly.
It's like pumped hydro with a very predictable rainstorm directly above it every day. You'd be able to get by with a much smaller reservoir.
> "Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks.
See the system described in the OP link at this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942
Long term literally dirt cheap thermal storage coupled with extreme cost optimized PV that would provide 600 C heat 365/24/7 for as little as $3/GJ, on par with combustion of inexpensive natural gas. Complementary with diurnal storage from batteries, this would be a complete solution to the renewable intermittency problem.
Can sand batteries work? Recent post on HN about use in Finland https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45112653
For district heating, sure. For electricity? Yes, in theory, but not at efficiencies that would make financial sense.
do efficiencies matter that much when you don't need much and can "charge" with "free" energy?
Higher efficiency storage can outbid you for the "free" energy.
perhaps, but the other way around is a possible scenario as well, because it may still be cheaper to have inefficient storage when the way you store the energy is expensive (e.g. some batteries may have very high efficiency, but you need difficult to obtain materials)
LFP batteries are > 95% efficient and only use common elements.
It was just an example for explanation
It's your core argument
> when the way you store the energy is expensive
batteries are cheap
it's an illustrative example for my argument
> batteries are cheap
a metal box for storing synthetic fuel is cheaper
Isn't that to store energy as heat so you don't produce it by other means during winter? Seems to address a specific class of storage needs
Baseload is quite irrelevant, because baseload also doesn't supply those critical needs. "Baseload" is by definition power production that can't follow the demand curve, and thus can't provide the power to keep the grid stable. It's as bad as solar and wind in this way, it's just that instead of having a fixed but variable supply curve it has a fixed but flat supply curve.
What you want is dispatchable power. Gas peaker plants for instance. Or overbuilt solar + batteries. Not baseload.
A typical car battery stores 60 kWh (the average capacity of models is increasing), so, charged during the day using inexpensive renewable electricity (particularly solar), it can power a household during one of the rare winter nights with insufficient wind.
Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.
Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).
In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.
Just to clarify for anyone who's confused... that's an EV battery, not the 12V lead-acid that's in an ICE vehicle.
>> A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day.
If there is a motivation, consumed amount for particular cloudy day could be 1\4 easily. Simply do the laundry, other energy intensive task next day.
“Simply do the laundry, other energy intensive task next day.”
lol the single life
you forgot gas
One would think people would learn from the disastrous results of the German Energiewende, where this has already been tried, but no.
The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet.
There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM.
So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland.
Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.
> It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive.
The CSIRO report says that nuclear is almost 2x more expensive than renewables even after factoring in all costs of storage and interconnects.
> Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar.
That depends on the location. Insolation and seasonality vary depending on distance from the equator, among other factors. Also, solar and wind are negatively correlated on both seasonal scales and intraday scales, so it often makes sense to mix the two if you're in Europe, rather than pick a simple winner.
Unlike solar, power wind makes very little sense even if storage improves. This is true even in first principles so technological progress is unlikely to overcome these limitations.
This is a very uneducated take. Wind absolutely makes sense in plenty of locations.
I myself am located on the west coast of Scotland and we get most of our energy from wind. Solar panels make much less sense here we tend to get much less light than most places in the world.
What's with the utterly uninformed takes on energy on HN?
Wind makes extremely good sense and has been making good sense for 30 years or more now depending on where on the globe you are looking. There is a ton of FUD about it but it is practical, affordable, available and relatively fast to deploy. Moreover there is readily financing available to take care of the capex.
There are 7 MW turbines deployed regularly
https://www.enercon.de/en/turbines/e-175-ep5
And there are 10 MW turbines and higher on the drawing board. Offshore and onshore options are available.
> What's with the utterly uninformed takes on energy on HN?
Culture war, innit.
> it is practical, affordable, available and relatively fast to deploy
It is none of those things.
Sorry, but you are not arguing in good faith. There 1.1+ TW of installed capacity producing approximately 30 to 35% of that installed capacity continuously. Turbine payback time is less than a decade.
You are in the most literal sense tilting at windmills here.
I mean, you didn't address what I said, you just looped back to what you originally said.
Unsurprisingly you got downvoted. It is a very unpopular opinion on HN. But I agree with you, the math does not add up. I have looked at the data and it makes no sense. Germany still needs to build a shit ton of wind turbines (150GW) and they are already decommissioning the first install, which is costing them a lot of money and is requiring them to think about the recycling, which will cost a lot of money. At some point we will know the true cost of wind power at least, I hope.
Germany's electricity price is almost twice of its "dirty" nuclear neighbor (France). Proof is in the pudding as they say. But most here seem to be unwilling to even look at the pudding, let alone eat it.
In what way was the energiewwende disastrous, give actual numbers.
German electricity production is increasingly dominated by renewables, in the first quarter of 2025 (which had unfavourable weather conditions) 46.9% of electricity was produced by renewables (mostly wind). Coal and gas has been declining steadily and Germany regularly exports electricity to nuclear focused France. Currently on average Germany is a net importer from France, but that does mean little because of the way cross border trade is an integral part of the European grid (note that Germany also is a net importer from Denmark whos grid is largely wind based).
So to me that sounds like a success story.
The cost of electricity is very high or at least it was during the latest period for which I have data, namely the second half of 2023:
45.65 US cents per kilowatt-hour for households in Germany compared to 16.06 US cents per kilowatt-hour for US households.
Which mostly comes from very high taxes to promote efficiency gains.
The interesting question is: What is the wholesale cost + subsidies?
Subsidies which now are being phased out for new production, or in some cases even lead to companies having to bid to get the privilege to build.
End consumer prices are utterly unusable to determine success or failure of the Energiewende. They are also utterly useless to compare across nations, as they are made up of very different components - e.g. in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors, in France the price is held artificially low by massive subsidies https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france... and so on.
50% of the price in France is also taxes and network maintenance fees so your argument does not make sense.
The retail price is so high because it is a failure of both technology and politics. The taxes are that high because politically they decided to over-invest in a bad technological choice; pretending otherwise is an extremely bad faith argument.
I don't understand "in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors". Do you mean that 60% of the price consists of taxes?
All kinds of fees (e.g. for the grid) and taxes, yes. It differs by year and depending on which surcharges were added/removed through laws. E.g. one part was for renewable subsidies and that's been removed in '22.
40% source is here (German, slide 7) https://www.bdew.de/media/documents/BDEW_Strompreisanalyse_0...
Consumer prices are now down to below 0.30 €/kwh again for new contracts (takes a few clicks for anyone) - they were mostly high previously because of Russia's war. This influence on electricity production was removed.
"Disastrous" by what metric? What are you even talking about? Germany went from >50% fossil fuel (mostly coal, not even gas!) to >60% renewables for electricity within the last two decades.
This is a huge success already.
I don't think it's a huge success, considering they're unable to meet their own demands for electricity, instead driving up energy prices in neighboring countries as well.
This. Germany has been strong arming policies around electricity in the EU for quite a while. Forcing their neighbors to sell their electricity for cheap when it is the most expensive in the market while assuming none of the costs and risks.
And they are disrupting neighbors' energy production economics when they offload their overproduction precisely when nobody wants it.
That's German superiority complex in all it's "glory".
The problem of meeting demand is in industrial use and residential heating, both of which aren’t typically electrified in Germany. The problem has more to do with an active war and an industrial sector built on cheap Russian gas.
Yes, and if they want to net-zero all their energy, not just their electricity, they will need to do some mix of:
1. electrify those applications currently served by gas 2. import or manufacture carbon-neutral synthetic gas 3. buy a heck of a lot of offsets
And since we don't have the technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere efficiently, buying offsets is spending a lot of money fooling yourself.
That is largely due to the war in Ukraine and Russian gas/oil being a big no-no in Europe right now.
Continuing to burn fossil fuel is simply not an option. Not if we want to comfortable keep living on this planet.
None of the European countries meat their energy demands by themselves. All of them regularly import and export electricity from/to their neighbors. That's a good thing and is driving down electricity prices not up.
The reason countries buy electricity from their neighbors is because it's cheaper not because they couldn't meat the demands themselves.
Now Germany is by no means perfect, heating is largely gas based which increases emissions. Ironically the law that was trying to change this, had a big counter campaign that likely contributed to the change of government.
So while the greens energiewende are often blamed for Germanys dependency on gas (although the dependency had been going for much longer), it's the conservatives who likely had a much bigger impact on Germany sticking with gas by preventing to move heating to electricity.
It's a huge success considering where they would have been if not for doing that, and then energy prices would have been higher still.
It depends on how you measure success… Has that change improved the economy and well-being of the Germans? I do not know, I’m only pointing out that change to renewables does not necessarily mean “success”.
First: This whole reneable thing was done to reduce negative externalities from pollution and CO2 emissions that were simply not paid for previously.
Arguing that "the economy would be better of without pollution/emission limits" is a bit like arguing that dumping trash in the next river is cheaper than proper disposal: Sure, your industrialists are gonna save a few bucks right now, but someone will have to pick up the bill regardless-- with interest.
I found that it is much better for my household budget to dump my trash in my neighbor's yard rather than to pay for trash pickup.
Oh, no, I was not arguing that, I was simply stating that becoming "green" is not necessarily better per se. There are many factors to consider.
Sure, but people's rent and bills are due now and if they can't pay up, you can't gaslighting them with "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.
Why haven't shareholders of energy companies also made sacrifices to save the environment? How come only the consumers have to?
Do you understand why people are pissed off with the switch?
> "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.
The cost of food, water, energy and other things are going up *because* of climate change. What kinda "luxury belief" is that?
Source? Because EU pollutes less now than before, but my groceries are even more expensive so your point is moot. So why should I accept to be spit-roasted like this with no return on my sacrifices?
Maybe greedy corporate profiteering is the real culprit here squeezing people and not people using the AC or driving to work?
There is absolutely overwhelming evidence that climate change is impacting agriculture.
You're dodging my question. I asked why hasn't our economic sacrifice to save the environment resulted in a reduction in grocery prices, if environmental damage is what's causing them to go up? We reduced the economic damage but prices are still going up. So what gives? Is it environmentalism or corporate greed?
Has CO2 returned to pre-industrial levels? Has the ice shelf re-frozen? How about permafrost?
We are not yet at the point where things are good again yet. We are just reducing further damage at this point.
Because there are lags in the system? Because we are not doing enough? Do you always expect immediate feedback on everything you do? If that's the case I guess you never invest in anything because that's by definition a bet that it will make things better (or less worse) in the future.
So your proposal is to further delay making anyone pay for changes, because previous generations profited? So at the end of the chain (which will likely not be very long anymore) some generation will be completely screwed.
> future of the environment
The environment consists of natural resources. Those resources have value and are "owned" by the people. You can save money by not changing the oil in your car, right up until the engine seizes up. Preserving the value of valuable assets through proper care and maintenance isn't exactly a high concept abstract concept.
> Sure, but people's rent and bills are due now and if they can't pay up, you can't gaslighting them with "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.
My point of view is that "we have to curb emissions now before consequences grow too dire" is not a "luxury belief": the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities. It was a luxury we could not actually afford at any point, basically just got it on credit in the past, and all that credit is coming due within the century.
> Why haven't shareholders of energy companies also made sacrifices to save the environment? How come only the consumers have to?
Because overall most of the benefit did go to consumers. People basically got a gallon of gas for 30 cents in 1960 when it probably needed to be a dollar or more, but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference (or anything close, really) from them.
> Do you understand why people are pissed off with the switch?
I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.
>the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities.
Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?
>but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference
YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?
>I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.
It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.
>Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?
Life isn't fair and time travel doesn't exist. We are stuck with the world we have now and have to deal with the realities, including suffering the consequences for things not your fault. It isn't fair that a son gets cancer because his mother smoked around him all his life, but he is still the one that has to go through chemo.
>Life isn't fair
This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want. You know that, right?
For example, I'm gonna take your house and when you ask why, it's because "life isn't fair".
However, various forms of fairness to balance out past wrong doings can always be achieved if desired, but it usually requires force or democratically if over 50% of people can unite on it.
>This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want
Yes, which is why I wrote more than 3 words. It is why I used the cancer analogy. This generation is left holding the bag, and it has to be dealt with. Stomping your foot and saying it's not fair does nothing to cancer, nor does it do anything to climate change. I’m not saying a specific policy decision is right or wrong. I’m saying this generation has to deal with it, regardless of fairness.
> Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?
Because the vast majority of "profits" (externalities that were not paid for) were not banked, they were simply not paid.
Even if every person that enjoyed cheap fossil products in the past had the price difference on some separate bank account, taking that to fund environmental policies would be very difficult in western countries because of democracy and demographics (very difficult to get majorities when working against the interests of elderly voters).
> YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?
Again, the Shell corporate overlords only siphoned off a very small fraction of the gains, even taking the whole corporation would be completely insufficient. The main beneficiaries in the past were not Shell and BP, but the end consumers instead.
Just heaping blame on corporations or past generations is not helping anything. You could certainly nationalize the whole petroleum industry and confiscate pension funds, but approaches like that have very detrimental side effects.
> It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.
I would argue that if you discover that a past lifestyle was financed by unsustainably pushing the hidden costs of energy elsewhere (and into the future), then still refusing to pay those hidden costs after the discovery is the very definition of selfish.
It's cheaper for the current generation to deal with climate change than to ignore it.
You're effectively advocating for some small subset of that generation to try to disadvantage another larger subset, at a net loss to society, and hope they don't damage themselves in the process.
While complaining about selfishness of previous generations.
Depends on the country, but overall I'll say the opposite is true: cheaper is to ignore it. Climate change will not stop even if Germany switched to 100% renewables. And globally it is also not a top priority.
Basically this. But he is probably rich enough to not care because the effort that will be asked of him will be small relative to his purchasing power.
So, he can pretend to be "good" for doing the right thing, while more unfortunate people will pay the real cost without any guarantee that the climate situation will improve and that their children will have a chance at a "better life". Not that they care that much because children are becoming unaffordable for much of the lower class.
The problem with the green ideology is that it's a global problem and clearly global fossil fuel use reduction isn't happening. And the countries using it don't care because not using it is much worse than the promise of a better world in the future. If your life is shit right now (compared to the rich world) the promise of a better world far out in the future is just propaganda.
There's another Australian state, Tasmania that also runs on 100% renewables, mostly hydro. There are plans to export more of that power to other states.
Hydro is pretty great with a few caveats. Flooding remain a massive problem if there is a failure, as the world most deadliest power plant accident was a hydro power plant with a death toll between 26,000 to 240,000 people. An other major issue is the extinction of species, as is currently occurring in Europe and especially in the northern parts. There are technologies to allow for migrating fish to bypass hydro power plants without chopping them to bits, through the effectiveness of the bypass tend to work against the power output of the plant.
100% renewable until the dams dried up and they flew in diesel generators (worse than coal) to prop up the state, reversing several years of environmental progress.
That event is illustrative of the fundamental problem here. Green energy proponents pretend it never happens and do not factor diesel emissions into the cost of hydro and other solutions.
Another common way they mislead is by pretending that emissions from gas peaking plants are not inherently associated with solar and wind generating, even though they would not exist without them.
It's a kind of sleight of hand or green washing that should be called out more frequently.
100% renewable does not exist. Not in '100% hydro' Tasmania or anywhere else.
On unconnected islands. If Tasmania had the interconnects to export their power they could have reversed those to import solar from the mainland.
g) AU is very well suited for solar, due to the confluence of abundant desert making land-use a non-issue, high irradiance per m^2, low seasonality of irradiance, and large landmass which generates statistical diversification due to lower temporal coupling between plants.
This applies to where most of the human population live currently.
People who don't live in such regions are likely to underestimate solutions that work well in these places.
> AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables
I feel we're going to keep seeing "solar doesn't work" posts in decades to come, long past when many areas of the world will already be on 100% renewables. It turns out that incremental deployment is a superpower.
There's no longer any good reason for AU not to be at >100% solar at midday every single day.
> SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way
.. while this is more of a problem. I could jokingly say that SMRs are a conspiracy by Big Turbine to sell more turbines. Also don't forget the need for water cooling, which may be a critical problem in AU.
In Poland we're seeing government slowly taking actions against people owning solar. Turns out, people were paying a lot in taxes for electricity and this money is now not present in the budget. Recent development is an incoming ban on energy storage beyond certain size. They want you to give energy basically for free to the grid during the day (when you're at work) and buy the energy from the grid during the night (charging cars). Electricity prices are not even that high now, bills are mostly some transfer fees. I imagine the same will be/is the case in all countries.
> c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle
One might say this is an advantage, with no home industry asking for local supply chains to be built up (at significant cost and risk). Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are not generally made in Australia, right? For the fuel cycle, Urenco for enrichment, and Westinghouse or Orano for the uranium processing and fuel fabrication would be possible deals with allies.
> e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
SMRs are not the entirety of nuclear, and were not the entirety of the Coalition nuclear plan. Large reactors do exist and are being built around the world. Rosatom are able to do so (Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh), KEPCO has done so in the UAE, and China is exporting to Pakistan. As an aside, a GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 first-of-a-kind (not demo-scale or research) is being built in Darlington Canada, so SMRs are being deployed.
> f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
This is why the Coalition plan proposed large reactors in addition to SMRs. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/04/nucle...
> One might say this is an advantage
I'm baffled that anyone could propose this as a good thing. I've worked in industries that are supported - just smaller than the US and the price gouging is substantial. Parts will be designed for the US market, we need to adapt. Bonus points when buying incompatible European / US designs.
Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine have all the necessary ancillary parts in warehouses close to where they are needed. They also have all the expertise, the cranes, the transport regulations nailed down.
I guess the shear quantity of land that AU has available for solar and wind takes away a lot of the issues for you guys?
Land cost isn't a strong limit on renewables even in Europe.
It's interesting that this country with all the spare land is also a world leader in rooftop solar.
That rooftop solar is delivering the cheapest consumer electricity in history.
Amazingly, the hardware costs and labor costs for rooftop solar are the same as the USA and sensible regulations around permitting and training have dropped the cost by 2/3rds.
Well it all does absolutely nothing to store energy.
Ahem
https://colliebattery.com.au/
These are very long term bets. MS isn't betting much here, just staying involved just in case. Which is prudent but not much of a commitment. A big commitment for a trillion dollar company would have a big dollar value. Like billions of dollars. That's not what's happening here.
I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress.
In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove.
I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic.
In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.
This for me is the real crux. Safety, nuclear waste, land-use, etc, are all issues of relatively trivial concern. They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.
For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.
Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin.
It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.
> Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.
I highly doubt that will be the case. Even if solar and wind do not get better costwise (which is likely not true) the cost of maintaining and decommissioning SMRs is likely only to go up. This based on every other nuclear power plant to date, I have seen zero good arguments on why SMRs would be an exception to that rule.
It's worth noting that the nuclear power plants of the 1960s follow different scale economics to SMRs. Casey Handmer makes this point in his online interviews and debates. The 1960s plants get their scale benefits from their sheer size. Similar to building a few massive aircraft carriers or massive olympic stadiums, however inefficiently each one is built.
SMRs are more akin to mass manufactured widgets, where the scale benefits come solely from manufacturing efficiencies gained through volume. They'll have a learning rate that governs the price declines for each doubling in production volumes.
From a unit economics POV, it's probably more useful to think of SMRs as a solar/battery-like technology rather than a 1960s nuclear-like technology. The problem for SMR proponents is that solar/batteries have had 50 years of this feedback loop playing out, but SMRs are starting from no volume.
All of the plans that I've seen for SMR 'farms' were hopelessly naive when it came to security, decommissioning and compliance costs. They were just a hair above that 'swimming turtle island' when it comes to design phase realism. I really see them more as a way to milk subsidies than something that will actually happen in the next 30 years or so, especially not given the rate at which we are putting up solar and stringing HVDC interconnects, which in my opinion are the answer to the storage problem.
> stringing HVDC interconnects
Agree that this solves many of the same problems as storage (as does overbuilding).
The PR problem with renewables is that the solutions are invariably cognitively complicated and multifactorial. The solution is going to be some kind of optimized result that mixes various storage forms, HVDC interconnects, overbuilding, and diversifying with solar and wind, and the exact nature of the solution is going to vary by geography.
It's just a hopelessly difficult communication challenge. If so many HN people can't grasp these concepts and jump to provably incorrect catchphrases like "storage is too expensive", then what hope is there for the general public.
People on HN don't generally realize that energy has pretty much always been a mix and that adding new energy sources with different availability, slew rates (both up and down, and not necessarily symmetrical), cost, peak capability, base load capability and so on is a well understood problem that markets know perfectly well how to deal with.
Then there is the 'cool' factor ascribed to some solutions, an element of hope that a favorite technology will one day power the planet and all kinds of unrealistic assumptions about what is and what isn't technically, socially and economically possible. You are right that this is a difficult communications challenge but the level at which the discourse takes place is well below the minimum standards for taking part in such a debate.
We're talking about very simple basic and factual knowledge here we are still very far away from the complexity of say the 15 minute ahead market, balancing and long term cost projections of a particular technology, we are more in outright disinformation and denialism territory.
The analogy is incorrect though.
There is economies of scale for creating the thing, and then the economies of scale for the thing making electricity.
You can make nuclear reactors smaller under the assumption that you’ll be able to make them faster and cheaper over time. But the cost of the electricity they make goes up versus larger reactors because the costs for parts aren’t linear. An SMR is a basically a tiny plant for making electrify.
A solar panel doesn’t have this issue. Making the panel 2x, 5x, 10x bigger does not change the unit economics of the electricity it produces.
SMR's have neither of those economics of scale. Ontario is building 4, and there's a couple others at similar scale. Nobody is contemplating the thousands you'd need for the scale necessary to make the switch from bespoke to assembly line worth it. So the worst of both worlds.
And the risk with bespoke but still much higher numbers than regular plants is that you will need all of the overhead for a much smaller amount of output and you'll definitely not have the same QA budget that you have for a much larger plant. Prediction: many small failures. Hopefully not a 'small Chernobyl'.
> They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.
The problem is. The regulation around safety, waste and land-use is what make the economics the problem.
But you are right, it is difficult, or just straight up impossible with the current state or regulation and policy.
Just for reference, since NRC was establish, basically new nuclear has been approved. During the AEC, innovation was rapid. Basically, no longer a balance between concerns, but simply all out focus on safety for a specific set of reactors. That's not the only factor, but its a big one.
It's pretty clear that for-profit entities will optimize to maximize profit at the expense of all other variables, including safety and the environment. We certainly can't trust the CEO class to properly prioritize safety concerns. So we will always need government regulations to keep these tradeoffs balanced.
You seem to be calling for a magical new set of regulations that are just as effective but don't cost as much. That's not going to happen.
Nuclear plants were already operated pretty safely and the saty was constantly improving as people were learning more and research was progressive.
You do not achieve safety by hard-coding all regulation to a specific technology and make everything else practically impossible.
It works like this:
"Your computer needs a C compiler with good error messages otherwise you can't build this",
"Ok but we are building a LISP machine, there literally is no C".
"We hear you but your C compiler needs good error messages".
"Ok, could you maybe tell us who you would accept from, we can show you our LISP compiler will have amazing error messages"
"MMhh sure we can do that, give us a full specification, and then we get back to you, but its going to cost you for every 1h we invest in that. And at the end, will tell you what we will accept as an application"
"Ok, how long will that take and how much will it cost"
"We can not give you a time or a cost, you will just have to wait (implied it will take at least many years and at least 100s of millions of $ with no outcome certainty what so ever)"
That's just the tip of the iceberg. And then each individual country has their own version of something like this.
So we have a market that is ultra heavy capital that needs scale. But scale is basically impossible to achieve.
Thankfully the US government has finally made some steps into relaxing some of these and adopting a smarter approach, but its like turning the titanic, see GAIN for example.
I am not suggesting we hand out plutonium the everybody who asks for it.
In fact what I dislike, is that anybody who even suggest that regulatory form is part of the solution people instantly bring out 'we need some regulation' or 'new regulation wont be magic'. Both are true, and both are irrelevant.
The de/re-regulation of many other industries has had dramatic effects, think of airlines, trucking, software, the Bell System and so on and so on. The current regulatory regime was created at a high point in panic and anti-nuclear sentiment.
What I would like to see is something like what NASA did, for commercial cargo and commercial crew. You start with something achievable (commercial cargo). Create programs where the government want's to achieve something, and has multiple companies bid in a technology independent way. Start with some smaller things, nuclear reactor for space, medical isotope reactors, off-grid nuclear and then do SMR.
Renewables can't meet the base energy needs. You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines. They also have low power density, making them problematic at grid scale.
SMRs fix all the issues of modern nuclear reactors. SMR's are not 'small' in the absolute sense, they're on the scale of traditional power plants, not existing nuclear reactors.
They have a ton of advantages:
- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.
- They produce power comparable to existing power plants. Nuclear plants have huge issues with producing tons of power in a centralized manner, meaning the energy infrastructure needs to be designed around them, and probably you need a centralized infrastrucure for power distribution, which might not jive well with local politics. They also need huge concentrated cooling capacity, which might have negative ecological effects, and present a huge risk should they need to be shut down. The recent issues in France with global warming, where the rivers water level got lower and the water warmer, cutting down on cooling margins dramatically leading to shutdowns comes to mind.
- In contrast SMRs can be slotted into current energy infrastructure. Modern reactor designs can be throttled to match grid needs.
- SMRs are standardized, smaller and don't need to be built on site and can be built relatively quicker and cheaper. This is huge. If a traditional plant costs $20B and takes 20 years to build, the interest on the loans could mean it's never going to be financially viable. If you cound do something that makes quarter the power, but costs $5B and 5 years to build, it's an entirely different value proposition.
China is already building these, and they are the main country of origin for solar panels and equipment. Renewables make a ton of sense, but can't solve every issue.
> You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.
This has been false in the real world. Factories that use a lot of energy do work with the power company and shutdown all the time based on demand. Large steel mills have their own power plant onsite, but smaller ones just buy grid energy and they want the cheapest. They arrange their factory maintenance schedules with the power company so that the power plants are maintained as the same time they are shutdown. They shutdown every December so the power company can sell the power they were using to run Christmas lights. They often run overnight shifts only because that is when power is cheapest. Even the large factories with their own power generation have shutdown for a couple weeks to sell power to the grid (this is very rare, but it has happened).
Wind and solar is a little more difficult because it isn't as predictable, but that is different from unpredictable. The power companies already are running models to predict the wind and solar cycles because it is important for many things they do. You can bet those smaller factories are already working with the power company to schedule shutdowns when power is predicted to be expensive - factories have to do regular maintenance anyway so it is just a matter of being ready (spare parts) when asked, and wind/solar is predictable enough for this.
> Renewables can't meet the base energy needs.
That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.
And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable. Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity. And SMRs are a rounding error on that. Most of the rest is gas based generation.
Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption based on price signals, user demand, etc. So, it's actually ideal to pair with fluctuating supply and demand from renewables. Using e.g. spot instances makes it easy for data centers to scale down their demand if energy is scarce and expensive. Other things they could do is throttle CPUs/GPUs based on energy pricing or encourage people to time shift non critical jobs to when energy is plentiful.
SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them. Whether you believe this will happen or not, it won't be happening very soon. Realistically, SMRs will remain a niche solution for decades to come; even if they do work at reasonable cost levels.
> And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed.
If we close all the steel mills and ship off manufacturing to China, then yes, we won't have baseload, and we can be happy that we saved the planet using solar!
> Renewables can't meet the base energy needs. That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.
> And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable.
Do you have solar at home? Because I do, I have 10kW of panels on my roof. I just checked my stats and in December I approximately made about 15% o peak capacity. And even that isn't the whole picture, as there were chunks days where I basically made nothing and even the batteries couldn't pull me through it. And I have no idea how you're calculating this 100GW. If you count adding 2000 500W panels as adding 1MW, then even on the Caribbean your calculation is going to be incredibly generous.
> Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity
As for nuclear, it was made way too expensive because the economy and money became fake, divorced from real value, and pearl-clutchers and concern trolls made it too expensive. But even in the 70s-80s when things were actually built in Europe, it was clear that Gen IV (of which SMRs are an example) was the future of nuclear, its just nobody bothered to build it because it was easier to ship off manufacturing into the 3rd world.
>Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption.
Yeah when you buy millions of dollars of HW, the 'we'll need to run it at 15% capacity in December and during night, not at all' sounds like a sound return on investment. Way to cheerlead to get another industry shipped off from the continent.
> SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them.
SMRs are not small, they are scalable, and can be made in similar capacity to existing coal and gas plants. Once they reach EOL, they'd be a perfect slot-in zero emissions replacement. But since nuclear is the devil's work, I guess we'll get to keep burning gas for another half a century.
That fact that people can't even agree on what SMRs even are tells you everything. You advocate that they are essentially the same thing as a regular power plant, others say they are small boxes that can be put at any neighborhood corner.
But everything because they are going to scale magically. Nobody ever explained how that scalability is supposed to happen. A large portion of any nuclear reactor is still a steam turbine, we have built lots of these without seeing prices fall exponentially (like solar) why should adding a couple (really a miniscule) number of SMRs suddenly fundamentally change the way their price scaling?
I might be wrong but I don't think anyone's seriously proposing on building these truly tiny reactors - I think every one of these is being built is powerplant sized.
SMRs identifying trait is that these reactors are prefabricated and transported onsite and do not have to be built in pace.
> If we close all the steel mills and ship off manufacturing to China, then yes, we won't have baseload, and we can be happy that we saved the planet using solar!
86% of generation added in China in 2024 is renewable.
If you want reliable all-year round-the-clock solar, you have to over build by 20x, not to mention the batteries. (Wind has different but analogous issues)
That's not to hate on solar - I think it's great, and I personally have solar at home, but its not a substitute for everything
I'm glad I'm not alone thinking this.
Much of the renewable price/cost calculation is plain wrong because we have offloaded the cost to other countries (who gladly still use fossil fuels).
On top of that there is the problem of maintaining a real economy inside the country, to benefit people actually living in said country. I believe most of HN don't care because they get paid to make stuff that is sold globally and they profit from that. They can't understand that not everybody can do that and you need to create value inside of the country so that they can share/benefit from that value creation.
I also have access to solar generation statistics in the middle of France and they make no sense without the generous subsidies and electricity generation purchase from the provider. But plenty are profiting from that so of couse they are happy about it.
> You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.
You're going to need more work than a bare assertion to demonstrate this, given that storage exists, and given that gas peaking exists, and given that interconnects exist.
Consider these:
- https://www.offgridai.us/
- https://sci-hub.se/10.1039/c7ee03029k
Throttling a reactor makes no sense when the fuel is dirt cheap, which it is for nuclear. It's not clear given the choice of providing the same amount of power with thousands of SMR's worth a few MW's each or a handful of traditional nuclear plants, that SMR's are inherently the better choice. SMR's make obvious sense as a distributed source in cases where power transmission is itself costly and the density of power use is low, but not obviously otherwise.
The wear and tear and fuel costs are non-zero.
Which is why old paid off nuclear reactors are today are being forced off the grids when renewables bring sustained low prices.
>- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.
I don't worry about designed meltdowns, I worry about someone bunker-busting it, crashing a plane into it, detonating a convoy of trucks filled with fertilizer inside it, someone deciding that an old mine close the the ground water is "good enough" to store the waste from it, that war, forest fires, floods or famine will leave the sites unmanned until the storage pools dry out and the waste starts burning, or any number of similar scenarios which become so much more likely the more of these things we have.
But mostly I worry that they are more expensive than anything else even in a best-case scenario.
Why should we invest in more expensive electricity, that also carries a significant risk for immense disasters, when we have solved cheap solar, cheap batteries and synthesized fuels? The path forward seems obvious, even though it's less traveled.
They are so safe that nobody has ever attempted a terrorist attack against them since the first fission reactor (1941). Terrorists have targeted the Twin towers, the Pentagon, the White House, the Bataclan, Nice, but no fission reactors nor waste deposits. (If terrorists are reading this, I suggest them to plan an attack to the Baogang Lake [1], which is considerably less guarded and potentially more effective in terms of people killed.)
And if reactors are really so expensive (5 G€/reactor, while Italy spends 10 G€ per year in subsidies for renewables), why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baogang_Tailings_Dam
>They are so safe that nobody has ever attempted a terrorist attack against them since the first fission reactor (1941)
Attempts are made regularly, and nuclear plants all over the world implemented additional security measures after 9/11.
"A foiled Chechen rebel assault on the Russian city of Nalchik in October 2005 would have involved an attempt to hijack and fly one of five aircraft into a nuclear power station. Papers released in the UK in February 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) revealed there were more than 40 cases of potential security breaches at UK civil nuclear sites from 2004 to 2005."
https://www.rusi.org/publication/countering-threats-nuclear-...
>why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours
It's complex but a simplified answer is that Italy pays what it actually costs, while the French leaves a lot of the cost to their children.
The children (of the people who built the french nuclear plants) recently had to pay over 50 bn euros to cover the debts of EDF, and will likely have to pay another ?? bn to cover lack of maintenance on the aging reactors. (Google it). For 50+ years, france sold nuclear electricity at a loss, mostly unknowingly.
Once they have paid the sins of the parents, the remaining costs to maintain the plants for another 20+ years again will likely be postponed to the next generation, since covering the cost today would make the electricity too expensive to sell.
Note that France is running their economy at a much larger deficit than Italy for the past few years. Nuclear power that is not paid by electricity consumers now, but instead by the government, is of course not the entire explanation but it's part of it.
but SMRs have the problem of not actually being proven.
China has a few under construction, but having reactors built is not proof of them being viable, e.g. remember the superphénix.
The Windows 98 license actually did forbid using Windows in nuclear power plants (along with other high risk areas). That was due to some interaction with the Java license and I always considered it a very fortunate fluke.
The same thing with QuickTime (remember QuickTime, and trailers.apple.com?)..
Ah, where did that carefree time go, where we had the time to read licenses...
Reference for those curious: https://archive.org/stream/microsoft-windows-98-second-editi...
"It looks like you're trying to insert some control rods. Would you like help with that?"
funny, except now it will be Ani as the avatar to Grok Unhinged
nuclear_power_run_book.doc
K://nuclear_power_run_book FOR NEW JOINERS (v2 copy).docx (3) (SHARED)
I’m sure it’s printed out and put in a 3-ring binder, but why wouldn’t the instructions for “what to do when the primary coolant loop pressure drops” be in a Word document somewhere?
In all seriousness, it’s only a matter of time before an LLM makes a critical error in language-translating (or even being used to write) a reference manual for an industrial process, and escapes the attention of regulators. One can only hope that that process is not nuclear…
Hey, remember that time we used "an organic" kitty litter instead of "inorganic" kitty litter and the resulting explosion cost a half-billion dollars to clean up? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#20...
I’m not sure we’ll notice an increase of these kinds of things. There was a case well before AI where a process chemist replaced propylene glycol with ethylene glycol in over-the-counter medicine and a bunch of people died.
File corrupted, bad sector
Proponents of the SMR (small modular reactor) overlook the fundamental approach in industry: taking advantage of economies of scale to improve efficiency.
Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production.
Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet.
This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets.
Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out.
On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage. Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor).
Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications.
Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system.
On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling.
There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...
You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.
The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
The NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, the issue with nuclear is cost, far more then NIMBY.
NuScale was always a bad idea. The PWR is the problem, making it smaller doesn't really solve the issues with them.
Project in Canada are struggling because the market in Canada is just to small. The reality is, you need massive amounts of funding, but with the way regulations work, even if Canada were literally perfect in every way, as long as large markets like the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
You are right that there is nothing new here, except maybe that large private institutions are starting to do some investing.
But the reality is, Rickover was right, Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right. An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
> You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.
I fail to understand which of the challenges I described it may relieve.
> The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
Having all brands of SMRs build interoperable parts is AFAIK beyond the most wild utopia. The very first step (convincing them to adopt the same architecture) is out of reach.
Yes, the NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, however it IMHO is way more powerful against nuclear than against solar and even wind energy, and as those last expand more and more people will understand that they don't have, in order to obtain electricity, to accept any nuclear-induced risk.
> The PWR is the problem
Which architecture seems more appropriate?
> the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
This is indeed a real challenge, however it mainly is because of past nuclear incidents and accidents.
> Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right
About the "Faustian bargain"?
> An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
As a French I doubt so. Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
I think the most favorable context is China? the us is quite resistant to nuclear in comparison
I doubt so as most of the challenges I mentioned aren't due to any subjective appreciation.
China invests way, way more on renewable than on nuclear.
This is a big deal, not because Microsoft wants to build reactors but because it highlights the real bottleneck: nuclear fuel. There’s already a growing uranium deficit, conversion and enrichment capacity are thin and geopolitically fragile, and next-gen reactors need HALEU, which barely exists today. Building new reactors is the easy part — scaling the fuel supply chain takes years.
Yes, and ... restarting the fuel cycle under the current administration is, according to activity in the US uranium rich areas, kind of happening. I haven't seen anything "official" yet but driving around southern Utah shows signs of 'unexpected economic activity.' Speculation is that the USG is going to re-open a Uranium mine near Moab.
I think I should correct your statement slightly - its not wrong however we don't have a uranium shortage -- we have more uranium than we could possible use.
We do have a HALEU advanced nuclear fuel supply chain issue. Thats being currently tackled. To your advanced reactor point -- they are also still far away so it is plausible that the supply chain catches up before any of the new reactors get deployed - assuming they make it to the finish line.
I should hope they make it to the finish line - I think we could do well with more nuclear providing our backbone of energy.
Enriching uranium to 20% instead of 5% is easy. If reactors require it, the fuel will be found just fine. You already have hundreds of SMRs in submarines and aircraft carriers and what not. A1B reactors in your carriers run on 93% enriched uranium!
That really isn't the bottleneck by any means. If there's demand there will be supply.
I don't believe it.
The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction. For instance there is an unlimited amount of handwringing over a closed fuel cycle costing a little more than an open fuel cycle but nobody points out that the capital cost of the reactor dwarfs fuel cycle costs for any fuel cycle -- no nukes hate reprocessing so they won't point this out and nukes don't want to remind you of the capital cost problem.
For every NPP that's had a nuclear meltdown there have been 20 that had a financial meltdown before they've even turned it on.
It drives me up the wall that big tech companies want to buy "a reactor" or an unspecified "SMR" but never an AP1000 (reactor that's actually been built) or even a BWRX300 (an SMR that might actually get built.) If there wasn't any bullshit a new build AP1000 would probably have a 10 year lag at least but...
... in the current international tariff situation it's almost impossible that any full-size or even moderate-sized reactor will be built in the US in the forseeable future because the US has no super-heavy press that can forge a nuclear reactor vessel. Japan, China, Korea, the UK, and many other countries have them and in the neoliberal world of a year ago we could have just had one made for us and shipped in by boat. The BWRX300 is the only western SMR that is far along and the pressure vessel will be made in Canada -- it's going to cost plenty no matter what but put 35% on top of that and you're doing the no nukes job for them. Way to go.
I want to see it work but I am not seeing realistic plans from the likes of Microsoft and Google, just the hot air from a 100W lightbulb when we really need 10,000,000 times as much heat!
> The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction.
Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.
I want to see a real explanation of the bungling that makes projects go 3x late and over budget and it is not "environmentalists" who might make it go 20% late.
I've looked long and hard and not found an explanation of the bungling fitting the facts better than that it's like a poker game: the vendor never believed in the sticker price, but the vendors figured that once there were chips in the pot the sunk cost fallacy would mean the buyers would never fold.
Thing is, they do, at least in the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
I think NuScale was trying to be honest about costs but the buyer in Utah built a process in which they could control costs by folding early and they did. Europe, China, and other places have more engineering thinking and less financialization and they're more likely to "stay the course" but as an engineer I'm not sure this is right -- it might work for China but not for Europe.
On one hand I'm glad to see GE get the BWR, especially the work done on ESBWR, back into the game with the BWRX300, but the costs they are quoting are too freaky low and their talk about "design to cost" makes it seem like they just quote the cost number that they need to be competitive with the solar sticker price without storage which will lure in the public as opposed to being competitive to whatever the (unknown) solar + storage sticker price will turn out to be. (e.g. highly variable because it depends by "how frequent blackouts will your accept?")
Lots of interesting history here, but most relevant was that regulatory and process changes starting in the 80's made it increasingly expensive to build reactors. As a result, reactor construction companies (notably Westinghouse) went bankrupt and no entity was willing to take financial risk to build new reactors. Western Europe is a different story, where political parties aggressively shutdown healthy nuclear plants and passed laws preventing new nuclear.
Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US (by both political parties) and Europe is slowly coming around to allowing new nuclear. NuScale is one of many next gen companies (I hope they're all successful), but the traditional large reactors are also great and can be built cost effectively.
I don't believe it -- although ideology makes explanations like that popular with a lot of people.
The cost escalations and bungling were well in progress before the TMI. The NRC streamlined the reactor approval processes in the 1980s by trying to separate the licensing of a standard reactor from the licensing of the site -- nobody took them up on the offer.
In the case of AP1000 builds both Sumner and Vogtle were held up for years because they were waiting for Chinese factories to figure out how to make parts, in some cases they never figured it out and they had to source them elsewhere. Factory modular construction was supposed to prevent bungling at the site but replaced it with bungling at the factory.
In theory the factories got up the learning curve and if somebody ordered another AP1000 it would be different, in practice the AP1000 is a Chinese reactor and the Chinese gave up on it for the Hualong One which there are (oddly enough) two designs for, which goes back to the designs the French were using back when they were building many plants on time and on budget... which is maybe a good thing, but they look pretty quick to move on to the Hualong Two and before they get up the learning curve on that one they'll be switching to the Three...
I'll agree that the Europe hired somebody who thinks like Amory Lovins to design the EPR and really did bungle the politics more than the engineering, but that's not the story in the US.
Regulatory requirements were definitely a real thing. One of the drivers was that nuclear companies were required by law to match the price of oil and any surplus profits from that had to be reinvested into safety and that set the bar for new safety requirements. What that meant was the 1970 oil crisis created a new level for nuclear safety beyond what was needed and that was locked in for future construction. The entire history of nuclear energy is one of bungled regulation and given the political power oil companies have had and continue to have, it’s not surprising given the existential threat nuclear posed.
> One of the drivers was that nuclear companies were required by law to match the price of oil and any surplus profits from that had to be reinvested into safety and that set the bar for new safety requirements.
This sounds like utter bullshit. Got references?
> Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US
Bar graphs showing decreasing regulatory cost on page 6. Pretty dramatic recent change.
https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources...
Here in Norway there's now talk about nuclear power, after a long time of little to no interest.
However they can't even put up wind turbines anymore, due to NIMBY issues, environmental concerns and whatnot. We had a ton of such projects but it's just about ground to a halt now.
And since our distribution network sucks, we've had a ~100x price difference between north and south for a long time now due to that, you can't just put it in the middle of nowhere.
As such I have very little faith they'll manage to put up a nuclear reactor in the near future, at least not close to initial cost and time. And none of that has to do with the details of building a nuclear reactor.
That said, there's change on the horizon. At least more and more people seem to be realizing that if they don't want wind turbines, they don't want huge swathes of solar panels and they don't want to alter more rivers then there's not a lot of options left on the table.
It's just experience in most cases. We don't build enough so the management and project structures and experience to do it never get a chance to be efficient.
The right thing to do with something like the Vogtle plant for example would be to keep building them since you've just paid some very expensive costs learning what causes delays, but the knowledge of what gets the plant built - because it was built - is still there and fresh.
That's why I wish we had more information about what happened to the AP1000 than has gotten out.
This is the idea behind the “small modular” part of SMR. Current nuclear projects are huge, largely bespoke efforts that require a bunch of contract firms working together on different parts of the project. The idea of SMR is to push most of the necessary parts one after another from a factory. The best analogy I’ve heard for this is comparing how the Japanese built planes in WWII (in small batches done by craftsmen) to how the US did (with an assembly line following a documented process). I buy the conceptual argument, but there are a lot of details to work out.
We’ve been trying to build ”SMR”s since the 1950s and a bunch has been built throughout the decades.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...
The problem is also: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?
I guess the answer might be hyperscalers that want cheap electricity to run LLM inference. They’re already throwing tens of billions at AI, what’s a few billion more to have a chance at super cheap energy for their new data centers?
Nuclear proponents argue that renewables (solar, wind) are not base-load, and nuclear is. They are correct.
But the people building power generation are doing it on a for-profit basis. Since solar is cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy, simpler to maintain and so on, that's what for-profit people build.
In other words, on the one hand you have large generators, requiring years of planning & permitting, a decade of construction, endless court battles from the anti-nuclear folks, generating returns 15 years from now, competing with the exact opposite (cheap, quick to build, beloved by eco folks, easy to run and maintain, off the shelf parts etc).
From a capital point of view its a no brainer. Capital follows profit, and solar is very profitable.
Nuclear may be good policy. Base Load may be very desirable. But unless govt is putting up the capital it just won't get funded. (Nuclear plants are being built, like in China, but using govt capital, which sees a return in more than just cash terms.)
There are lots of strong arguments for Nuclear. But Nuclear proponents need to address the capital requirements above all. Until the capital problem is solved, every other argument is useless.
One radical answer that question which is often neglected for the facile "regulations" explanation is that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nuclear plants because the steam turbine and heat exchanger cost too much compared to natural gas plants.
If that's really the case then a Gen 4 reactor that runs at higher temperature, uses printed circuit or other advanced heat exchangers and a Brayton cycle gas turbine could win on the capital cost but it's easier said than done. There's not a lot of hope I think the LWR but the BWRX300 is at least trying to do it by deleting the heat exchanger and the only way you're going to get costs down radically will be by deleting things. Commercial Gen 4 reactors are at least 20 years out and we should have gotten started 20 years ago.
One radical answer that question which is often neglected for the facile "regulations" explanation is that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nuclear plants because the steam turbine and heat exchanger cost too much compared to natural gas plants.
The timing undermines this theory. The US added one nuclear reactor to the grid in 1996 then zero until 2016 (sort by first grid connection date here):
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
The US built an additional 58 coal generating units between 1995 and 2009 (see section "Age comparison of coal plants"):
https://www.gem.wiki/Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants
Combined cycle natural gas units were already cheaper to build in 1995, but the gradually rising natural gas prices over the next ~12 years meant that coal could still compete on cost for electricity generation. The cheap fuel for coal units counterbalanced the slower, more expensive construction process. It wasn't until fracked natural gas drove fuel prices down that coal unit construction ended in the US.
A lot of the natural gas plants are combined cycle, which includes a steam Rankine bottoming cycle.
I don't see how this isn't dispositive on the economics question. That markets (overwhelmingly) choose to build combined-cycle natural gas plants, choose to add the Rankine bottoming cycle, means the marginal cost of the steam turbine is *less* than the marginal cost of the fuel saved by the efficiency gain. That's the case even in the USA; and natural gas elsewhere in the industrial world is integer-multiples more expensive.
The natural gas plants without steam turbines are precisely the load-following plants that run for a fraction of the time (or at a fraction of their capacity); the relative weight of capital vs. fuel costs is inverted. (Or those, like xAI in Memphis, which are rapidly assembled in rushed desperation. I wonder if that will be a trend in the datacenter boom: designs limited, not by costs under normal market conditions, but bottlenecks affecting rushed projects. Nuclear SMR's would seem to be worst at this—the designs they expect to use haven't even been built yet!)
Yes, and the bottoming steam turbine is 1/3 the size of a steam turbine rated for the full power output so… radical capital cost reduction.
It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel. Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.
> Yes, and the bottoming steam turbine is 1/3 the size of a steam turbine rated for the full power output so… radical capital cost reduction.
It's a cost reduction, but likely not radical when talking about a nuclear power plant. For a cost breakdown of a nuclear plant see
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
So the "conventional island", which would include the steam turbines, condensers, generators etc. is about 15% of the cost. Reduce that to a 1/3 the size, and cost drops to 5% of the total, a savings of 10%. Probably even not that much, since a steam turbine 1/3 the size probably costs more than 1/3 the cost of a "1/1" size turbine. And then the remaining 2/3 of the power output would have to be generated some other way, so would shift cost somewhere else. Of course, some part of the cost of the nuclear island can be attributed to steam production as well. In any case, all in all I don't see this as making or breaking the economics of a nuclear plant. The issues that cause nuclear plant costs to skyrocket lie elsewhere (and no, just blaming regulations is overly simplifying it as well, though a popular scapegoat).
(I'm not sure, but I suspect what's making coal non-competitive with gas isn't so much the steam turbines, but rather that there's more labor and machinery involved in burning coal than gas, from mining, transportation, pulverizers, and then all kinds of exhaust gas treatment used at least in the civilized world, ash handling etc.)
> It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel.
Yes, that's true. The BWRX300, which of the current crop of SMR's is probably the one with the most realistic prospects of actually being built somewhere, is a BWR, and the maker claims one reason for the supposedly good economics is that they have spent a lot of effort on minimizing construction cost and equipment needed. We'll see, I guess. I think historically the economics of BWR's vs PWR's is mostly a wash.
> Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.
The follow-up ASTRID project, which never left the drawing board, used a sodium-air (or might have been nitrogen, to avoid issues with trace contaminants in air since it was all closed cycle anyway?) heat exchanger and Brayton cycle turbomachinery, to avoid any potential issues with sodium and water. I think it was supposed to have slightly lower thermal efficiency than an equivalent steam plant, but maybe somewhat lower capital cost.
When a big tech wants to build some huge datacenters, where they plan to put hundreds of thousands of ultra-expensive GPUs, they want to run those GPUs as close to 100% of the time as possible. Every hour the GPUs don't run costs them money. From the point of view of Microsoft, having an SMR next to a datacenter makes perfect sense. Solar and wind can do the job, if coupled with batteries and/or natural gas. But than you need a grid operator. If all you need is electricity for a datacenter, and you don't care about being connected to the rest of the grid, then you want as simple a solution as possible. And an SMR promises to be just that, a turn-key solution to get continuous and constant electricity.
I think "promises" is the key word there. Data centre's want power, as you say, but they want it now, not 15 years from now.
So yes, when SMR's are "off the shelf" (aka from "order" to producing) , including permitting, construction etc, within a couple years then they are appealing.
I don't think we're quite there yet.
Sure. But this is why what Microsoft did here was just a hedge. It did not cost them much (if anything at all) to become a member of the World Nuclear Association. If the SMRs become reality a few years down the road, and if the demand for datacenters increases significantly because of the increased use of LLMs, then they stand to benefit a lot. If either of this does not pan out, then what's the risk for Microsoft?
The point of the baseload argument isn’t the “desirability” of power sources that can provide baseload, it’s the necessity. Renewables that can be scaled up (i.e. not niche cases like geothermal) are all too inconsistent to replace the entirety of generation without storage. Other tactics like long range transmission can reduce the amount of storage needed but not eliminate it. Fully replacing generation with renewables isn’t just unprofitable without storage, it’s impossible.
Storage is making great strides but for it to get good enough to fully convert the grid we need qualitative advances in the underlying technology, not just manufacturing scale driving down prices.
There is necessity with baseload plants: they have to be run at high capacity factor or else their economics go all to hell. This is especially true of nuclear where capex dominates. So describing something as "baseload" is actually describing a defect: it's a generation technology that cannot be practically dispatched.
It’s only a defect if you try to make the grid 100% nuclear, just like solar’s variation is only a defect if you try to go 100% solar. It’s not a competition where either is likely to “win”, they’re just two different tools for power generation.
It wouldn't be a defect if it was complementary to solar. But it's the same defect as solar/wind, so it is a defect.
How is it the same defect? Nuclear plants can run all the time and have to if they have any hope of recouping investment. Solar can’t run all the time but is super cheap so it doesn’t have to. You still need responsive capacity but even if you keep natural gas around for that you’ve made a massive dent in fossil fuel usage - bigger than solar or nuclear could do without the other.
Both nuclear & solar produce power at times when it's not wanted. Same defect.
If you were building a grid from scratch in a typical American region, and you were aiming for lowest cost, you'd overbuild solar enough that it handles 100% of demand on a sunny evening, add enough wind to handle 100% of demand on a dark + windy evening, then add about 3 days of battery storage. That'll supply you over 95% of your energy needs.
But that's not 95% of the power, it's 100% of the power 95% of the time. So you also need to supply 100% of the power 5% of the time somehow else. That's not 100% of peak, since peak is during air conditioning demand when solar works, but 100% of almost peak.
The cheapest way to do that is low efficiency single cycle natgas. CCS natgas is 1/20th the cost of nuclear, and single cycle is about half the cost of CCS.
So if you make 2.5% of that nuclear, you've doubled the cost. And you've saved a few hours worth of carbon emission, 2.5% of 5%.
If you want to be carbon-neutral, you use syngas instead of natgas. Yes, syngas is 6X as expensive, but fuel is not the main cost of a peaker plant running <= 5% of the time.
Of course electricity at night is highly desirable. But there are no economic incentives to build it.
From a purely financial point of view, base load is not appealing. Whereas cheap solar is appealing. If I have a billion$ to invest, I know which one I'm choosing. I'm maximizing return, not "societal good". Which is why govt is best placed to build base load, since they optimize for societal good, not profit.
To make base load appealing to investors we need expensive power at night. But that's countered by local battery storage.
To be clear, this is not a "what we need" argument. It's a capital argument. Private Power suppliers chase profit, and there's more profit in daytime power than nighttime power.
> Of course electricity at night is highly desirable. But there are no economic incentives to build it.
Wait, what? Who is going to accept having no power at night at their house? Ignoring the fact that the intra-utility trade does provide a direct economic incentive, nobody is going to live somewhere the power companies can’t keep the lights on 24 hours a day most days (in the developed world anyway).
You're looking at this from the consumer point of view. But consumers provide income, not capital.
Consumers may, or may not, have a choice of power providers. They can choose to "accept" what is on offer, or remove themselves from the grid. But they have very little negotiating power.
Actually it's pretty easy for (residential and office consumers to spend their own capital on batteries and inverters. Most homes consume (or can be set to consume) reasonably low power at night. A 20 kw/h battery will cover most homes easily.
(Solar panels aren't necessary for this.)
The capital cost, and savings therefrom, put a hard limit on what suppliers can charge for night time power. And of course storage is just as attractive to suppliers. (More capital-attractive than say a nuclear plant.)
As consumers we are used to simply announcing our needs. And assuming companies will expend any capital necessary to meet those needs. In practice it doesn't work that way, as rural phone/internet/cable consumers will testify.
Once you see electricity generation as a capital issue, not a consumer issue, things get clearer.
The point of separating electricity artificially into "baseload" and "peaking" was the quirk of engineering that made coal and nuclear cheaper if you ran them flat out.
In a world where both solar and wind are massively cheaper, that entire paradigm collapsed. Even more so when you can reuse the same hydro and gas that was working as peaking as "firming" to complement the new model.
Here's a nice pie chart of the costs:
https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/
> BWRX300
I believe Rolls Royce is pretty close as well. But both have yet to deploy a single working example. And it doesn't seem we are anywhere close to see one yet.
There is more than enough uranium on the planet. This is more of a pork cycle problem. If there is a clear path towards an SMR industry supply will be there.
Very interesting, can you provide any more reading on this topic in particular? Curious about how the modern private market is approaching the fuel supply chain issue in creative ways.
As per just_human, more specifically, start- https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Recommend starting here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/
If building nuclear reactors is the easy part, and we're barely building nuclear reactors (and when we do they go massively over estimates), this sounds all around kind of bad.
Nuclear fuel, like lithium is a supply chain problem not an Erlich/Simons end-of-resources problem. Nuclear fuel UNLIKE lithium, has bizarre qualities that the waste stream from some kinds of reactors in turn, is valuable fuel. Not that we want prolifration from breeder reactors, but the point "fuel is the bottleneck" has some caveats. Supply chain logistics around fuel, including whole-of-life treatment of the outputs, is a problem.
Fission fuel is so cheap that we currently don't even bother to fully recycle our nuclear waste. We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.
> We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.
> easily
That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.
In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.
But if you dismantle nuclear weapons and downblend to make HALEU you have it. Killing two big birds with one small shift. Megatons to megawatts, ftw.
General Matter working on this (founders fund company)
Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.
Nuclear is great but we can do without bashing renewables as "insufficient". Solar + batteries are here right now and they're cheaper than nuclear.
Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage. Storage is extremely expensive. Nuke is extremely cheap to generate -once its built. The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!) and each nuke plant is a bespoke effort which gets recertified each time. This is enormously expensive. There is reason to believe that small modular nuke plants will vastly reduce this cost. That means we might have a path to cheap nuke, but there is no immediate path to cheap storage barring a technological revolution (not just incremental improvements) in battery tech.
In the long run solar power will kill fossil fuels, but we desperately need a bridge to get us there and not destroy the carbon balance in the atmosphere. Nuke is that bridge.
> Storage is extremely expensive
Define "expensive". Over what timescale? Have you seen https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
"Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier."
This is right now, July 2025. The costs of batteries continue to fall. How much cheaper will batteries be by the time we start churning out SMRs fast and cheap?
By all means keep beavering away at nuclear. Its time will come one day. But I won't hold my breath for it to solve the climate problem in the next 10 years.
“Very sunny” is doing a lot of work there. The storage required goes up dramatically once you run the numbers for somewhere that has seasons. The long-range HVDC lines between hemispheres idea is cute but probably geopolitically impossible; I don’t think the US will let its ability to literally keep the lights on depend on South America.
Storage could get there, but I don’t think it’s credible that manufacturing scale alone will solve the problem. We probably need some new, qualitatively different chemistries to become viable for solar to be viable for the whole grid. From a technical perspective the nuclear plants we could build in the 1960s could do it, whether we can still build them (no matter if the barrier is regulatory or practical) is another question.
The other side of the question is:
How will you get me with rooftop solar and a home battery to buy your extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when I have my own imperfect solution almost the entire year?
Scale this up to a society adding onshore and offshore wind and you quickly realize that the nuclear plant will have a capacity factor at 10% or so.
Vogtle with a 20% capacity factor costs somewhere like 85 cents per kWh, or $850 per MWh.
Nuclear power due to the massive CAPEX is the worse solution imaginable to fix renewable shortcomings.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
Electricity self-sufficiency is only realistic when: your needs are quite low, you own a house, you have capital to invest for both panels and storage, your heating is not electricity dependent (so most likely fossil fuel or wood, which isn't better)
Yet, most people live in cities, with plenty of appartement or shared houses where most of the requirements are just not feasible. And the trend isn't going in reverse.
So yes, YOU, may have your own individualistic solution but clearly, it's not something that is suitable for most people. Considering you do not have a real horse in the race, you should quit arguing and enjoy your own egotistical "solution" and let people who want to live collectively decide what's best for them.
I’m sure the French are crying about having much lower energy prices than e.g. Germany, even with the importing. I don’t see why we’d expect they’d pay more if the natural gas plants were in their borders.
You sure wrote a lot here to make one point. Yes, if you're willing to operate your own disconnected microgrid you have enormous advantages. Not every entity can do that or is willing to accept the loss of reliability that comes with.
In most of the US, the minimum solar power in winter is still more than half the average amount. We can set up enough panels within the country.
> “Very sunny” is doing a lot of work there.
The price dropped 22% in a year. Next year it could be the same price in "somewhat sunny" places.
The additional storage needed when you need to store energy from the summer to feed the grid in the winter (instead of just for day/night and a few cloudy days) is not only orders of magnitude higher in raw capacity, but requires different battery chemistries that can hold charge for that long. 22% cheaper is a drop in the bucket.
> when you need to store energy from the summer to feed the grid in the winter
Surely you don't need to power 100% of winter hours with summer sunshine. Electricity isn't grain to be stored in a silo.
Most places humans live in also get sunshine in the winter. Less sunshine admittedly, but that's where overbuilding panels and interconnecting grids comes in. And even dark, cold places get windy.
Are you so sure that storage is so expensive? It’s been coming down the cost curve extremely quickly, such that opinions formed even an year ago are severely outdated, and it’s now solar+storage that’s being favorably compared to replacing nat gas plants, not just solar itself.
Storage that is good enough to replace peaker plants, and storage that is good enough to handle seasonal variations in insolation are completely different ballgames. The lithium battery chemistry in your phone will self-discharge on the order of a month - there are alternate chemistries but they have other problems right now.
> seasonal variations
Or overbuild renewables reducing the seasonal variations. In cost terms when compared to nuclear power those would be insignificant.
With fossil based energy systems we didn’t match production capacity to consumption 100% with peakers having low capacity factors.
But somehow we can’t overbuild a kWh and need massive seasonal storage when it comes to renewables.
Yes, if you have a magic planet spanning transmission system capable of handling the power flows over building solves the problem. Unfortunately that's orders of magnitude more expensive than storage, which we already can't afford.
Gonna have to see more numbers for "storage is more expensive than nuclear". And not the unit cost of SMRs with the assumption that mass manufacturing is solved, certified, and permitted. You have to account for those costs too. And time, of course. The climate crisis is here now. We can't wait 10 years for cheap SMRs to be ready (though we'll gladly take them when they are).
I’ve never seen anybody give an estimate for the cost of storage required to fully convert the grid of e.g. the US that wasn’t obviously astronomical and not something the utilities could afford the capital for. If you’ve seen different please share.
I still don't see numbers. What is this "obviously astronomical" estimate? And how does it compare to nuclear, in any form?
Battery storage ranges from $150 to $300 / kwH capacity. The entire grid would need something like 5twH of capacity for an 8 hour ride through. I want you to carefully consider those prefixes and the vast, vast Gulf of space between them.
Nah, you can buy retail packs for less than $300/kwh now, I installed some recently. Commercial installs in China are reportedly hitting like $60 installed.
Also, 4 hours is the target Jigar Shah talks about for getting solar to a load factor roughly equal to most thermal plants.
Also, I believe that’s 4 hours on the nameplate of the variable generation, not 4 hours on the entire grid load. People generally aren’t advocating for going fully variable generation.
I see the issue. You are relying on information that is many years out of date. Your upper span is soon a magnitude out of date.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...
Also please give a source as to why the US grid would need 5 TWh of battery storage. So we know it is not simply a number you invented out of thin air to say ”impossible!!!!”
> Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage.
For say an AI training-oriented data center, you could scale down the power usage when supply is limited. You could change power limits on the CPU/GPUs, put the machines in sleep mode or powered off entirely. So the required storage would just be a slightly bigger UPS.
Not sure if the economics works out, but at least technically it's possible as it's more flexible than user-based loads.
You don't want to waste your GPU capex by not running those suckers at 100%. (Other datacenter workloads it makes some sense to demand-regulate, but not AI.)
AI based training is an almost ideal match with this kind of supply. You could even imagine migrating long running training jobs to different parts of the world based on energy availability to optimise costs.
So the model is buy some of the worlds most expensive hardware and let it sit idle for half the time? If I want to save the same throughput I need to buy at least twice the hardware!
Load throttling is one of those ideas that seems great as long as someone else is doing it.
Ha, that's a great point. I guess if you have some latency sensitive inference workload the capacity will effectively be dynamic, but that is likely uncorrelated with local energy prices I imagine.
Solar benefits from storage yes but it's not at all worthless even without it.
If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.
Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.
I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.
> The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!)
So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.
This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.
You're approaching this with the nuance of a child. Yes, nuke regulation is burdensome, and yes it is necessary because nuke can have quite severe failures when failures occur. The solution is not to dogmatically suppose that one of those two basic facts is false. It's to engineer around the problem by making many exact copies of the same design, reducing the amount of regulation that needs to be applied on a per unit basis. That's what small modular reactors are. Certify once, build many.
> You're approaching this with the nuance of a child.
I'm really happy I got to speak to such and adult then. Fuck you too.
> Storage is extremely expensive.
No.
And yet we still have no place to put that "clean" energy when it is depleted.
You can bury the casks in my (literal) backyard if you'd like (please put the grass back). It's an overhyped issue much less impactful than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.
> than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.
As I'm fond of saying, environmentalists didn't kill nuclear. I'm not denying they had motive. But they lacked means. They can't stop anything else they've set their minds to: fossil fuels, automobiles, deforestation, industrial livestock farming. Even whaling is alive ffs.
No, there was another party with both motive (competition) and means (lots of cash and political influence) to do the deed: the fossil fuel industry. And nuclear didn't help itself with accidents (and ensuing costly clean ups, one of which helped take down the Soviet Union), and budget overruns even when things went smoothly. Both found a convenient fall guy: the green movement.
Tl;dr nuclear hasn't grown because of money. It cost too much, and the competition had the cash to slander its reputation.
I'd rather it be stored neatly in canisters underground than floating up into the atmosphere.
It can be left in canisters on site. It could be dumped in the ocean. It really doesn't matter.
> It could be dumped in the ocean
FFS no. This is the reason environmentalists don't trust the nuclear industry.
This is a "no" purely for optics; it would be perfectly safe.
Citation needed.
There's approximately 1.4 * 10^21 kg of water in the ocean. There's about 2.3 * 10^6 kg of waste per year. 10^-15 is a really small number.
(Hell, seawater is already ~3.3 * 10^-9 uranium.)
Why is heavy metal concentration such a problem in fish right now?
God I hate this argument. Casks. The answer is casks. The short term solution turns out to be a fantastic long term solution. If that isnt good enough, demand it be reprocessed with thorium or something.
There. No more silly anti nuke gotcha. You can give up on that one permanently.
Nuclear proliferation.
I am steelmanning this, and assuming you are making a hilarious joke at the expense of anti nuke activists. Instead of defending the storage issue, this is just a pivot to another unrelated and already well resolved issue. Thats exactly what the silly anti nuke folk get up to. Well played, solid joke, 10/10.
Have we seen Microsoft actually put any skin in the game yet? All the pre-purchase announcements are virtually risk free for Microsoft. They've agreed to buy a certain amount of power at a certain price, if the counter-party can deliver it. But they're not pre-paying, they only pay when the electricity gets delivered. If they never deliver, Microsoft isn't out any money.
I'm halfway certain it's for political optics.
I'm intensely pro nuclear. But the tech is still in the stables. We need research into driving down costs. In the meantime, we need to think harder about where we're putting datacentres and how we can, if not make power cheaper for average Americans, at least not raise its real cost.
It’s a smart move on their part. It’s also a way for VC/investors to have some concrete value prop in their math. Aka if x works, I’d get at least y return (where y is guaranteed to not be zero)
The Gates Foundation has heavily invested in Thorium salt reactors.
There're 0 new reactors being built in the USA currently. Not Microsofts fault obviously, but then again what's the point of these articles?
I see a lot of skepticism in the comments, but if you’re going to gamble, SMRs seem like a pretty good bet. Nuclear is still in its mainframe era, where everything is bespoke and costly. Modularization enables repeatability, which is the heart of optimization. Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!
There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like the idea of proliferation of nuclear reactors on every corner because I don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to handle that many reactors. I'm all on for huge ones but they have obvious issues.
Have you been to a failed state? Bulgaria was in a state of disrepair when it comes to its industry, as kids we wandered to abandoned factories and I'm %100 sure that I don't wish a nuclear reactor to end up in a place like that. As 12-14 y/o kids we were going in, tear apart stuff the get interesting objects out like bearings, flat plastics etc. that we can use for games or making machines and if small reactors were a thing back then I'm certain that many disasters would have happened. AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.
Nuclear reactors are very cool, they all have its place but please don't make it available to an average bozo that lucked on crypto or some greedy maniac in a failed state.
I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail and things end up in wrong hands but where I grew up you can find remains of a few ancient empires + 1 quite recent ones with machinery and electronics unaccounted for.
> AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.
People did actually die because of abandoned RTGs, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
> I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail
Anybody that still feels like that right now in America is not paying attention.
If only you knew how deadly is average chemical factory that you probably do not know is just a few miles from your home, you would not worry about SMR-s that much :)
I know how deadly it can be. The thing about the chemical stuff is that it smells bad, it look dirty etc. Once we wandered in an old building that had a huge pool like thing filled with something that smells like freshly roasted nuts. A pleasant smell but its out of place, therefore run away.
Playing with lead, you notice that it lives traces on your hands, it looks wrong so you try not to play with the lead anymore.
A lightbulb with a shiny liquid in it? Don't break it or break it in open air at safe distance. Even if you touch the liquid make sure you wipe it out clean as it looks unnatural.
You easily develop instincts to detect what's dangerous with machines and chemicals, with nuclear you can't do that.
Ans as for the active ones, I hope they are taking good care of them. Bhophal 2.0 is indeed possible.
Seriously, you are concerned small nuclear reactors left behind? The main idea is, that you will be able to load them onto a truck and ship them back to the factory. So the chance of anything left behind is very small.
Why would the risk be small? I've seen pretty expensive machinery been left behind. I destroyed such machinery to take out the copper wires from its transformars to make a net.
What makes you think that this can't happen? It can happen in so many ways, i.e. the owner is criminal and runs away or fucks up and loses everything and the court takes years to decide who gets what from the factories, the new owners put it on sale it takes another 10 years to sell because the repair costs incurred are massive and equipment is getting obsolete therefore you can't find a buyer. People get old, move on and all that decays for 50 years until the land becomes valuable enough for someone to buy it with all that obsolete garbage.
It happens all the time.
You are not going to load a reactor at the end of its lifetime on a truck to ship it back to the factory.
I think you underestimate the amount of mismanagement and human error that happens every day. May I remind you of the Goiânia accident? Additionally, Wikipedia has a seriously long list of “orphan source incidents”.
> There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
Thing is, traditional nuclear plants generate so much power that we only need a few "bespoke" plants to fill in all baseload demand and even provide enough redundancy. Renewable sources are quite a bit cheaper though wrt. to the sheer amount of bulk power that they supply over time, it's just unreliable and highly intermittent. Smaller reactors just aren't very useful in that kind of scenario - it's unlikely that they'll be cheaper per watt than a few large plants.
I technically agree, but modularity also works on large reactors. And they are generally cheaper to build and operate per energy produced than smaller reactors.
Modularity could work on mainframes too but it mostly didn’t. Mainframe cost per transaction can be very low, and yet here we are. Tech at scale always passes through a cheap/worse is better phase.
Take a look at the open compute project for example. Instead of having power supplies in each server, they have a lesser amount of large ones for example.
Economies of scale wins in big compute projects too
Which is why comparing mainframes and nuclear reactors is a bad analogy. A better one would be datacenters vs individual PCs. If the goal is efficiency, datacenters win everytime.
> Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!
And yet, for most things, we see the opposite trend. We build big factories, big ships, big warehouses and yes, big power plants. We tend to make things as big as physics lets us do, because of economies of scale. For power generation specifically, big things tend to be more efficient, thanks to the square-cube law. For example look at big ship engines, they use specialized piston engines with cylinders you can fit into, not dozens or truck engines, even though the truck engines would be a good example of modularity.
And speaking of the "mainframe era", in a sense, that era was more distributed/modular than today. Companies had their own mainframe, whereas nowadays, it is centralized in huge datacenters. The servers themselves are modular, because we can't make a datacenter on a chip, physics get in the way, but having big datacenters help make economies of scale on cooling, power generation, security, etc...
I am not against SMR, they are an option worth considering, but if I had to bet between SMR and conventional, large size nuclear reactors, I'd go conventional. Someone mentioned China as taking SMR seriously, and yes, they do, but they are also building lots of big nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well at it.
I read this analysis of the SMR farm announcement in Canada a few months ago and I found it quite insightful: https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/the-first-te...
Depressing, but it shows the typical faults of most Canadian projects these days. Massive government spend on a project doomed to fail by economic analysis before it's even online; and no takeaways for the Canadian people to actually get momentum going.
If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on".
Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way.
What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?
It’s usually about well connected companies lobbying for free money. It’s the sort of thing that keeps Bell and others afloat and guarantees they never have to get competitive.
The gross thing is seeing the public cheer it on.
I'm still half cheering it because at the very least it's still nuclear progress, and will help ensure we still have nuclear energy workers for another generation here. I worry a lot about what's been done to the Atomic Energy Workers in terms of whittling away at our capability to produce good energy workers with tribal wisdom and the Canadian nuclear culture of safety.
"there is no evidence today that SMRs will reduce electricity costs compared to continuing rapid investment in wind and solar."
Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much.
Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. Many billions of PV cells have been manufactured. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity.
If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942
>But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity.
Because the level of permitted development without being crushed by onerous regulatory burdens has been absurdly hamstrung on nuclear. All of the issues you add as "but" cases are things that many different innovations in a fluid market for research could have refined. The same has been done for many complex technologies over the decades, yet for nuclear there's always some excuse like the ones you mention. The comment you replied to is right. We're talking about something that since decades ago could have been improved enormously, and hasn't been thanks to a multitude of stupidities.
The United States Navy trusts extremely compact reactors (designed and working despite the DoD's notoriously lax financial and schedule stringency with defense contractors) to power its absolute most important, costly, defense-crucial war machines, and regularly docks them right inside the country's (and world's) largest urban areas, but somehow there's just no way to make nuclear power for civilian use more compact, cheaper and effective?
The regulatory burden argument doesn't explain why renewables are trouncing new nuclear in China. I view it as a universal excuse nuclear fans trot out to explain away inconvenient realities. They also never explain how the regulatory burden would be reduced in a way that doesn't compromise safety. And regulated safety is the price the nuclear industry pays for liability limits.
> Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience.
I am imagining a field of shipping-container sized units, each of which is a small modular reactor. Probably with solar panels on top ;) Still a few orders of magnitude different, but the idea here is that each unit is small enough that it can be manufactured, so that nuclear plant bring-ups don't take 30 years. Most of the cost is because of the tremendous generational effort involved in just a single project; what does it take to reduce the cost of the plants themselves to the point where they can really shine, economically?
The goal is to have reliable base load power generation so that we don't have to deal with the massive complexity and carbon footprint of battery plants all over the place to deal with peaky generation technologies like solar. I don't believe that that is a solved problem: using tremendous amounts of rare earth materials for limited-lifespan installations that don't even produce energy is possibly not the best use of our resources, considering it's almost all fossil fuel going into those logistics operations anyway, right? EROEI for a battery plant is going to be hard to achieve.
NPPs that small are a nonstarter, due to loss of economies of scale. Even SMRs are creeping up in size now to try to recapture the economies of traditional gigawatt power plants.
Your shipping container mention reminded me of The Box, a book that explains how shipping was so erratic, risky, slow, unreliable and incredibly expensive before the standardization into containers. Containers literally changed the world economy.
I think you are onto something. But this requires upfront investment, which alas, politicians are not for.
Thermal storage has very poor discharge rates unfortunately (usually slower than a day), as well as surprisingly high cost once you factor in inefficiencies and turbine cost
As was repeatedly explained in that other thread, thermal storage of the kind described there is inherently a long term storage technology, and this drives the design to minimize capex, not maximize round trip efficiency. The focus on efficiency is fundamentally misplaced there, as it becomes orders of magnitude less important compared to diurnal storage (which batteries appear to be well on their way to dominating.)
Long term storage and diurnal storage are complementary technologies, sort of like the different levels of cache and main memory in a computer memory hierarchy. Combining them appropriately reduces cost vs. using just one of them.
Anyway, the technology as described would produce heat at 600 C for as little as $3/GJ, which nuclear would have a hard time competing with.
$3/GJ is $108/MWH which any large scale fission buildout would easily beat for thermal energy costs
You misplaced a decimal point. A MWH is 3.6 GJ, so it's $10.8/MWH.
$3/GJ is about the current Henry Hub price for natural gas, and as you should know cheap natural gas like this is what killed the "nuclear renaissance" in the US.
Oh my bad, you’re right
Re: Nat gas, agreed, it’s not solar though, storage is much more expensive
Thermal energy still needs to drive a turbine to generate electricity
Sure. 600 C is about the temperature of steam in a coal fired power plant, so one of the use cases here is to take an old coal plant and replace the heat source. It's much higher temperature than the steam in a LWR, so the turbine can be smaller and cheaper. Also, no steam generator is needed as in a PWR.
Yes but one of the reasons that coal is being replaced by gas is because of the capex of the steam turbine
Yes? That doesn't mean the capex of a steam turbine for this application would be unaffordable, or that this wouldn't have superior economics to nuclear (which also has a steam turbine, and a more expensive one).
This is concern trolling. The key to nuclear economics is speed of construction, and controlling costs, and not caving to safety pearl-clutchers (that is, adding cost and delays for 'safety measures; meant to appease the public, not things deemed necessary by experts and regulators).
But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.
You're just trying to smear a conclusion you don't like with fatuous insults.
The argument that this time, for sure, nuclear will be much cheaper has worn quite thin. Why do you think anyone in power is going to listen that song again?
BTW, do you think the dominance of renewables over new nuclear construction in China is due to "pearl clutching" there?
There's no conclusion or root cause in the article. It just suggests that since the Canadians had cost overruns and delays, it's impossible to build reactors on time and budget.
Yet China has managed to build those plants exactly around those costs and budgets - I have seen this argument so many time, around high speed rail, where Americans failed at infrastructure and deemed it 'uneconomical', then when China succeeded they smeared them for building probably in 'an evil way' or what.
Let me turn your question back at you - if China is doing so well on renewables, why is it that they're still building tens of gigawatts of nuclear capacity with hundreds more planned?
Even the linked article admits that 'Solar GWh' is not comparable to nuclear GWh because if you add the wattage of panels together you get a meaninglessly big number.
If you are planning around a 24/7 available power source, you need to overbuild solar by 20x I estimate, and the article admits, their calculations do not take storage into account (which you simply would not need if you had an always available power source.
China leads on solar panels, equipment and batteries, yet they are the biggest investors into nuclear today, I think that says enough about solar (and wind) not being able to economically substitute for nuclear.
Also a different angle - economics. If you take 20 years to build a reactor, then the interest that investment assuming an 5% YoY, would be ~2.7x the original purchase price. Your yearly profits wont be enough to pay the interest at that point.
You are right - by these standards it makes no economic sense to build a nuclear reactor, but the standards only exist because of the positively lethargic Western work moral.
It's never nuclear's fault, is it? Like communism to the true believer, nuclear can never fail, it can only be failed. There's always an excuse.
I think the world has grown tired of the excuses and has largely moved on. You laggards will be coming along soon enough.
You seem to misunderstand me - I'm not some nuclear fanboy, but I'm looking for a powerplant solution that's 3 things: universal (unlike hydro), always available (unlike renewables) and sustainable (unlike gas and coal).
It seems that with SMRs, nuclear is finally getting to that state. I would like to ask you - what is your problem with it?
For me I wouldn't like to live next to a nuclear power plant, but I'd overwhelmingly prefer living there compared to a chemical plant - and there are a lot more of those everywhere.
Plants are huge investment of time and effort and I believe the costs mainly come down sabotage to pearl clutchers like the Greenpeace folks who think every plant is going to turn into Chernobyl, bureaucrats with their own loyalties and agendas of preserving a lucrative status quo and a huge civilizational laziness in the West results in a lack of will to get together and see things through in a timely manner.
Oh, who would have thought. Fusion and nuclear is a money pit.
Because complexity is expensive and those two are by far the most complex ways of generating energy, one of which is even so complex it hasn't even achieved net plus anyway.
Even a giant like Microsoft doesn't have unlimited funds to burn.
I am user of Microsoft Nuclear Cloud Plant Manager Xp SP3 and after update my control panel restarted causing power outage. Now every time i click power status it is crashing, while power output is rising, making pipes hot.
I already tried msreactor /scannow but don’t want to reinstall reactor as last time I did it I lost my city (and support only told to use boron or move to another area).
Please help!
Announcement release: https://world-nuclear.org/news-and-media/press-statements/wo...
The article mentions Helion. Those guys were supposed to have their Polaris demo machine running by now. But they've become very quiet about that. Press releases about it in 2024, but not much in 2025.
Polaris is supposed to pass theoretical breakeven, and maybe even technical breakeven - more electrical power out than they put in. That would be a huge event.
Polaris has been operating at low power already. They have recently installed shielding in the walls to allow higher power operation.
There seems to be a fair bit of progress notes from them. They aren't obligated to tell us anything, of course.
Here are their funding rounds.[1] Their funders, which include both YC and DoD, had better be getting info.
[1] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/helion/__fS6qGKScel2LE9EV85bG...
Relevant - worth a listen, changed my mind about nuclear, also beautifully and compellingly read by the author.
'Going Nuclear - How the Atom will save the world' by Tom Gregory https://open.spotify.com/show/7l8wXWfPb3ZAUmd1pfUdv3?si=52fe...
Fusion is dumb I don't understand why people care about it. Fission is save, has cheap inputs and the energy density is already absurdly high. Fusion adds 1000x the complexity for little gain.
Probably a good idea to have sufficient nuclear reactors on time, before we geoengineer stratospheric albedo and the output of renewables drops as a result.
Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU? Well here we are building nuclear reactors to run our brute force "scaled" LLMs. Really, really dumb.
> Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU?
No? The tradeoff is entirely one between the value of labour versus the value of industry. If dev hours are cheap and CPUs expensive. If it’s the other way, which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs.
This makes sense if and only if you entirely ignore all secondary and tertiary effects of your choices.
Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid, depriving local citizens of resources for your datacenter, and let's not forget ewaste, pollution from higher energy use, pollution caused by manufacturing more and more chips, pollution and cost of shipping more and more chips across the planet.
Yeah, it's so cheap as to be nearly free.
> Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid
This is a peculiarly USA-localized problem. For a large number of reasons, datacenters are going up all over the world now, and proportionally more of them are outside the US than has been the case historically. And a lot of these places have easier access to cheaper, cleaner power with modernized grids capable of handling it.
> pollution from higher energy use
Somewhat coincidentally as well, energy costs in China and the EU are projected to go down significantly over the the next 10 years due to solar and renewables, where it's not so clear that's going to happen in the US.
As for the rest of the arguments around chip manufacturing and shipping and everything else, well, what do you expect? That we would just stop making chips? We only stopped using horses for transportation when we invented cars. I don't yet see what's going to replace our need for computing.
Almost everything you wrote is incorrect, which is why you don’t provide sources for anything.
And in the end, the cherry: “yes, the world is ending, so what can we do? I guess nothing, let’s just continue burning it so it dies faster.”
> it's so cheap as to be nearly free
Both chips and developer time are expensive. Massively so, both in direct cost and secondary and tertiary elements. (If you think hiring more developers to optimise code has no knock-on effects, I have a bridge to sell you.)
There isn't an iron law about developer time being less valuable than chips. When chip progress stagnates, we tend towards optimising. When the developer pipeline is constrained, e.g. when a new frontier opens, we tend towards favouring exploration over optimisation.
If a CS programme is teaching someone to always try to optimise an algorithm versus consider whether hardware might be the limitation, it's not a very good one. In this case, when it comes to AI, there is massive investment going into trying to find more efficient training and inference algorithms. Research which, ironically enough, generally requires access to energy.
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"Which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs."
Ermmm. what?
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It's the difference between computer science and software engineering.
And you would have been mocked by your peers for being so concieted that you'd dare to look down on other people for not inventing an algorithm that doesn't exist and for which there's no evidence it's even possible for one to exist.
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Dig up
There's a ton of research into more efficient AI algorithms. We've also seen that GPT-5 has better performance despite being no bigger than previous models. GPU/ASIC vendors are also increasing energy efficiency every generation. More datacenters will be needed despite these improvements because we're probably only using 1% of the potential of AI so far.
Interesting, if GPUS/ASICS have been improving in energy efficiency, then why is it that total consumption has been exponentially increasing?
Because so many people want to run the models.
You see this in other sectors where demand outstrips improvements in economy. Individual planes use substantially less fuel than they did 50 years ago, because there are now fewer engines on planes and the remaining engines are also more efficient; but the growth in air travel has substantially outpaced that.
You have a point. But it doesn't make sense to seek for the next unrealized breakthrough (low energy, brain-comparable power consumption) AI leap yet, when existing products are already so transformative.
It will come, give it time.
Big O? More like Big H2O (heavy water).... I'll see myself out.
Pretty exciting to me. Constraints breed innovation and it’s possible that the wave of AI leads to new breakthroughs on the green energy front.
Edit: Amazing how anti-innovation and science folks are on HN.
There's no efficient algorithm for simulating a human brain, and you certainly haven't invented one so you've got absolutely no excuse to act smug about it. LLMs are already within an order of magnitude of the energy efficiency as the human brain, it's probably not possible to make them much more efficient algorithmically.
Your brain has a TDP of 15W while frontier LLMs require on the order of megawatts. That's 5-6 orders of magnitude difference, despite our semiconductors having a lithographic feature size that's also orders of magnitude smaller than our biological neurons. You should do some more research.
The TDP of a typical human brain is not 15 W, but 25 W, so about the same as for many notebook or mini-PC CPUs, but otherwise your argument stands.
The idle power consumption of a human is around 100 W.
>Your brain has a TDP of 15W while frontier LLMs require on the order of megawatts.
You should do some basic maths; the megawatts are used for serving many LLM instances at once. The correct comparison is the cost of just a single LLM instance.
Yes, the cost figures published by LLM labs imply a power consumption measured in megawatts for each instance of top performance frontier models. Take the L.
I'm really sad the core argument for the Matrix's existence doesn't hold up (it never did, just for me as a kid is all).
They started with a different, more brilliant idea, of using human brains as a giant neural net, then backed away from that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832
oh wow that's cool. I do understand why they moved away from it. Battery is waaaayyyyy easier to understand for the layman and lay-kid (me).
dating myself here but I remember in the 90s reading a really funny spoof article about Microsoft announcing they had developed nuclear weapons. Didn't even seem that implausible at the time.
I would have linked it here but none of the search engines are turning up anything at all, and in fact I don't think it's even possible to find stuff like that with search engines anyore.
I had thought maybe it was on the old 0xdeadbeef mailing list, but no luck, but probably it was this from rec.humor.funny which in the end isn't quite as clever as I remember it being.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/4zIyBq1-1_E/m/...
The funny part about our 1990s memes on big tech, is that today’s big tech is 100-1000x larger.
NVidia is worth more than Germany.
We're not for sale, but still… numbers? Nvidia's stock price isn't even a 10th of the gold reserve, as far as I can see?
Also, comparing GDP (rate of production) to valuation (area under the curve) is silly. Like comparing velocity to distance.
All I can think of is Microsoft === blue screen of death. Coming soon to your neighborhood.
I wonder when Elon will go to nuclear business as green values have gone down (solar tiles anyone?)
Microsoft and nuclear reactors... what could possibly go wrong?
Wonderful, the next CloudStrike bug will not be a joke
Awesome. I'm convinced nuclear is the only realistic path toward an energy-laden sustainable future, I've yet to understand the fear mongering beyond political faction bearing and token counting in terms of district employment numbers or some such third-order nonsense... there's nothing safer in terms of human lethality.
Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization.
It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years.
It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors.
Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI.
I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?
China has been running a side-by-side experiment building both nuclear and solar. Here's one rendering of the result:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1l5h5e2/sola...
Nuclear may be a big part of the future (assuming storage prices don't plummet) but it's not going to be the bulk of the power we ever receive. It'll be the 10% that stabilizes the grid and provides baseload, at most.
[0] A summary on ACX of a debate between nuclear and solar proponents; and
[1] The video of the debate itself.
I thought solar won.
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-stu...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbypyd7HFPE
Also relevant given the post is also about fusion.
At this conference for progress nerds, with big arguments between solar and fission nuclear "no one wanted to defend fusion".
> Fusion promises cheap clean limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap clean limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.
...
> the only pro-fusion sentiment I saw at the conference was a series of graphs comparing “fission” and “fusion” and showing strong performance advantages for ”fusion” in all categories. But it turned out the pro-solar faction had mischievously labeled solar as “fusion” since it ultimately comes from the sun’s solar core. It was a good trick - think of solar as a new high-tech wonder, instead of as the annoying thing environmentalists keep nagging us about, and it really does look like a miracle.
Uranium shortage, expensive builds, long timelines, unproven technology(no commercial molten salt deployments). Just do solar and batteries. It is way cheaper and proven. Going to get even cheaper when sodium batteries become mainstream, less than half the cost of lithium batteries.
The problem is that I don't trust corporations to run nuclear plants reponsibly; and if they fail to do so and I get hurt, then I don't trust society to take care of me or to hold the corps accountable.
I don't outright buy the claim that a "failure" results in you getting hurt. Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events. You're getting 3x the yearly radiation from one cross-country flight NYC to SF than you would if you lived at the gates of a nuclear power plant for a year.
You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many.
Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood.
I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.
>Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events.
Not at all.
Fukushima costs 7 billion per year now, after 15 years, with no end in sight. Boar with meat measuring over 30 000 bq/kg was shot 30 years after Chernobyl in areas over 1000 miles away.
The things that have already happened were not acute, immediate or local, they were wide-spread and long-lasting.
And they were far from the worst that could have happened. Imagine if the fire at Chernobyl was not put out, for example.
Financially and technically nuclear makes little sense since solar and batteries are faster to deploy and much cheaper.
Nuclear power is very interesting for nations and companies that want to extract money from the taxpaying population. Microsoft gets cheap electricity now, and when the US discovers that its promise to handle the waste and liability is crazy expensive, taxpayers will have to pay for it. Not Microsoft.
Politicians and corps generally want to start multi-billion dollar projects to deliver comparatively tiny amounts of electricity 10 years from now, because it's about the money today, not about the electricity tomorrow.
Don't fall for it. We want to build cheap, distributed, uncomplicated electricity ourselves, controlled by the people who consume it.
Even if nobody gets rich from selling electricity in that scenario, there's plenty of money to be made from consuming almost free electricity.
I'm just not sure we can trust the numbers in today's America. I'm sure it's safe if they are run responsibly, but we've already got stuff like Cancer Alley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley). I'm less worried about a disaster than I am about long term radiation exposure due to cut corners.
It's too expensive compared to solar with storage.
The numbers from published analyses are clear. The revealed preferences from local market participants and foreign geopolitical rivals strongly aligns with these analyses.
If Bill Gates wants to put his money into making it cheaper per Wh, then that's great, and I support him doing this.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Acres of battery parks on fire, near the Tianjin Gate.
What's with this narrative? There isn't some popular resistance holding nuclear back. The only thing holding them back is their own ineptitude.
> It's all proven technology
Literally none of the things you mentioned exist at commercial scale. It is the opposite of "proven". This technology is purely hypothetical.
There's a history of protests against nuclear power, so I don't think it's right to there isn't a popular resistance holding nuclear back.
Certainly the nuclear industry hasn't done themselves any favors either.
There was popular resistance to nuclear, and nuclear was held back, but that doesn't mean nuclear was held back by popular resistance. It certainly doesn't explain why nuclear is struggling to compete with renewables globally, even in countries without popular resistance (like China).
McMurdo was powered by a modular reactor in the 60s. It's not "hypothetical" - though I do agree it's not economically scalable, but neither is training an LLM and before OpenAI did it DARPA did it, and you'd better believe the DOD did it too. I'm saying that the technology exists, it's been proven, and it can work - the hangup is political and cultural, and it burdens me with sadness to see conversation focus on things like "omg what if microsoft put clippy on an ICBM" it's appealing to ridicule and we've enough of that tendency these days. Instead we should celebrate this! Explore and discuss it from merit and principle.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-sets-targets-triple-nu...
I want to like nuclear, but it's clear that many of it's proponents are red-eyed bitcoin-maxis with that strange fanatical juvenile vibe going, and it all just turns me off because it's obvious they are spouting BS. It's all just an act to pump a penny stock or because they are an angsty teen.
Microsoft seems to be announcing random vaporware innovations every once in a while.
Earlier this summer it was quantum computing, more recently optical computing, seems like the next one is going to be fusion!!
AI Santa next?
is there a terraform module for a nuclear reactor yet?
I don't believe idempotency is as easy or safe to achieve with a nuclear reactor as it is with EC2 instances.
Yay, common-sense energy ftw. Good for MS.
> Yay, common-sense energy ftw.
Yeah. Countries around the world, including China are abandoning their solar and wind plans and picking up on new nuclear plants instead. Not.
It is a conspiracy I think.
China's nuclear growth definitely appears to be slowing: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61927
PRC nuclear isn't "slowing" it's on pace/steady relative to latest 5 year plan, but pace of renewables like solar have simply exploded relative to forecast. The TLDR is there was dicey 2010-2020 period post Fukushima reassessment and AP1000/EPR drama... where PRC realized even they can't build western nuclear tech economically due to foreign drama (technical issues, political issues i.e. sanctions, Westinghouse bankruptcy). Took them a few years to unfuck situation with indigenous nuclear tech stack, but then solar LCOE plummeted and industrial capacity made prioritizing solar no brainer. As in they're still on trend for nuclear targets, but far above trend for solar... party because after cracking down on real estate, resources went into industry, and solar factories went brrrt + a lot of excess labour redirected from building apartments to building solar farms. So not so much nuclear slowing, as it looks slowing relative to solar speeding. We'll know more if they scale down nuclear in next 5 year plan, which they may depending on status of storage.
> As in they're still on trend for nuclear targets
They’re not. The targets keeps being revised down and pushed into the future for every plan they make.
They only revised down 12th since it was mid Fukushima. 13th they missed targets due to AP1000/EPR and having to pivot to domestic but didn't revise down. Special circumstances. 14th latest, midterm review a couple years ago (amidst solar boom) said most indicators were meeting expectations. Last I checked they're on trend to hit 65/70GW by 2025 with ~30GW under construction, and 70GW by 2026/27, i.e. reasonably late, which given nature of nuclear I'd give a pass and categorize as on trend give nuclear leadtimes. +1-2 year of execution delays isn't unexpected, but they're not dramatically cutting targets/plans. Have to wait until next long term strategies, i.e.see if they revise down their ~100 GW by 2030, or ~200GW by 2035 plans, reality is they're basically on first wave of domestic plants with associated growing pains. If things go well, they can quickly scale.
> In December 2011 China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) announced that China would make nuclear energy the foundation of its electricity generation system in the next “10 to 20 years”, adding as much as 300 gigawatts (GWe) of nuclear capacity over that period.
> This was followed by a period of delay as China undertook a comprehensive review of nuclear safety in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
> Subsequently, moderated nuclear energy targets were established, aiming for a nuclear energy contribution of 15% of China’s total electricity generation by 2035, 20-25% by 2050 and 45% in the second half of the century.
> However by 2023 it was becoming clear that China’s nuclear construction program was well behind schedule. The target for 2020 had not been achieved, and targets for subsequent 5-year plans were unlikely to be achieved.
> In September 2023 the China Nuclear Energy Association (CNEA) reported that China was now aiming to achieve a nuclear energy contribution of 10% by 2035, increasing to around 18% by 2060.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...
China has also revamped the funding model for nuclear power with it now having to compete on costs with alternative generation. They have an enormous backlog of reactors which has achieved regulatory approval but have yet to start construction.
In 2025 only 4 reactors have so far started construction, in 2024 the total number was 6 reactors.
At current expansion rates nuclear power's slice of the Chinese grid is shrinking. Let alone multiplying.
Quotes from article repeating my points but missing context. 2011 was 12th 5-year plan, post Fukushima + desire to indigenize nuclear stack, they revised down nuclear ambitions / timelines, but it's not indicator they're cancelling / downgrading nuclear rollout. As in 13th, 14th plan hasn't deviated from nuclear targets revised 15 years ago, i.e. generation goal has been consistent given reasonable adjustments 100GW by 2030, 200GW by 2035 vs 300 GW in timeline without Fukushima + indigenization. Nuclear contribution downgrade as % of energy mix wasn't because they plan to curtail / cut back nuclear GWs, it's because their projection for future energy demand has grown above prediction, so planned nuclear share is going to be smaller %, i.e. nuclear share falls even if GW targets consistent. It just so happens they lucked out that solar/wind matured rapidly to fill gap.
Current construction / execution issues involves in dealing with 1st wave of indigenous plants, again it's shrinking as % of grid/mix because denominator is higher than expected, which is independent of central gov desire to multiply nuclear build rate, which they can't reliably commit to until tech is mature. So the best we can say is they're a few years off their planned nuclear GWs and if tech matures, they can go forth and multiply. Of course if alternative LCOE makes nuclear not economical that could change, i.e. if storage blows up. But there's no actual policy hints that nuclear is being revised down, as in not in the last 15 years, which even then is mostly target being pushed a decade due to factors listed. Now they're on trend and the delays are single digit year execution related, not 10+ year we have to rebuild the tech stack delays.
No. It’s not “decreasing”, it’s decreasing.
We’re in the realm of math here, not your opinion or imagination.
The second derivative is negative for all data shown (except 2018). That means, factually, objectively, in reality, as measured, the rate of growth decreased.
If you need help understanding this, I can provide a spreadsheet with the calculation and plots.
No offense, "Realm of math" is useless autistic framing. We're in the realm of politics and policy. Numbers rising or falling are execution noise, downstream of intent and implementation. PRC's 13th/14th Five-Year Plans all kept medium term target (~200GW by 2035). Shortfalls (i.e. numbers decreasing) come from first-gen domestic reactor growing pains not strategic abandonment. Pointing at a latest points graph line and yelling "decreasing" without context is spreadsheet nitpicks vs what policy signals suggest future trend will be. The reality is PRC rollout is slightly behind schedule, single digit years. LCOE of solar and other renewables are increasing projected energy generation targets, so nuclear is less as % of energy mix even though policy for nuclear has been steady, i.e. behind schedule =/= decreasing nuclear commitment.
It depends which way you're aligned. Some tech is good for humanity, some not so much.
Um…
This seems like a nothing burger.
Microsoft jointed an NGO that pushes nuclear that most people have never heard of.
If they were investing a 100bn in nuclear that would be interesting. Paying a small, cancellable membership fee is the opposite of “doubling down”
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But fusion has never been proven to work at scale
On the contrary, I think it has only been proven to work at scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star
Fusion definitely works at large scale; and in short bursts. That is the Sun and Thermonuclear weapons.
What has not yet been shown (and may be impossible?) is fusion working at small scale and over long timeframes.
It has been:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
From what I can tell, Helion energy has already broken ground on what would be a commercial fusion reactor connected to the WA grid despite their best prototype still not producing net positive energy. It's a gamble, but presumably everyone involved is willing to take the risks. A data center that runs on fusion would be a real watershed moment and everyone wants to be first.
If Helion delivers a working fusion reactor that produces net electricity, at commercially competitive rates, I think that's an even more significant event than the recent AI boom.
Helion is a odd one. They have picture of the site here https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-secures-land-an...
saying "Milestone keeps Helion on track to deliver electricity from fusion to Microsoft by 2028"
but as you say they don't seem to have produced any energy and after watching Sabine's take I'm very skeptical (https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4)
I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.
> I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.
There may be some of that, but I think a lot of it is people who believe in what they're doing. A good example in another field is Stockton Rush and his submarine - assuming he wasn't suicidal, he clearly believed in what he was doing, even though to any sane and informed outsider it was fundamentally and life-threateningly flawed.
I don't understand this line of thinking.
"Breaking ground" and "wanting to be first" makes no difference to the physics, engineering, and economics involved here. They're just going to end up with an expensive plant that eats money.
No-one has yet demonstrated a break-even fusion reactor purely from a physics perspective - let alone an engineering or, even more challenging, an economics perspective. In other words, we're essentially still in the fundamental physical research phase.
It's like building international airports for jet planes when you've just invented the Kitty Hawk - but worse, really, because at least the Kitty Hawk proved we could fly in practice. With fusion, there's no evidence that we'll ever be able to create a sustained, economically viable reaction.
Ugh, I rdread this topic because nuclear is as close to as a religion as you get on HN. SMRs just arne't better in any way that matters [1].
And while I personally hope we have economical commercial power generation in the future, I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons, which have the added problem that they destroy your very expensive containment vessel. Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core (depending on the size of the star) and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.
I'm reminded of the push recycling of plastic. Evidence has surface that this was nothing more than oil industry propaganda to sell more plastic [2]. A lot of "recycling" is simply dumping the problem into developing countries and then just looking the other way. We used to do this to China until they stopped taking plastic to "recycle".
I can't help but think that Microsoft issuing some press releases about nuclear is nothing more than marketing to contributing to the data center explosion that will inevitably drive up your electricity bills because you'll pay for the infrastructure that needs to be built and will be paying the generous (and usually secret) subsidies these data centers engotiate.
[1]: https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bro...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Ironically, I'm fairly sure that it is in fact big oil propaganda claiming that plastic recycling is big oil propaganda.
You could for example look at China, a country that has embraced nuclear and solar and wind and batteries and EVs because they don't have good access to oil and don't have much government influence from that group.
Do they recycle more or less of their plastic waste than the USA?
Google suggests in 2023 it's 30% in China vs 12% in the USA.
It's a confusing topic, as some anti-plastic campaigners seize on this intentional failure of the US to recycle more and better to try to push total plastic bans.
Which are good policy for specific items, and again we see these being done in China too, as a complement to recycling, not a replacement.
China though seems to care even less about toxicity than the rest of the world. Also by default I would be wary of number fudging from there.
> I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons
That's just one of many massive problems? You touched on the reason for this:
> Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core ... and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.
As a result of this, we actually have no good reason to believe that commercially viable fusion power could ever be possible.
While we can create conditions comparable in relevant ways to the core of a star, it's extremely uneconomic to do so, for obvious reasons.
And we haven't even achieved the scientific breakeven point for a sustained reaction, let alone one that remotely approaches being viable from an engineering or economic perspective.
Neutron energy loss would be a good problem to have, because it'd mean we're much further along than we are now. The fact that, after half a century and enormous expenditures, we haven't even reached the point where neutron energy loss is the main problem, gives an idea of just how unrealistic this all is.
The one company I really want to see involved in dangerous things with clean up and serious environmental risks is the company that has serious production QA problems, an attention span of about 2 minutes, regular bouts of corporate schizophrenia and a policy of forcing half the planet to abandon working hardware.
Nothing good can come of this.
Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it.
Are there serious environment risks with fusion reactors?
My understanding was that very little radioactive waste was created from a fusion reactor and what little there is will decay pretty quickly (decades).
A fusion reactor creates a much more intense flux of neutrons than any fission reactor, which will transmute into radioactive isotopes any substance from which a shield will be made.
So the quantity of radioactive waste will certainly not be little, but more likely much greater than in a fission reactor.
Nevertheless, because there is more freedom in the design of the neutron shield than in a fission reactor, it is likely that it is possible to find such compositions where most of the radioactive waste will decay quickly enough, so that there will remain only a small quantity of long-lived radioactive waste.
However, until someone demonstrates this in reality, it is still uncertain how much radioactive waste will be generated, because this depends on many constructive details.
A lot of components of a fusion reactor, e.g. pipes for cooling fluid and the like, will become damaged by the neutrons and they will have to be replaced periodically, after becoming radioactive. The amount of such waste will depend a lot on the lifetimes of such components. For now it is very uncertain how much time such components will resist before requiring maintenance.
The big risk is tritium leakage.
To show the scale of the problem: if the world were powered by Helion's reactors (for all primary energy), and the tritium produced were just released into the environment and mixed completely with all water on the planet (including oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, and ice), then it would lift all that water above the US regulatory limit for tritium in drinking water. All the water, including everything in every ocean.
You are correct. Radioactive materials from fusion reactors are not a significant environmental threat. The bigger problem with fusion reactors is that nobody has yet built a controlled terrestrial fusion reactor that produces net power.
Well we don't have working fusion reactor topology yet but the current "reactor" components are low level waste so safe within 40-100 years. Which is still a hell of a long time. Also they still will require biological shielding and associated materials are quite difficult to deal with (concrete etc).
I expect that the longevity of their attention is considerably less than this, particularly if the LLM boom crashes. ROI will not pay for the disposal later down the line.
The claims of low level waste from fusion reactors implicitly assume that impurity elements (like, say, niobium) that would produce long lived activation products can be reduced to very low levels. This may drive up the cost of materials dramatically.
"Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it."
Do they? I hope they don't. I would enjoy seeing MSFT implode and losing trust of its shareholders with its cash - itll be forced to return it rather than reinvest.
Or, for another perspective, they're helping force capitalism to work: an opportunity exists to reduce prices.
This is a good way to force the (often monopolistic) providers to get their shit together, as google did with google fiber.
Ah yes a nuclear race to the bottom. Sorry but that will be a monumental fuck up if you have any historical knowledge about how we handle nuclear materials.
Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now.
It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste.
I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.
We do not in fact need it.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are interested in it enough to put money into it. That suggests there is a market need for it, or at least interest, within the current context.
We should assume they're acting rationally, so the real question is, why do they find this interesting at all? Why not dump the money into private solar farms instead?
The world will spend about a quadrillion dollars on energy in the 21st century. Piddling little billion dollar investments look like long shot bets on low probability outcomes. The big spending is on renewables now.
Gates in particular seems to have been a disciple of Vaclav Smil, a person whose arguments against renewable cost reduction were wildly mistaken.