We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.
Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.
That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.
I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.
My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.
I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off.
> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.
Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.
This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.
Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.
Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.
People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Etc etc.
Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.
Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production.
Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.
Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.
That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.
You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.
> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.
Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc
Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
> A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:
Exactly. What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise, where the engineering effort is concentrated in building economies of scale. To me it's clear that nuclear energy's pros largely outweigh the cons, and that it is a perfect complement to solar and wind power generation.
I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.
Injury rate is 6x other space vehicle manufacturers. If you were to slow them down by 6x they would pretty close to the 20 years it’s already taken to get SLS/constellation to do a test launch.
Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation.
To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade.
They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power.
Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out.
The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility company cannot, because for the Navy it's about having a necessary capability. There's no economic break even to consider.
Secrecy isn't the obstacle here. Naval reactors are optimized for combat performance, costs be damned. They aren't economically efficient for commercial power generation.
I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.
Submarine reactors run on super high enriched fuel instantly one could instantly repurpose into a bomb. Lots of gen 4 and 5 reactor designs that combine low cost, compact footprint, and running on less expensive and carefully controlled fuel.
> If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale
You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times
Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."
> Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.
A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.
Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward
You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.
We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.
Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]
Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.
As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
> At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.
I don’t follow. If nuclear initially costs more than coal, then the first effect as it decreases is displacement when the prices cross over. Then if it falls further you will notice consumer price drops.
Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.
I understand HN leans moderate to conservative, but we absolutely need regulations in place for nuclear. If done well and safely, nuclear is great. Over and over and over again for-profit companies have proven they are not capable of prioritizing safety if regulations are not in place to stop them.
It’s always funny to me to see folks with the “HN leans _________” comments every few days with the blank spot filled in with every single political position one can think of.
Advocating for deregulation in order to achieve innovation is the opposite of conservative.
It’s not a matter of being a for profit or not. It’s an also matter of technological development. Most of the early incidents in nuclear plants happened under the management of public or state controlled companies.
> Advocating for deregulation in order to achieve innovation is the opposite of conservative.
Not sure how it's the opposite of conservatism to remove unneeded government roadblocks to enable industry. That's pretty solidly in the traditional American conservative viewpoint (not to be confused with whatever viewpoint currently dominates the GOP).
I don't think anyone wants to get rid of nuclear regs entirely. There is a popular perception (i dont know if actually true) that safety regs were built around first generation reactor designs which were designed in an inherently unsafe way, and for modern designs that are inherently safer, it makes sense to relax some regulations.
I completely agree with you and I'm pro nuclear. But those regulations have to be streamlined and the regulator needs to have enough manpower so licenses aren't stuck in limbo for years.
It's also unacceptable that the regulations can change during builds and then you have to make large parts completely new before you get the license to load fuel into the reactor.
No one is saying there shouldn't be regulations on nuclear.
But our regulations on nuclear are utterly insane -- every time I get someone to read into the reasons nuclear here has been so much more expensive than safe nuclear in other countries with more reasonable regulations around it, they come away shellshocked. It takes a while to understand what's going on, because it's truly death by a thousand cuts, but the unifying principle is the NRC's ALARA ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable") principle (with honorable mention going to the NRC's Linear No-Threshold harm model, which despite the evidence assigns a linear cancer incidence to radiation dosing).
Getting radiation exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" sounds like a nice idea. But there's no lower bound, so the costs scale infinitely, gutting the incentives to innovate and invest. If the prices of other forms of energy go up, regulators intentionally raise the costs of nuclear comparably by increasing what must be spent on reducing radiation exposure. New innovative plant design that increases margins? Guess what -- that's another opportunity to use the money to lower radiation exposure even further.
The lack of a lower bound results in absurd results, because we long ago decreased the exposure from plants to far below background radiation levels, and far below the levels at which we've been able to observe harm.
We need to replace the LNT model with a sigmoid model that aligns with the science on radiation harms, and we need to remove the infinitely-scaling ALARA standard. Doing these will not increase risks, but will decrease costs a large amount in the short run and even more in the longer-term.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.
I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.
If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!
A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh
> It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.
And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.
> I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.
And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.
I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.
I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
> I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
> Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.
Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.
Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):
> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.
1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital.
2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab.
3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.
China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe.
Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles.
Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper:
> We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.
> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution.
That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.
That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.
Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.
If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.
However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)
That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.
Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate.
However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.
We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China.
I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.
I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.
Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.
That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.
China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?
I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."
It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.
I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.
We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer.
Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns.
I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
Perhaps the are talking about Unions and the regulations around minimum pay and working conditions.
I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
Thats not the full picture. Aviation exploded in growth -- you can easily expand operations and work to smaller margins. The US shut down the nuclear industry intentionally from the 80s until the last 5 years from regulations.
I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.
This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.
Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.
A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing.
Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.
Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.
The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?
Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.
I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!
As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.
If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.
Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.
Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.
What about long term environmental cost?
I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.
> if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard
What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.
Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action:
> and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.
It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."
No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.
What's the evidence that there's "flooding the market" going on? It seems to me wind turbine prices have followed a plausible looking downwards hill and there's no sign of dumping excess inventory or otherwise unsustainably low prices.
This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.
I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.
Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.
It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.
The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.
A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.
And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.
> The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge.
Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time.
We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.
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.
The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state
Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.
>SVP vs PG&E
This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas
True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure.
Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.
> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation
Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"
Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
Germany doesn't need to participate in the next. They need to participate in something though. They are too small to do everything alone. Even the US depends on a lot of other countries to make things work.
Could you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.
Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
If AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)
There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.
Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
Cool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.
Given how fast compute needs replacing, it's not much of a fall behind.
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
They can’t even use the products as a result of their obsession with government regulation. For example, Apple released a universal translator, literally right out of Star Trek, but the EU won’t be getting it either.
Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell.
Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?
The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start.
Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.
I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy. There must have been stronger political reasons behind it than simply « not liking nuclear ». I’d be curious to read something deeper on the subject and understand the reasoning behind those strategies since the Fukushima accident.
Nuclear is really unpopular with a significant part of the German electorate especially on the left. So, yes, it’s entirely political.
I guess sabotaging France by preventing it for exploiting the advantage its great strategy in energy should have afforded it is just cherry on the cake.
The historical data shows that France didn't have upwards trend in nuclear generation since early 2000s.[1] I wouldn't bet on it to change regardless of political climate.
Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
The EU is fining France because they don’t have enough clean energy in their mix despite France having the cleanest energy in Europe because nuclear used to not count. They are also forcing the French national energy company to resell their electricity at a loss to competitor moving money which should be used to invest into the pocket of private investors. And let’s not talk about the utter stupidity of the current discussion on the dams.
Then you realise that a significant part of France new debts was due to them shielding their population for the soaring prices of electricity despite France producing cheap energy, said prices being due to Germany brain dead strategy leading to a dependence on Russian gas and the obligation to go through the European market, and you start to see the double whammy.
Well, at least, the energy market is not as bad as the ECB rules.
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.
> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.
The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.
Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants).
Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive.
> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means.
But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.
It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]
The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.
Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]
The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.
It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
You need a reliable source for energy. Pumped storage is not. They are mostly good for dealing with the fluctuations of energy supply and demand. It crucially requires water to operate. You can't do much when there's a drought. Also, did some googling. The world’s largest pumped‑hydro storage plant (Fengning, China) stores nearly 40 GWh, delivering 3.6 GW for about 10.8 hours when full. Thats not even a day.
There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.
No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T.
Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
And the CO₂ difference for electricity production, so the only part of the energy system where nuclear vs. intermittent renewable is currently applicable, is not 2:1. It is 10:1.
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Holy shit - you can't build a nuclear power plant in Germany. That's it and get over it. It's gonna be 95% renewable by 2035 whether you like it or not.
Also renewables are way cheaper than any nuclear power plant build in the last 20 years on western soil.
I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will).
However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons:
2. It will take longer
3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles
4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well.
Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.
Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have.
I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).
1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).
2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.
3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?
4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space.
Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables.
Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.
And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.
Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.
There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)
1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year
1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.
Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.
Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.
Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.
This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors.
For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
The EU may have a geopolitical interest in taking another look at nuclear. The dependance on Russian natural gas and expensive imported US natural gas is not good for their economic outlook long term. Honestly I am surprised Germany has not fired back up a couple of its plants considering its difficulties with Industrial output and competing in a world market.
The longer faux-environmentalists like Greenpeace continue to double-down on boneheaded anti-nuclear stances, the less respect I have for them, and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence.
However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.
Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.
There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.
The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.
For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.
A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.
The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.
By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.
I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?
How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?
Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.
Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.
Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable.
Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.
How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.
> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.
None of this happens to be true.
A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.
And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.
What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?
Here the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.
> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.
> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.
True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.
> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment
Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.
> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.
The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.
> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.
Why not? Grid scale batteries will allow using solar/wind throughout the day and not only peak times, eliminating the duck curve problem. This is already only a few years away.
This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.
First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).
Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.
Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.
Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany). Thus, a comparison isn't that easy to make.
System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.
That is also not true. For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all. Even Greenpeace and the Green's chief anti-nuclear Lobbyist, Jürgen Trittin, called nuclear power plants "money printing machines".
> Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France)
Those are minute compared to subsidies intermittent renewables get in Germany. In particular as there is the ARENH program, which is effectively a negative subsidy (it takes money away from the nuclear company EDF), and of course EDF is profitable and gives money to the government.
When you add it all up, France has a negative subsidy of € 0.1 - 7 billion yearly, whereas Germany subsidizes intermittent renewables to the tune of around €20 billion a year.
> System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend
That is also not true. System costs are actually rising, because yields are dropping, the share of renewables has risen and the (fairly cheap) coal backup is to be eliminated. Total costs are now estimated at several trillion euros. For comparison, France's nuclear program cost a total of €228 billion through 2011.
Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany. [1]
EDF was nationalized in 2022, doesn't have to build money reserves for decommissioning (which would be tens of billions), is about 50 billion in debt and just got a 5 billion government loan to keep some old reactors running and another government loan to build new plants. These are not minute interventions, both France and Germany heavily subsidize their sectors (in different ways). With the ARENH program ending in 2025, a more fair comparison will be possible.
I have to read up on the system costs though, that may be ai fair point.
> Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany.
That's not true. That report is based on a completely ridiculous paper by the FÖS, the "Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft". Calling the numbers it uses "completely made up" is putting it kindly.
"The disregard for scientific methodology, for basic knowledge of economics and business administration, environmental economics, energy economics, and nuclear technology, the biased selection of sources, even the use of newspaper articles as supposedly scientific sources, and the denial of the positive effects of nuclear energy, which far outweigh its social costs, are unworthy of the FÖS. Either they are a sign of insufficient economic expertise at the institute, as well as a lack of knowledge of scientific methodology, or the FÖS is deliberately misleading readers with the aim of being able to cite the highest possible fictitious costs for nuclear energy on behalf of its NGO clients. Both discredit the study and its client."
The debt that EDF carries is completely normal for a company this size, especially one that does infrastructure. It would be unusual for a company not to use the capital markets to finance such projects. EDF has been highly profitable for decades, recently while being used to subsidize other parts of the economy via ARENH as well as being used to buffer the effects of the energy crisis, not just via ARENH, but through massive expansion of ARENH.
ARENH is not "ending", it is being replaced by a comparable scheme that is structured slightly differently.
EDF was not "nationalized" in 2022. It was always a state company, with the state never holding less than 85%. The period where the state held less than 100% was relatively short, from 2005 to 2022. The state bought out the minority shareholders in order to streamline the planned nuclear expansion.
The "subsidies" for EDF (cheaper loans etc.) amount to around € 2.7 - 3 billion a year. By itself, that's obviously not "minute". However, these sums are dwarfed by the ARENH program and the profits that EDF pays to the state, which turn the subsidies into "negative subsidies" in sum. That is, the state gets more money from EDF than it gives it, by a good amount.
Even if that weren't the case, the sums are dwarfed by the German subsidies for renewable, which are an order of magnitude higher than the gross subsidies in France (and infinitely higher than the net-negative subsidies).
>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
Maybe you could argue against the actual arguments Greanpeace make against nuclear instead of making ad-hominem statements.
Relatedly, you could read what scholars like Langdon Winner say about nuclear energy (in short that they require an almost authoritarian posture in order to safely deal with nuclear fuel and nuclear waste); in contrast with solar which can be deployed at a local and decentralized scale.
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb.
Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.
If you're going for the enriched uranium route to a bomb, nobody is going to start with used nuclear fuel, because dealing with the highly radioactive spent fuel is such a huge PITA.
If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.
That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.
Not everyone has a U mine or pre-existing bomb industry. The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is "yes", bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a "PITA") if you have a reactor core handy to start with.
No but every nuclear power plant requires local military defenses, and every country that expands nuclear power requires this state power even if they don’t have nuclear weapons.
I doubt it was for any particular energy policy objective, if they were Soviet funded. The soviets (or whatever name you want to give them now) are masters of finding fracture points in relatively stable western societies and exploiting them to make unstable western societies that are less effective at combating Soviet policy. See: almost the entirety of the modern political discourse.
given how the united states starved them of foreign currency and then introduced economic shock therapy that reduced life expectancy of the population by 10 yrs particularly for men one might say the western imperialists were better at that
There's a fun game you can play with countries that build nuclear power plants: "guess the existential threat".
In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.
In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.
It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure.
It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.
Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented.
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:
>…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated
economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US
$70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.
Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.
In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.
If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
These are orchestrated by Russia. They want to destabilise European energy sector and economies and they are sponsoring various organisations to spread such misinformation.
The West is losing information war with Russia - see the downvotes. Sites are infested with Russian bots and useful idiots helping the genocidal regime.
LCOE does not account for the full (system) costs. Nuclear power plants have capacity factors over 90%, while PV/Wind have less than 25%. LCOE does not account for the added costs, such as increased transmission and storage/backup costs.
> Germany, long a symbol of anti-nuclear politics, is beginning to shift.
err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight, the costs of dismantling used plants are outrageous and if it were not for nimbyism, we'd be essentially self sustaining on wind and solar within a decade.
matter of fact fossil and nuclear sponsored fud on wind and solar is the single biggest issue we face in Germany.
> but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight
The Problem in Germany is that by law the state has to build a repository, while the operators have to pay for it. The operators did pay (~24 bln EUR), but politically either NIMBY parties (such as CDU/CSU/SPD) block it, or the Greens (under Habeck) block progress so they can continue to shout "what about the waste???"
In Finland the operators can build their own repository and they did it cheap and relatively fast.
Also from an even more anti-nuclear country (austria): Kernenergie? Ja bitte!
Finally, France will be happy after years of being pushed back on this with the drive for solar and wind turbines, which sadly all got supplemented via gas on the back that nuclear was bad.
Sadly, with electricity becoming more reliant on gas and other fossil fuels when it is not so sunny in winter, or on those cloudy days with no wind, means fossil fuel usage ends up higher than if they had stayed and expanded nuclear - instead they closed many plants(Germany a prime example, in favour of....gas).
Then the whole over-dependence on Russian gas and oil really did whammy the energy price market, not just for Europe, but with a knock-on effect across the world. One we still pay for today.
I read a lot of comments talking about „getting down the operational costs“ but i am missing someone talking about the costs of depositing the nuclear waste until it has no more risks. Am i missing something?!
Asking because I don't know. How is enrichment governed? Say for instance if a country is only using it for energy vs defense/offense. And are there elements that can be specifically used for energy vs otherwise? Last I remember, having access to enriched uranium was grounds for a country to bomb another one.
The only way to ensure that a civil uranium enrichment program remains strictly civil is via transparency and monitoring. A country that has mastered uranium enrichment technology for fueling civil power reactors could use the same technology to produce bomb-grade uranium. It actually takes more work to enrich natural uranium into fuel for power reactors than it takes to further enrich power reactor fuel into bomb material:
This is scary. so the extra effort to move from, say, 20% to 85% is relatively small compared with the effort to get up to 20% in the first place. Might as well build a feature into the reactor so that it only works with <=20%
You should read the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as it addresses several of those issues. Possession of highly enriched uranium isn't necessarily an act of war by itself.
Natural uranium on earth is currently about 0.7% U-235; civilian power reactors typically need low-enriched uranium which is 3% to 5% U-235.
The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).
Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
IAEA inspections verify your claimed inventory and enrichment facilities. They are trying to detect if any nuclear materials are being skimmed/diverted. As for weapons, nuclear fuel is very low enrichment (usually under 5%). Iran surpassed 60%, which has no peaceful use, so that is why it was said they were perusing weapons.
Imo that's a pretty complicated topic. On one side if you just build LWRs you just don't need very highly enriched uranium or plutonium so posession of those is a red flag. On the other side fast breeder reactors are the ones which are able to produce the least harmful waste. But fast breeders and closed fuel cycles produce and handle plutonium which in turn can be used for bad things.
Clean, mostly. With future? No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not.
Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source.
Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding].
And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in storing. Except for costly disasters in how not to intermediately store it, here in Germany.
If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful, why not make future generations happy by preserving it for them, and for now, limiting its use until we learned how to add to the initial price the full cost of long term storage, with further disasters as a learning experience for that?
Saving lives and being cost-effective in the short run might work, but every energy expert says in 50 years, nuclear will have to be phased out anyway. And fusion could provide clean, but also primary heat inducing energy. So even that will not save us.
Primary heat on this scale isn't nessisarially a bad thing. It has a very small impact on the global power balance with respect to the effect global warming.
There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.
I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.
>If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful
It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.
Why mine uranium? Only about 4% of nuclear fuel is actually used before the fuel rods need replacement, which makes uranium highly recyclable. Given all of the “spent” fuel rods in storage, mining operations for additional uranium are unnecessary. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for millennia, provided we are willing to begin a recycling program.
Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use isotopes from it. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.
What do you mean? Modern in situ uranium mining is one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have. It's not perfectly clean, but it's pretty darn good.
Ok, well by this definition, all human development activity is unclean. This is a perfectly valid point of view but is pretty distinct from the modern definition of clean.
The problem in my mind with a "clean is clean" litmus test is that it eliminates the word "clean"'s ability to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable human development.
Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.
OK, but then by that logic, solar and and wind shouldn't be categorized as clean energy either. Clearly it's a matter of degrees and meant as a useful segmentation for taxation, etc.
Holy shit you're all insane. Why do you want to call it clean when clearly it's not? Reducing energy consumption should be the goal. Stop calling clean stuff that isn't.
Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage
Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar.
The death rates might be a difference in units; the Forbes article is using deaths per trillion kWh, the other might be deaths per thousand/million kWh.
The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.
E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.
Sure, in deaths per unit energy. But the real risk of nuclear is financial. The tail risk is huge for any producer on their own, which makes insurance extremely expensive, and which means that usually only nations bear the full financial risk of nuclear.
The nuclear industry did say that this would happen but the reality was the exact opposite:
>According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.
Pebble-bed reactors are incapable of catastrophic failure, and molten-salt reactors have negative feedback loops with increasing pressure. Nuclear doesn't have to mean the same designs that were used in the 60s.
Both those design types were operational in the 1960s in the US but have been shut down due to lack of performance and industrial interest. New interest has started today, but let's not claim the new ones are some kind of new improved tech that evolved out of our workhorse water cooled/moderated plants.
Western designs are safe, most Soviet-era ones are/were not. It's unfortunate that nuclear power still has this stigma, as it's like saying "all cars are unsafe" while comparing the crash test ratings of a modern sedan to a 1960's chevy bel aire.
To put a number on it, linear no threshold models predict ~130 deaths as a result of the radiation (and are known to over-estimate lethalities at low doses).
Around 50 people a year die while clearing snow in Japan, so it's ~ twice as dangerous as shoveling snow in worst-case predictions.
The main reason is a combination of negligence by the owner of the plant and not enough enforcement of standards.
The fukushima powerplant was known to have sea wall lower then required and as such was vulnerable to a tsunami (this was known for quite a long time)
Combined with backup power in the basement (also against standards)
For an example of what happens to a reactor build according to safety requirements see the onagawa nuclear powerplant
The Chernobyl plant had known construction defects that could impair safety. These things would prevent a western plant from starting operation, but did not stop the Soviet plant from beginning operation:
They did not even have any automated safeties in place, because their philosophy was “faith in the worker” while the western philosophy is “humans are fallible”:
They then ignored their own safety procedures when operating the plant, which ultimately is what caused the disaster.
Saying that Soviet designs being in the same generation as western designs makes them equally safe/unsafe is quite wrong when you look at the details. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one mistake after another.
That said, the plant was designed by a country that shot down a civilian airliner that had strayed into their airspace due to a navigational error, when they knew it was a civilian airliner:
They had no regard for human life, so of course, they built things that are incredibly unsafe. There is no end of examples of them simply not caring about human life.
I'd say a reactor in inland Europe is far from the craziest place to put one. God forbid someone were to put one in the Pacific ring of fire... oh, wait...
Why? Are you concerned that, like Lex Luthor in that worst-of-all Superman movies, someone will use nuclear reactors to somehow cause damage to continental plates? Actually, that's more of a stretch than the movie took.
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.
> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.
Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.
That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.
See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.
I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.
I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.
My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.
I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off.
> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
And then you have bad faith actors.
No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?
No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?
No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?
Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?
None of that has never ever happened, right?
Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.
This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.
Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.
Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.
People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Etc etc.
Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.
>> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
>It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days
Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...
That’s fair, but everything else is outcompeting coal these days.
So even if we can drop prices down to what China pays, nuclear still loses in China.
I think if you regulated coal on a linear no threshold risk model, you'd find the costs to be somewhat closer.
Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production.
Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.
Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.
You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel.
https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836...
That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.
You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.
> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.
Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc
Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
> A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
France built 40 in a decade:
* https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...
More recently, Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, but Unit 4 cost 30% less (though still not cheap).
Exactly. What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise, where the engineering effort is concentrated in building economies of scale. To me it's clear that nuclear energy's pros largely outweigh the cons, and that it is a perfect complement to solar and wind power generation.
We can't blow up nuclear reactors to learn how they failed like spaceX does with rockets.
Sure we can, just not out in the open with a bunch of spectators.
> What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise
I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/spacex-worker-injury-rates...
Injury rate is 6x other space vehicle manufacturers. If you were to slow them down by 6x they would pretty close to the 20 years it’s already taken to get SLS/constellation to do a test launch.
Super heavy is on year 4.
Betcha their worker injuries per kg to LEO are lower than most companies.
I really don't want a SpaceX-like attitude to radioactive material.
It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.
Total non starter.
Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation.
To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade.
They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power.
Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out.
The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility company cannot, because for the Navy it's about having a necessary capability. There's no economic break even to consider.
The point is that we don't even see much discussion. You can use LEU variant as fuel if we cannot accept the higher levels of enrichment.
The requirements for submarines are completely different than for a land-based plant, so certainly there is something to tweak which reduces the cost.
Russians have done it, why can't others?
E.g. Akademik Lomonosov, producing 300 MW with cost of 400-700 million dollars. Using 14.1% average enrichment.
And upcoming RITM-200 reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITM-200
Secrecy isn't the obstacle here. Naval reactors are optimized for combat performance, costs be damned. They aren't economically efficient for commercial power generation.
The problem is economics. Just because the Us built a fleet does not mean that they are economical once put in a non-military application.
The DoD is not exactly known for great efficiency and getting the most value for money
I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.
And the technology is incredibly mature, submarine reactors were some of the first reactors, period.
Submarine reactors run on super high enriched fuel instantly one could instantly repurpose into a bomb. Lots of gen 4 and 5 reactor designs that combine low cost, compact footprint, and running on less expensive and carefully controlled fuel.
French have some LEU submarines. They seem to be pretty good on paper. Needs refueling every ten years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffren-class_submarine
France also built full-sized commercial plants rather than batteries of small reactors. That's because scale matters for efficient production.
Cool! Thanks
And they are heavily guarded.
In the current political climate I prefer energy sources that don’t cause severe damage if sabotaged.
Did you hear the worries in Ukraine that Russia could hit a wind turbine with a rocket?
What's the danger in hitting a micro nuclear reactor with a rocket ? A shitty dirty bomb detonated near the powerplant ?
There are some companies that are trying to get SMRs up and running.
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-02-05/article-6744/new-swedish...
We’ll see how it goes.
> If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale
You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times
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: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?
Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
> Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.
A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.
Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward
I'm talking about capital costs, not operating costs. $3B/GW for a coal plant is about 5X as much as natgas.
Does that calculation include the cost of storing the nuclear waste after use? I'd be curious to see a reference for your claim.
Dry casting on site is fairly cheap.
The true cost of nuclear is the massive construction cost. We don't know how to solve that.
You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.
We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.
Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]
Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.
[1] https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ [2] https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/...
As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
> At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.
The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.
Why not not both?
Sure, but one comes first.
And it's going to end up being price.
I don’t follow. If nuclear initially costs more than coal, then the first effect as it decreases is displacement when the prices cross over. Then if it falls further you will notice consumer price drops.
Or you know, build renewables and storage which has in recent years reduced Californias fossil gas dependency by 40%.
“All of the above” seems a good approach. If this is an existential crisis, why would we not hedge our bets?
(Not everywhere has good sun for solar.)
Solar is not the only alternative. Tidal, river flow, reservoir, wind, thermal come to mind in terms of renewables.
At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees
Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.
> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
I understand HN leans moderate to conservative, but we absolutely need regulations in place for nuclear. If done well and safely, nuclear is great. Over and over and over again for-profit companies have proven they are not capable of prioritizing safety if regulations are not in place to stop them.
It’s always funny to me to see folks with the “HN leans _________” comments every few days with the blank spot filled in with every single political position one can think of.
HN leans to perfect diversity: power distribution is so boring. :D
It's not diverse. Whoever you are, HN always leans in perfect opposition to your ideas.
Advocating for deregulation in order to achieve innovation is the opposite of conservative.
It’s not a matter of being a for profit or not. It’s an also matter of technological development. Most of the early incidents in nuclear plants happened under the management of public or state controlled companies.
> Most of the early incidents in nuclear plants happened under the management of public or state controlled companies.
Not a fair comparison since back then nobody else had the resources.
> Advocating for deregulation in order to achieve innovation is the opposite of conservative.
Not sure how it's the opposite of conservatism to remove unneeded government roadblocks to enable industry. That's pretty solidly in the traditional American conservative viewpoint (not to be confused with whatever viewpoint currently dominates the GOP).
I don't think anyone wants to get rid of nuclear regs entirely. There is a popular perception (i dont know if actually true) that safety regs were built around first generation reactor designs which were designed in an inherently unsafe way, and for modern designs that are inherently safer, it makes sense to relax some regulations.
Nuclear safety to provide safety is important but not to stifle any innovation or deployment which is what it has been.
I completely agree with you and I'm pro nuclear. But those regulations have to be streamlined and the regulator needs to have enough manpower so licenses aren't stuck in limbo for years.
It's also unacceptable that the regulations can change during builds and then you have to make large parts completely new before you get the license to load fuel into the reactor.
No one is saying there shouldn't be regulations on nuclear.
But our regulations on nuclear are utterly insane -- every time I get someone to read into the reasons nuclear here has been so much more expensive than safe nuclear in other countries with more reasonable regulations around it, they come away shellshocked. It takes a while to understand what's going on, because it's truly death by a thousand cuts, but the unifying principle is the NRC's ALARA ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable") principle (with honorable mention going to the NRC's Linear No-Threshold harm model, which despite the evidence assigns a linear cancer incidence to radiation dosing).
Getting radiation exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" sounds like a nice idea. But there's no lower bound, so the costs scale infinitely, gutting the incentives to innovate and invest. If the prices of other forms of energy go up, regulators intentionally raise the costs of nuclear comparably by increasing what must be spent on reducing radiation exposure. New innovative plant design that increases margins? Guess what -- that's another opportunity to use the money to lower radiation exposure even further.
The lack of a lower bound results in absurd results, because we long ago decreased the exposure from plants to far below background radiation levels, and far below the levels at which we've been able to observe harm.
We need to replace the LNT model with a sigmoid model that aligns with the science on radiation harms, and we need to remove the infinitely-scaling ALARA standard. Doing these will not increase risks, but will decrease costs a large amount in the short run and even more in the longer-term.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
Yeah it seems like having State control is not a silver bullet
Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK).
E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.
I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.
I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...
I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.
If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
Maybe this article?
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-hold...
The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction...
A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh
> It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.
And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.
> I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.
And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.
I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.
I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned
Which are the fake costs from regulation?
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
> I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.
> Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
> The lack of regulatory clarity
Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.
Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):
> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.
Its multifold.
1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital. 2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab. 3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.
China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe.
Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles.
Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper:
> We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.
> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution.
That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.
That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.
Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.
If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.
However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)
That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.
Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate.
However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.
We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China.
I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.
I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.
Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.
That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.
Which regulations?
What would change in the construction process?
China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?
I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."
It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.
I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
> What is different?
All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.
We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer.
Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns.
I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
Perhaps the are talking about Unions and the regulations around minimum pay and working conditions.
I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
Nuclear regulations are no worse than aviation regulation. Yet planes manage to be cost competitive.
Cutting regulations isn't necessary the win people think. If safety regulations are cut, it risks accidents in future.
Nuclear needs to move from bespoke builds to serial production.
Thats not the full picture. Aviation exploded in growth -- you can easily expand operations and work to smaller margins. The US shut down the nuclear industry intentionally from the 80s until the last 5 years from regulations.
But what are the specific regulations you would cut, dude?
I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.
This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.
Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.
A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing.
Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.
Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.
The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?
Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.
I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!
As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.
If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.
Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.
Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.
What about long term environmental cost? I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.
> if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard
What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.
It's regulation holding back nuclear power...in every country?
Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action:
> and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.
It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."
No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.
Your rates aren't doing insane shit because you don't have nuclear energy. Renewables are way way way cheaper.
How much of that rate is because China is flooding the market with wind turbine blades and solar panels?
How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?
> How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?
Buy them while they're selling cheap. They're good for at least 20 years. Plenty of time to stand up domestic manufacturing if they cut you off.
What's the evidence that there's "flooding the market" going on? It seems to me wind turbine prices have followed a plausible looking downwards hill and there's no sign of dumping excess inventory or otherwise unsustainably low prices.
To use wind turbines as an example, more than 50% of the various bits are manufactured here in the US. For turbines destined US wind farms, at least.
This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.
In other words: nuclear is not viable unless the risks are offloaded to the public. Privatize profits, socialize risks.
Its the same with any massive infrastructure investment - only governments have the balance sheet to build them.
I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
Maybe roll back regulation to when France rolled out the Messmer plan?
They spent 1/4th of what we do today.
Regulations on nuclear power protect us from nuclear waste and meltdowns. Meltdowns are rare but catastrophic when they occur.
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.
Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.
It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.
The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.
A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
Unless by "taxes" you mean "delivery charges" this is simply untrue.
The generation is cheap. The delivery, the grid cost, is 3x-5x the cost of the generation.
It's all PG&E and the regulators's fault, for not containing costs more.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.
And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.
> The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge.
Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time.
We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.
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.
The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
[1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state
Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.
>SVP vs PG&E
This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...
True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure.
[1] - https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=...
Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.
Another big reason for the high costs is the lack of experience building the plants.
> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation
Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"
Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx...
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
Germany doesn't need to participate in the next. They need to participate in something though. They are too small to do everything alone. Even the US depends on a lot of other countries to make things work.
Could you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
If we’re looking at the car and energy industries, I think China has already won.
Sure, talk to your grid operators about that! :)
It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
I'm not sure how tidal and geothermal fare in Germany
It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
My baseline expectation is some opposition to any new energy infrastructure.
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.
Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.
This right here. It's not one or the other, its a diverse combination of all of them that makes for the best results.
Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
If AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)
Not with a tech that needs 15 years to be build
A country is not forced to have AI farms running in it. Building giant powerplant for the AI tech (possible) bubble not seems wise.
The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point.
SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.
> who knows what demands AI will have at that point
This is true for any investment pretty much.
There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.
Check out:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
> baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes
That is unlike any definition of baseload generation I have ever heard.
If demand spikes nuclear power plants aren’t fast enough
You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops.
Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025
US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
Cool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
The already use it and are not impressed.
AI wears out quickly if you have special demands.
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.
https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage
Given how fast compute needs replacing, it's not much of a fall behind.
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
They can’t even use the products as a result of their obsession with government regulation. For example, Apple released a universal translator, literally right out of Star Trek, but the EU won’t be getting it either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45215548
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217477
The wait until after the AI bubble and buy the cheap surplus of energy.
AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither.
I willing to wager that the AI bubble will burst before you could even begin to build power plants for them.
I'm sure the bubble will burst. However we have already found a few uses for AI and those uses will continue after the burst (if they are economical)
Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell.
Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?
The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
and a municipality willing to have the German finale nuclear waste storage in their backyard.
the Söder Challenge is Legend:-)
Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start.
Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.
I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy. There must have been stronger political reasons behind it than simply « not liking nuclear ». I’d be curious to read something deeper on the subject and understand the reasoning behind those strategies since the Fukushima accident.
Nuclear is really unpopular with a significant part of the German electorate especially on the left. So, yes, it’s entirely political.
I guess sabotaging France by preventing it for exploiting the advantage its great strategy in energy should have afforded it is just cherry on the cake.
Germany doesn't need to sabotage France on nuclear energy; France has done a fine job of sabotaging themselves.
The historical data shows that France didn't have upwards trend in nuclear generation since early 2000s.[1] I wouldn't bet on it to change regardless of political climate.
1: https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/generation/nucle...
France is sabotaging France on nuclear.
Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
The EU is fining France because they don’t have enough clean energy in their mix despite France having the cleanest energy in Europe because nuclear used to not count. They are also forcing the French national energy company to resell their electricity at a loss to competitor moving money which should be used to invest into the pocket of private investors. And let’s not talk about the utter stupidity of the current discussion on the dams.
Then you realise that a significant part of France new debts was due to them shielding their population for the soaring prices of electricity despite France producing cheap energy, said prices being due to Germany brain dead strategy leading to a dependence on Russian gas and the obligation to go through the European market, and you start to see the double whammy.
Well, at least, the energy market is not as bad as the ECB rules.
That's a shame.
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
The data does not back up this narrative: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas.
The devil is in the details. The easy part is now done, and further significant increases in solar/wind in Germany are not going to happen.
Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times.
Your graph also ignores energy used for heating and for industrial processes. Their electrification is now stalled by high energy prices.
> not going to happen … nothing on the horizon for other times
Batteries and storage.
> heating and for industrial
That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
> Batteries and storage.
Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.
> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.
The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.
Germany is also quietly reassuring investors that it's safe to build natural gas by extending the subsidies: https://www.energyconnects.com/news/renewables/2025/january/...
As usual, actions speak louder than words.
If you're willing, we can place long-term bets on that. I'd be delighted to lose, but I don't expect it.
Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.
Yeah, but we're Germans. We don't stop when it's reasonable, not when we want to follow an idea.
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants).
Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-s...
> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means.
But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.
It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]
The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.
Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]
1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continu...
2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-gene...
4.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-b...
The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.
It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
You need a reliable source for energy. Pumped storage is not. They are mostly good for dealing with the fluctuations of energy supply and demand. It crucially requires water to operate. You can't do much when there's a drought. Also, did some googling. The world’s largest pumped‑hydro storage plant (Fengning, China) stores nearly 40 GWh, delivering 3.6 GW for about 10.8 hours when full. Thats not even a day.
There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.
> The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage.
We already do that. France notably has a lot of hydropower and they pump water up when they don’t want to shutdown a nuclear unit.
The issue is that there is very little places where you could build new dams in Europe and water shortage is becoming a regular occurrence.
If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today.
Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price.
The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.
No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T.
Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
And the CO₂ difference for electricity production, so the only part of the energy system where nuclear vs. intermittent renewable is currently applicable, is not 2:1. It is 10:1.
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Holy shit - you can't build a nuclear power plant in Germany. That's it and get over it. It's gonna be 95% renewable by 2035 whether you like it or not.
Also renewables are way cheaper than any nuclear power plant build in the last 20 years on western soil.
Perhaps. Will see how the German economy looks like in 2035.
>Holy shit - you can't build a nuclear power plant in Germany.
Not with you in the way
> Sure, it might cost more
I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will).
However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons:
2. It will take longer
3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles
4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well.
Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.
> It will take longer
Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have.
I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).
There are a few things:
1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).
2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.
3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?
4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
Even with that, renewables are cheaper.
One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space.
Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
Nuclear also requires non-infinite resources like uranium.
There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables.
Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.
And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.
Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.
There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
Different energy product. And it doesn't preclude renewable energy from being deployed alongside.
This pitting of renewables vs nuclear is not helpful for renewables or nuclear. They both work well together.
Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)
1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year
1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.
Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.
Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.
Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
I don’t think it would cost more.
The real problem with nuclear energy is, and always has been the cost. It always seems to turn into a boondoggle.
If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.
This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors.
For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
Nuclear waste is a problem caused by activists preventing disposal sites like yucca mountain from being built
The EU may have a geopolitical interest in taking another look at nuclear. The dependance on Russian natural gas and expensive imported US natural gas is not good for their economic outlook long term. Honestly I am surprised Germany has not fired back up a couple of its plants considering its difficulties with Industrial output and competing in a world market.
The longer faux-environmentalists like Greenpeace continue to double-down on boneheaded anti-nuclear stances, the less respect I have for them, and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence.
However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.
Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.
There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
e.g. PETA
I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.
The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.
For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.
A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.
The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.
By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.
I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?
Yes, interconnectedness is critical if you want reliability.
Spain has far too little transnational capacities. That was a significant contributing factor in the grid outage.
The Spainout was caused by having too little rotating mass in the grid that stabilizes the frequency.
There was a trigger in some of the PV systems, but that wasn't the underlying cause.
If you want to change the topic of this conversation to distribution resiliency instead of production resiliency then sure.
I had both of these as a single concept in my head, thus the confusion.
How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?
For something that is supposed to be clean it sure keeps making places unhabitable.
Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.
> Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive
I’m laughing in $0.11/kWh nuclear energy while Germany’s “cheaper” green energy is uh... quite a bit more expensive.
Retail or production price, where are you based?
In the US, the price I’m metered at.
Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.
Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable.
Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
> extra steps.
Those extra steps are crucial, as they massively dilute the output and make it weather/daylight and seasonally dependent.
Intermittent renewables produce at least an order of magnitude more waste than nuclear reactors, be they fusion or fission.
> Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.
This observation seems entirely useless and pointless. What implication are you saying we should draw from this?
> limitless clean energy source
Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.
How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.
“Limitless” in that context means “it still happens in a cloudy week with no wind”
That is what storage and long distance transmission are for. It’s very hard to take these tired arguments seriously.
Both of these are not feasible solutions for industrial economies.
I'd like to see a prior for that use of that word, otherwise you're just making stuff up. Please use words to say things.
Solar and battery have had immense investment to bring down that LCOE. Where can we get if we invest similarly in nuclear.
lol at wind though. that's not real.
And even then it's not competitive. And LCOE is only a small part of the cost with intermittent renewables.
> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.
None of this happens to be true.
A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.
And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.
What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?
Here the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
https://yle.fi/a/74-20136905
Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.
> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.
> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.
True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.
> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment
Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.
> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.
The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.
> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.
Why not? Grid scale batteries will allow using solar/wind throughout the day and not only peak times, eliminating the duck curve problem. This is already only a few years away.
This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.
That's only true because both solar panels and batteries are produced in China off cheap coal power.
LCOE is not a fundamental metric. EROI is and it's pretty bad for photovoltaics.
And even then it's not actually true.
First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).
Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.
Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.
Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany). Thus, a comparison isn't that easy to make.
System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.
> Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized.
That is also not true. For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all. Even Greenpeace and the Green's chief anti-nuclear Lobbyist, Jürgen Trittin, called nuclear power plants "money printing machines".
> Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France)
Those are minute compared to subsidies intermittent renewables get in Germany. In particular as there is the ARENH program, which is effectively a negative subsidy (it takes money away from the nuclear company EDF), and of course EDF is profitable and gives money to the government.
When you add it all up, France has a negative subsidy of € 0.1 - 7 billion yearly, whereas Germany subsidizes intermittent renewables to the tune of around €20 billion a year.
> System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend
That is also not true. System costs are actually rising, because yields are dropping, the share of renewables has risen and the (fairly cheap) coal backup is to be eliminated. Total costs are now estimated at several trillion euros. For comparison, France's nuclear program cost a total of €228 billion through 2011.
Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany. [1]
EDF was nationalized in 2022, doesn't have to build money reserves for decommissioning (which would be tens of billions), is about 50 billion in debt and just got a 5 billion government loan to keep some old reactors running and another government loan to build new plants. These are not minute interventions, both France and Germany heavily subsidize their sectors (in different ways). With the ARENH program ending in 2025, a more fair comparison will be possible.
I have to read up on the system costs though, that may be ai fair point.
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88... (last page)
> Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany.
That's not true. That report is based on a completely ridiculous paper by the FÖS, the "Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft". Calling the numbers it uses "completely made up" is putting it kindly.
One of the many debunking is here:
https://kernd.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Artikel_atw_D_20...
Summary:
"The disregard for scientific methodology, for basic knowledge of economics and business administration, environmental economics, energy economics, and nuclear technology, the biased selection of sources, even the use of newspaper articles as supposedly scientific sources, and the denial of the positive effects of nuclear energy, which far outweigh its social costs, are unworthy of the FÖS. Either they are a sign of insufficient economic expertise at the institute, as well as a lack of knowledge of scientific methodology, or the FÖS is deliberately misleading readers with the aim of being able to cite the highest possible fictitious costs for nuclear energy on behalf of its NGO clients. Both discredit the study and its client."
The debt that EDF carries is completely normal for a company this size, especially one that does infrastructure. It would be unusual for a company not to use the capital markets to finance such projects. EDF has been highly profitable for decades, recently while being used to subsidize other parts of the economy via ARENH as well as being used to buffer the effects of the energy crisis, not just via ARENH, but through massive expansion of ARENH.
ARENH is not "ending", it is being replaced by a comparable scheme that is structured slightly differently.
EDF was not "nationalized" in 2022. It was always a state company, with the state never holding less than 85%. The period where the state held less than 100% was relatively short, from 2005 to 2022. The state bought out the minority shareholders in order to streamline the planned nuclear expansion.
The "subsidies" for EDF (cheaper loans etc.) amount to around € 2.7 - 3 billion a year. By itself, that's obviously not "minute". However, these sums are dwarfed by the ARENH program and the profits that EDF pays to the state, which turn the subsidies into "negative subsidies" in sum. That is, the state gets more money from EDF than it gives it, by a good amount.
Even if that weren't the case, the sums are dwarfed by the German subsidies for renewable, which are an order of magnitude higher than the gross subsidies in France (and infinitely higher than the net-negative subsidies).
>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
Maybe you could argue against the actual arguments Greanpeace make against nuclear instead of making ad-hominem statements.
Relatedly, you could read what scholars like Langdon Winner say about nuclear energy (in short that they require an almost authoritarian posture in order to safely deal with nuclear fuel and nuclear waste); in contrast with solar which can be deployed at a local and decentralized scale.
The (authoritarian?) nation of Finland has already solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
I watched a very interesting documentary about Onkalo, which happens to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
Greenpeace is both halves of the name.
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
"Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes."
Not an expert, but isn't all you basically need to do is running the centrifuges a bit longer?
Breeding plutonium is a different process than enriching uranium, sure, but with enough enriched uran you will have a nuclear bomb.
And a dirty bomb is bad enough and simple to construct as well.
Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb.
Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.
If you're going for the enriched uranium route to a bomb, nobody is going to start with used nuclear fuel, because dealing with the highly radioactive spent fuel is such a huge PITA.
If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.
That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.
Not everyone has a U mine or pre-existing bomb industry. The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is "yes", bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a "PITA") if you have a reactor core handy to start with.
Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.
Are you considering a world in which nuclear weapons do not exist at all?
I don't know how you are going to disarm the current stable-state of mutually assured destruction.
No but every nuclear power plant requires local military defenses, and every country that expands nuclear power requires this state power even if they don’t have nuclear weapons.
I've heard and think I've read multiple times that Greenpeace was fueled by Soviet monies to prevent Western energy independence and economic takeoff.
I don't have sources and would appreciate if anyone has anything to offer on this.
I doubt it was for any particular energy policy objective, if they were Soviet funded. The soviets (or whatever name you want to give them now) are masters of finding fracture points in relatively stable western societies and exploiting them to make unstable western societies that are less effective at combating Soviet policy. See: almost the entirety of the modern political discourse.
given how the united states starved them of foreign currency and then introduced economic shock therapy that reduced life expectancy of the population by 10 yrs particularly for men one might say the western imperialists were better at that
This comment is entirely orthogonal to my discussion, to the point that it's confusing.
There's a fun game you can play with countries that build nuclear power plants: "guess the existential threat".
In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.
In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.
It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure.
It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.
Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
(E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).
Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented.
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...
The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:
>…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US $70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...
Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.
In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.
If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
These are orchestrated by Russia. They want to destabilise European energy sector and economies and they are sponsoring various organisations to spread such misinformation.
The West is losing information war with Russia - see the downvotes. Sites are infested with Russian bots and useful idiots helping the genocidal regime.
Whatever. No one wants to invest into it anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
LCOE does not account for the full (system) costs. Nuclear power plants have capacity factors over 90%, while PV/Wind have less than 25%. LCOE does not account for the added costs, such as increased transmission and storage/backup costs.
> Germany, long a symbol of anti-nuclear politics, is beginning to shift.
err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.
but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight, the costs of dismantling used plants are outrageous and if it were not for nimbyism, we'd be essentially self sustaining on wind and solar within a decade.
matter of fact fossil and nuclear sponsored fud on wind and solar is the single biggest issue we face in Germany.
Atomkraft? nein, danke.
> but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight
The Problem in Germany is that by law the state has to build a repository, while the operators have to pay for it. The operators did pay (~24 bln EUR), but politically either NIMBY parties (such as CDU/CSU/SPD) block it, or the Greens (under Habeck) block progress so they can continue to shout "what about the waste???"
In Finland the operators can build their own repository and they did it cheap and relatively fast.
Also from an even more anti-nuclear country (austria): Kernenergie? Ja bitte!
Finally, France will be happy after years of being pushed back on this with the drive for solar and wind turbines, which sadly all got supplemented via gas on the back that nuclear was bad.
Sadly, with electricity becoming more reliant on gas and other fossil fuels when it is not so sunny in winter, or on those cloudy days with no wind, means fossil fuel usage ends up higher than if they had stayed and expanded nuclear - instead they closed many plants(Germany a prime example, in favour of....gas).
Then the whole over-dependence on Russian gas and oil really did whammy the energy price market, not just for Europe, but with a knock-on effect across the world. One we still pay for today.
I read a lot of comments talking about „getting down the operational costs“ but i am missing someone talking about the costs of depositing the nuclear waste until it has no more risks. Am i missing something?!
Asking because I don't know. How is enrichment governed? Say for instance if a country is only using it for energy vs defense/offense. And are there elements that can be specifically used for energy vs otherwise? Last I remember, having access to enriched uranium was grounds for a country to bomb another one.
The only way to ensure that a civil uranium enrichment program remains strictly civil is via transparency and monitoring. A country that has mastered uranium enrichment technology for fueling civil power reactors could use the same technology to produce bomb-grade uranium. It actually takes more work to enrich natural uranium into fuel for power reactors than it takes to further enrich power reactor fuel into bomb material:
https://scipython.com/blog/uranium-enrichment-and-the-separa...
This is scary. so the extra effort to move from, say, 20% to 85% is relatively small compared with the effort to get up to 20% in the first place. Might as well build a feature into the reactor so that it only works with <=20%
You should read the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as it addresses several of those issues. Possession of highly enriched uranium isn't necessarily an act of war by itself.
https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...
Natural uranium on earth is currently about 0.7% U-235; civilian power reactors typically need low-enriched uranium which is 3% to 5% U-235.
The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).
Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
> Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
Which, as I understand it, is because at 20% enrichment you've already done about 70% of the work needed to get to 85%.
IAEA inspections verify your claimed inventory and enrichment facilities. They are trying to detect if any nuclear materials are being skimmed/diverted. As for weapons, nuclear fuel is very low enrichment (usually under 5%). Iran surpassed 60%, which has no peaceful use, so that is why it was said they were perusing weapons.
Imo that's a pretty complicated topic. On one side if you just build LWRs you just don't need very highly enriched uranium or plutonium so posession of those is a red flag. On the other side fast breeder reactors are the ones which are able to produce the least harmful waste. But fast breeders and closed fuel cycles produce and handle plutonium which in turn can be used for bad things.
Energy needs like 5% enrichment while weaponizing needs much higher and much more difficult to obtain 85% enrichment
Clean, mostly. With future? No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not.
Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source.
Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding].
And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in storing. Except for costly disasters in how not to intermediately store it, here in Germany.
If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful, why not make future generations happy by preserving it for them, and for now, limiting its use until we learned how to add to the initial price the full cost of long term storage, with further disasters as a learning experience for that?
Saving lives and being cost-effective in the short run might work, but every energy expert says in 50 years, nuclear will have to be phased out anyway. And fusion could provide clean, but also primary heat inducing energy. So even that will not save us.
Primary heat on this scale isn't nessisarially a bad thing. It has a very small impact on the global power balance with respect to the effect global warming.
There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.
I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.
>If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful
It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.
> No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not
Luckily we do need lots of heat. District heating, process heat, thermochemical H2 production, ...
EU is not so bad at all, in fact, it's really cool.
They had been pushing back the nuclear energy for quite a few years before they came out with this
Uranium mining isn't clean at all. Between Greenpeace (full of business school hacks) and lobby pressured EU courts, there's a middle ground.
Why mine uranium? Only about 4% of nuclear fuel is actually used before the fuel rods need replacement, which makes uranium highly recyclable. Given all of the “spent” fuel rods in storage, mining operations for additional uranium are unnecessary. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for millennia, provided we are willing to begin a recycling program.
Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use isotopes from it. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.
What do you mean? Modern in situ uranium mining is one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have. It's not perfectly clean, but it's pretty darn good.
>What do you mean?
I mean it's not clean
>one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have
Not the point. It's not clean, it shouldn't be called clean end of the story.
Nuclear power uses around 1/10th the resources of intermittent renewables per kWh of electricity produced.
So if nuclear isn't clean, renewables are downright filthy.
Ok, well by this definition, all human development activity is unclean. This is a perfectly valid point of view but is pretty distinct from the modern definition of clean.
> all human development activity is unclean
of course
> modern definition of clean
clean is clean. no need to lie or modernize word definitions to fit your agenda of promoting nuclear energy all day every day for a decade
The problem in my mind with a "clean is clean" litmus test is that it eliminates the word "clean"'s ability to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable human development.
Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.
OK, but then by that logic, solar and and wind shouldn't be categorized as clean energy either. Clearly it's a matter of degrees and meant as a useful segmentation for taxation, etc.
Even doing nothing is not "clean" by that philosophy, since you'd did and your rotting corpse would taint the soil, making it unclean by default.
Then what is clean? By that definition Solar and Wind aren't because copper and iron mines aren't clean.
Holy shit you're all insane. Why do you want to call it clean when clearly it's not? Reducing energy consumption should be the goal. Stop calling clean stuff that isn't.
Now now, there are words that you can say to make your point that don't make you seem deranged.
Are you saying it's less clean than mining for the materials that make up solar panels and wind turbines?
Do you think rare earth minerals for batteries and photovoltaics grow on trees?
Who talked about those? Not the fucking point. Nuclear isn't clean.
What source of energy is clean then?
No point, old mate just can't deal with anything but perfection. No energy source is clean, so let's not bother.
> Uranium mining isn't clean at all.
Nor is mining for coal!
Clean but not safe
I'm totally fine with people attempting to build new fission plants. More power to them!
I just don't see it happening. They cost too much and take too long. Not holding my breath here.
By some weird accident they stop being that expensive and long to build when you cross the border into China.
Maybe Western nations will allow Chinese companies to come build their nuclear plants. That would be something.
It is. And that's great news!
Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage
We need to do what we can right now to avoid people saying this exact same thing 20 years from now.
Well, compared to carbon, it is.
Glad that the Russian funded Greens were finally defeated. In the end, the green party may have doomed us with this 50 year delay.
This is clean, until something goes catastrophically wrong.
(Which eventually it will. The more reactors, the more chances for it to happen.)
Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Data reported by Forbes put the death rates for nuclear power in the US below all other sources of energy including solar:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
The death rates are wildly different than the ones at the site you linked. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy.
The death rates might be a difference in units; the Forbes article is using deaths per trillion kWh, the other might be deaths per thousand/million kWh.
The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.
E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.
Sure, in deaths per unit energy. But the real risk of nuclear is financial. The tail risk is huge for any producer on their own, which makes insurance extremely expensive, and which means that usually only nations bear the full financial risk of nuclear.
Meanwhile lignite mines (which Germany are re-opening) actively affect the health of everyone nearby, even when everything goes perfectly alright.
The nuclear industry did say that this would happen but the reality was the exact opposite:
>According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.
https://theprogressplaybook.com/2025/02/19/german-state-of-b...
Pebble-bed reactors are incapable of catastrophic failure, and molten-salt reactors have negative feedback loops with increasing pressure. Nuclear doesn't have to mean the same designs that were used in the 60s.
Both those design types were operational in the 1960s in the US but have been shut down due to lack of performance and industrial interest. New interest has started today, but let's not claim the new ones are some kind of new improved tech that evolved out of our workhorse water cooled/moderated plants.
You are incorrect fortunately.
Western designs are safe, most Soviet-era ones are/were not. It's unfortunate that nuclear power still has this stigma, as it's like saying "all cars are unsafe" while comparing the crash test ratings of a modern sedan to a 1960's chevy bel aire.
Then why did Fukushima happen?
That tsunami killed 20.000+ people, and spilled massive amounts of chemicals and toxic junk to the ocean.
Yet people keep fixating over the radioactive pollution, including evicting people from their homes for truly minor amounts of radiation.
Turns out the "worst case scenario" of nuclear accidents is jackpot for nature. By clearing Fukushima from humans, nature is thriving: https://www.sciencealert.com/animals-aren-t-just-surviving-i...
To put a number on it, linear no threshold models predict ~130 deaths as a result of the radiation (and are known to over-estimate lethalities at low doses).
Around 50 people a year die while clearing snow in Japan, so it's ~ twice as dangerous as shoveling snow in worst-case predictions.
The main reason is a combination of negligence by the owner of the plant and not enough enforcement of standards. The fukushima powerplant was known to have sea wall lower then required and as such was vulnerable to a tsunami (this was known for quite a long time) Combined with backup power in the basement (also against standards)
For an example of what happens to a reactor build according to safety requirements see the onagawa nuclear powerplant
It also had a design flaw that has not been present in most nuclear reactors since the late 70s.
"Modern" designs have the ability to self cool in case of emergency by using an ice containment condenser or similar solutions.
Japan is very in the east, they said western designs. The reactor knows where it is, by knowing where it is not.
Just kidding.
Old, bad design - from the 1960s, in fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor states that the 1960 reactors are most used, today. In the west. Contradicting that western reactors are safe, while eastern designs are not.
The Chernobyl plant had known construction defects that could impair safety. These things would prevent a western plant from starting operation, but did not stop the Soviet plant from beginning operation:
https://inspectapedia.com/structure/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Disast...
They did not even have any automated safeties in place, because their philosophy was “faith in the worker” while the western philosophy is “humans are fallible”:
https://www.eit.edu.au/engineering-failures-chernobyl-disast...
They then ignored their own safety procedures when operating the plant, which ultimately is what caused the disaster.
Saying that Soviet designs being in the same generation as western designs makes them equally safe/unsafe is quite wrong when you look at the details. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one mistake after another.
That said, the plant was designed by a country that shot down a civilian airliner that had strayed into their airspace due to a navigational error, when they knew it was a civilian airliner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
They had no regard for human life, so of course, they built things that are incredibly unsafe. There is no end of examples of them simply not caring about human life.
What is a bit scary is that we cannot easily deal with the consequence of something really wrong... We have to real with it.
I'd say a reactor in inland Europe is far from the craziest place to put one. God forbid someone were to put one in the Pacific ring of fire... oh, wait...
Why? Are you concerned that, like Lex Luthor in that worst-of-all Superman movies, someone will use nuclear reactors to somehow cause damage to continental plates? Actually, that's more of a stretch than the movie took.