Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, and opposition to nuclear from environmentalist orgs should be viewed as a massive historical mistake as it set us back decades in moving the needle on carbon emissions.
The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.
The engineering side might be a theoretically solved problem, anybody looking at belgium's crumbling nuclear powerplants can help but feeling slightly nervous!
I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens.
On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.
All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.
> the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem.
Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.
Belgium is notably lacking in mountains, which is why they now start building a site for low level nucleat waste storage, adding to the cost. For high level nuclear waste they have to build deep underground, waterproof, bomb-proof facilities at high expense:
Given the actual build times of nuclear plants in Europe, vs the renewables build out rate, we need solar and wind to tide us over for a decade or more before the nuclear plants come on line.
Solar and wind are scaling much faster than gas and oil right now. After the recent Iran war I think it would be insane to rely on new oil or gas. Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.
> and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.
More of a political problem, from what I hear. This is, if anything, worse: simply not knowing is a research problem, but knowing how to do it and yet having an influential group saying "no because reasons" could be genuinely insurmountable.
They have done. The Three Mile Island accident happened when it was being operated by Navy vets [1]. Simple training isn’t enough.
During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response:
> Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.
So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour.
How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents?
Vs. coal?
Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.)
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Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here:
> Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.
Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?
Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?
That's almost certainly just an artifact of old data, and I typed that before realizing your URL has the year 2011 in it.
A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh.
Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't updated for 6 years:
Purity isn’t really important. We need to decarbonise as much of our energy grid as we can as quickly as possible since cumulative carbon emissions matter.
Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with new ones? Possibly, since the existing power generation is clean so there is less rush.
Does spending the effort on building new nuclear outweigh the opportunity costs for others? Given new nuclear plants in Europe are taking 20 years to build I have strong doubts. It seems absolutely clear that wind/solar + batteries can get most countries to 80-90% clean energy faster and at lower cost. And after that happens nuclear seems a very awkward addition to the mix since it is not cost effective to run when it’s power is only needed 10-20% of the time.
(I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)
If it was viable it would have happened already. We have a massive oversupply of solar and wind, particularly on the west coast. Generation is the easy part.
We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
> If it was viable it would have happened already.
It is happening, all over the world, with a persistent and rapid growth curve.
> We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
Better cut those tariffs on cheap Chinese batteries (and aluminium for the transmission).
Not that anyone would build one in the current political reality, but China produces enough aluminium that it would be viable to make a genuinely planet-spanning 1Ω power grid connecting your midwinter nights to someone else's midsummer days.
Would it be fair to say that because the US Navy is not running it as a for-profit power generation that would help. Like every accident seems to be a list of cost saving shortcuts being responsible
Chernobyl was supposed to be an economically viable means of generating electricity. Comparing a tiny billion-dollar submarine reactor to a power plant simply doesn't make any sense.
The reactors on aircraft carriers have a similar thermal output to many commercial power reactors. The ones on submarines are around a third of that size, about the size of SMRs like NuScale VOYGR or the Xe-100 reactors proposed to be built at Long Mott in Texas.
Chernobyl was supposed to turn low enrichment uranium into plutonium for Soviet bombs. They made design choices that compromised safety to make plutonium production more efficient.
> It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
But submarine/ship reactors are tiny compared with commercial reactors and 5+ times more expensive (although its hard to break out the true lifetime cost of the reactor from the submarine/ship).
Even modern commercial SMR designs (a few by companies that make Submarine reactors) are likely to cost a couple of times more per MW than large existing reactors
They have lost nuclear submarines (USS Thresher), lost nuclear missiles, depth charges, torpedos and bombs. They have crashed nuclear ships and submarines.
Yeah, they haven’t had a nuclear reactor leak (that we know of).
They're expensive because of, arguably, over regulation. The are not inherently expensive, we've just declared them so. The next response will be "all that regulation is needed" but it's arguably that the over regulation is killing people by the unintended consequences of keeping things like coal viable, etc...
Powerprice in Germany today minus 500€/MWh. Nuclear power is economic madness in an environment where we see negative electricity prices practically every day.
Wind and solar power are remarkably stable in Europe. Last year, the average weekly electricity output was 14.0TWh; not a single week fell below 10.5 TWh.
Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.
Not really. Storage is most used for short term stabilization and alleviating congestion in certain transmission nodes. In most markets its used to provide capacity under contract with utilities to meet resource adequacy requirements which don’t consider long term regional complete loss of renewables. Longer term storage that can provide power to, say, a whole region during a multi-day storm is basically an uneconomic fantasy that rational developers have no real incentive to build, because it would be a huge overbuild most of the time, and accordingly undercompensated for said overbuild. Developers are building batteries that are just the right size for a capacity contract & providing ancillary services (voltage support, frequency regulation, etc) plus price arbitrage, which are deployed for only minutes to a few hours. There are some 8 hour duration batteries out there, but they are not common.
If Germany power prices are so low, why are Germans power bills so high ? Maybe you are cherry picking spot/marginal price and not netting the subsides ?
What about the opposition from the not exactly environmentalist orgs?
> "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible." — "Nuclear Follies". Forbes Magazine. 1985.
The fossil fuel industries and their shills? Probably not lamenting the delay in moving way from fossil fuels the same way the environmental groups ought to be.
Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups:
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions
I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infrequent and so we have very hard time estimating and thinking about probabilities of them happening.
Personally I think that keeping existing reactors running is better than the alternatives, but I'm not so sure about building up new reactors compared to building more predictable green energy sources.
Burning coal in coal power plants causes more deaths each year in Europe than the total deaths caused by Chernobyl accident (4000-8000).
"The health burden of European CPP emission-induced PM2.5, estimated with the Global Exposure Mortality Model, amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain"
But only nuclear accidents get the media attention, because they are big and infreqeunt. Similar to deaths caused by aircraft crashes vs deaths caused by car crashes.
Serious question, when has there been a serious nuclear accident? Fukushima was caused by a natural disaster that killed far more people than the nuclear failure did. Chernobyl was pure communist stupidity. This level of incompetence would never happen in a well functioning country. So that leaves Three Mile island?
Meanwhile coal kills millions each year (mostly the old and children).
And what are these predictable green alternatives? Only hydro is reliable and is heavily restricted by geo. We’d need massive breakthroughs in battery technology to make solar and wind reliable in most of the world (by population).
Look up historical weather patterns days with no sun and no wind, you need massive, massive amounts of energy storage.
Renewable generation is not the hard part. Renewable transmission and storage is the hard part. Its so hard, in fact, that building very expensive nuke is still much cheaper and more attainable.
> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).
The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?
It does the oppose of this:
> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)
Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.
And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
"carbon emissions" LOL. Just lookup what's happening In Tuapse, and in other war zones. And we are penalising some poor bugger burning wood to warm his house at winter ...
Destroying a whole valley for hydro is something locals could easily oppose. Similar with huge solar farms. You can be a proponent of a technology but anti a particular project.
Nonsense, the reluctance of governments to reduce carbon emissions has been driven by the reluctance for entrenched industries to give up their gravy train. There are many ways for power to be produced with lower carbon emissions, it's absolutely not a binary situation at all.
What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of the argument being forced into these positions, its artificial and contrary to the desires of people who want action on climate change who support nuclear and don't.
I would be very happy if people who oppose nuclear would abstain from supporting the fossil fuel industry. When EU voted on green technology, one side voted for nuclear to be defined as green, while the other side voted for natural gas to be given the green status.
Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or supporting a combination of renewables and fossil fueled power plants (which sometimes goes under the name of reserve energy and other times as thermal power plants). Usually it is combined with some future hope that green hydrogen will replace that natural gas at some time in the distant future.
We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Opposition to the fossil fuel industry should be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants, and a plan to phase out and decommission existing ones. It is difficult to respect people who claim to believing in a climate crisis but then stand there with a shovel when the next gas peaker plant is being built, then arguing how bad nuclear is to combat the climate crisis.
Yep, I have been saying for decades that I agree on almost everything wirh the local Green Party, _except_ the anti-nuclear stuff. Very emotional, very relatable but very dumb.
The anti-nuclear stuff seems to pair up quite well with "you need to start importing a lot of natural gas", which makes me think it is simply an agenda pushed by a certain rather large country to the east.
You don't have to wonder, because it is the agenda that you're thinking about and also the agenda of fossil fuel companies.
But we now have two lessons that teach us that being anti-nuclear was stupid: the Ukraine war and the current US administration's adventure in the Gulf.
The anti-nuclear area, at least in Western Europe, had historically a very high correlation with those who held sympathies for a certain very large nuclear power who would have strategically benefited from an anti-nuke sentiment that would avoid another nuclear power's weapon deployment in EU bases. But I'm sure it is a coincidence.
I live close to the Belgian border. Some time ago there was concern about Belgian reactors (they are old and their concrete was fracturing) and they were distributing iodine pills. Keeping them open even longer just sounds peak Belgium.
I've heard an opinion that having less people leads to a technological regression, because some things to create/research are so expensive that they become profitable and functioning only at the world's scale
E.g. China is too small to have an isolated closed market for a competitive and efficient semiconductors manufactoring
They are only expensive because externalities of other solutions are not captures or are subsidised. Wind and solar are expensive if battery storage is included in most of the world.
Waste is mostly a solved problem. Much more solved that waste management for coal plants in any case (whom also produce a lot of radioactive waste in addition to producing tons and tons of co2)
We have more than enough uranium. Currently only a small fraction is economically mineable but we have played that game before with oil.
It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires.
Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river right next to the house fire we are fighting?
The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.
Even with Danish insolation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses.
This paper is very heavily biased against nuclear power and is only valid for Denmark
It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE
It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW
80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors.
It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of...
"Availability of firm low-carbon
resources reduces costs 10%–62%
in zero-CO2 cases"
They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed.
It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain.
The authors are editors of the journal this was published in.
Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot.
This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.
Hinkley Point C and EDF just got a 7% interest rate to finish the project. That is after nearly 20 years of project work and 10 years of construction, so about all risk should already have been found.
Like I said. The costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C.
Imaginary cheap and fast to build nuclear power is amazing. It also does not exist. In South Korea those costs are from before the corruption scandal.
In China they are barely building nuclear power. It peaked at 4.7% of their grid mix in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. For every plan they release the nuclear portion shrinks and is pushed further into the future.
Then I just see you trying to handwave the study away. The entire point is literally to prove that Denmark does not need to rely on its neighbors, and still get a cheaper result.
And like I said. Denmark is the hard case due to the winter sun being awful. As soon as you go south in latitude the problem becomes vastly easier. We’re talking like 99% of the worlds population having more sunlight than Denmark.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind,
I wonder how many people actually believe that we are in good shape so mankind should have no development whatsoever. Just stay as is or even go back decades just to preserve the environment. The first world need more energy because we're greedy and etc.
Sure, someone can be both concerned about climate change and oppose nuclear power. But it's a largely self-defeating stance: nuclear is the only non-intermittent geographically independent form of clean energy. Dams and geothermal are geographically constrained. Solar and wind are intermittent, as well as varying in output depending on location.
There's not much trust in anyone who says nuclear is completely safe, "we fixed it now," etc. That shouldn't be the motto. But fossil fuel is already killing more people, coal puts more radioactive uranium dust into the air even, and that's before getting into climate change.
I think people who are anti-nuclear and environmentalist are wrong, but it's not an insane opinion to have. There's no fact you can point to that says nuclear is safer than renewables. I just don't see how the world is realistically going to switch to renewables. We've already seen oil companies use those as distractions from nuclear.
Nothing man-made is "completely safe". No such thing.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production we have.
By far.
And that includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.
People overestimate the danger from nuclear energy by incredible amounts.
That doesn't mean that close exposure to a running nuclear reactor won't kill you in short order. That's why we build these things with shielding. A lot of other things will kill you in short order if exposed to them: cars/trains in motion, for example.
To be clear, all thermal plants - be they nuclear, fossil fuel, biofuel, etc. - require water for cooling. But this doesn't need to be freshwater, many nuclear plants are cooled with seawater. In non-costal arid areas, nuclear plants can be cooled with sewer water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.
Small thing, dams are not carbon neutral. Depending on location, the plant life they inundate no longer absorbs carbon and, worse yet, the rotting plant life emits methane and other not-good gasses.
Yes, and pouring concrete also emits carbon dioxide. And building wind turbines requires fossil fuel emissions. And the truck driving solar panels out to the solar farm emits CO2, etc. But at the end of the day, the carbon intensity of dams, nuclear, wind, etc. relative to fossil fuels is near zero: https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electricity-emissions-around...
Nuclear is also in practice significantly geographically dependent.
Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power station named "Bankside". They burned tonnes of oil right in the heart of London until the 1980s to make electricity. People weren't happy about it, but they designed, built, and operated the station because although any fool can see there's toxic smoke pouring out of it into your city, electricity is pretty useful.
In practice nuclear power stations get built somewhere with abundant cheap water, far from population centres yet easily connected to the grid. England has more places to put a Nuke than say, a Hydro dam, but they are not, as you've suggested, "geographically independent", unlike say solar PV which doesn't even stop you grazing animals on the land or parking vehicles or whatever else you might want to do.
What you're describing is substantially different than, say, attempting to build a dam in a flat place with no rivers.
"It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here"
The only thing a nuclear plant - any thermal plant for that matter - requires is cooling. But that doesn't need to be freshwater. It can be seawater or waste-water, like the Palo Verde plant.
That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.
> suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear
That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying.
What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.
> unpopular with experts
How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
> How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
Fundamentally, unless you know the Navy's answer and can apply it to override those lawsuits, it doesn't matter: politics can't be wished away just because the wrong people have power.
> The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.
Increasingly not; as with all things, you have to aim for where the ball will be rather than where it is, and for this topic that implies that for any given proposed new gas (or nuclear) plant you have to ask about the alternatives, which also include "how fast you we build energy storage, and what would it cost?"
That's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Naval reactors look cheap, because the cost is for the reactor in the narrow sense. Other major costs, such as the containment building and countermeasures against natural disasters and terrorist attacks, are included in the costs for the rest of the ship.
You are accusing environmental organizations of not believing in climate change as a debating tactic. That is uncharitable! But also just weird.
Just leave that part out, it only detracts from your message.
"I think environmental orgs should support nuclear as it is low carbon and generally aligned with their goals. I'm disappointed that many of their members seem to be unaware of the true record on plant safety, particularly compared with coal"
Adding anything about them not believing in climate change makes it sound like you are repeating talking points you picked up from fossil fuel funded propagandists, who to this day are pushing that message.
(Your opinions on nuclear also reveal that media diet, but in a much more subtle way).
> How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
Pretending it's all the fault of the bad environmentalists is a bit ridiculous. A nuclear powerplant is a tricky thing to create. A lot of projects had delay, often not due to any environmentalists or anti-nuclear people, but because the parts failed their internal control, which demonstrates that it is tricky to build. A nuclear powerplant is a huge provider that cannot be turned online for usually ~10 years, so you can also understand the complexity and the uncertainty: we are not able to predict the price of electricity or what will the electricity grid will look like in 2-3 years, and yet they need to predict it for a given region in 10 years.
And some environmental laws are frivolous or turned out the be incorrect (the same way some people who at the time were against some environmental laws turned out to be incorrect years later), but some laws are just legitimate and it is simply not fair to pretend that the opinions of some people should just be discarded because you have a different opinion. I myself don't always agree with some law, sometimes anti-nuclear, sometimes pro-nuclear, but a given fraction of these laws will exist, it is just the reality. It's like saying "communism would work if it was not for people who don't like communism": people who don't like communism will always exist and if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic.
> if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic
And yet, our world contains multiple cases where it is the case that nuclear is being built today, at reasonable costs, and with great success. The two examples I've given in this thread are China and the US Navy. Some others include Japan and South Korea, both of which are notably not dictatorships.
What's frustrating in this discussion is policy and management decisions made 50 years ago are assumed to be the steady-state immutable reality in western countries.
My argument is not that nuclear is the best economic play. It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.
What? Who is saying that nuclear cannot be successful, this has nothing to do with my comment. Did you read one sentence without understanding the meaning?
It is simple: some environmental laws are a legitimate ask from some people, whether you or I agree with the ask itself. It has nothing to do with the nuclear, it is about your argument framing the existence of environmental laws as the reason it does not work. If nuclear cannot work well in some countries because in some countries there are people who ask legitimate things, the problem is not these people, the problem is that the nuclear model is not adapted to the reality of these countries.
But again, as I've said, it is not even the case: the difficulties with nuclear are not limited to "some environmentalist".
> It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.
That does not make sense. If you want to write a software that does something, you don't just spinning up Linux, Windows, Mac, and start writing code in Java, C++, python, typescript, erlang, ... at the same time. What you do is: you write a decision matrix, score it, and _choose one strategy_.
In the context of the climate crisis, the strategy can mix different technologies ... or not. The fact that it does not does not mean that this particular strategy is worse than another. In particular, budgets are obviously limited, so spending X$ on project A may lead to a successful project A while spending X/2$ on project A and X/2$ project B may lead to both projects A and B failing. (and if you don't think it's true, just increase the number N of projects until X/N$ is ridiculously too small to do anything. According to your sentence, you said you should be spinning up every options all at once as aggressively as you can, so you cannot do only N-1 projects, you need to split your money amongst the N projects).
When it comes to climate change, I was 100% pro-nuclear 20 years ago. Now, in some countries, it is too often a money pit (not because of regulation or the bad environmentalists) that is wasting money that could have helped the climate. If you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should spend your time, money and energy to real solutions instead of achieving nothing by trying to do everything all at once without a plan.
The analogy breaks down because hydroxychloroquine does not effectively treat Covid. Whereas nuclear power is carbon free (to be pedantic, it's carbon intensity is on par with that of most renewables).
Renewables can give us large amounts of energy but when you need reliable output 24/7/356 you can choose thermal, gas, coal or nuclear. Not all countries have access to thermal energy so if you want to become carbon neutral nuclear is the only valid choice for that aspect.
Or just batteries? Throw on a gas turbine emergency reserve running your favorite fossil or green fuel for well, the emergencies. We’re talking irrelevant emissions.
I truly can’t comprehend where this massive boner for new built nuclear power comes from. Sci-fi?
> Why do so many nuclear fans try to suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear? It's very odd.
You’re putting the answer you want to hear (“because they are nuclear fans”) in the question, making it extremely obvious but then stating it is “odd”, as if the answer wasn’t straight forward.
Disingenuous – is the word describing this, I believe.
Also you need to check your concepts. “Climate change” is what we want to prevent (more like catastrophe, really, by now).
There's two very different types of reactors: the already-paid-for long-run reactor that's still going, and then on-paper-not-yet-constructed reactor in a high cost of living nation.
Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables, only makes sense in a few geographic locations. Not all, or even most!
Even keeping old reactors running gets super expensive as they get past their designed lifetimes, and very often doesn't make sense.
The engineering is indeed already done for electricity, and storage and renewables are cheap and getting cheaper. Nuclear is at best staying the same high cost, and getting more expensive is these large construction projects rise due to Baumol's cost disease.
Opposing more nuclear in the US in the 1980s wasn't fully irrational, the US managerial class have way overbuilt nuclear and we didn't need all the electricity. Then we didn't have much growth in
The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living, it's the anti-EV and anti-battery advocates, and to some degree it's retrofitting the wide variety of highly-cost-sensitive industries, such as steel or fertilizer or concrete, to use carbon neutral methods. Or maybe sustainable aviation fuel.
Nuclear had it's chance to be a big contributor to climate action back in the mid 2000s and 2010s, it failed that challenge in Georgia at Vogtle, in South Carolnia at Summer, in the UK at Hinkley Point C, in France in Flamanville, and in Finland an Olkiluoto. Every one of those failures is a very good reason for a climate activist to oppose nuclear.
> The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living
All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle.
Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more.
If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon.
If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.
what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.
We should do both, aggressively! That's exactly the point I'm making. It's always been shocking to me how this discussion immediately goes to a fixed-pie "solar OR nuclear" discussion. You build both! They solve different problems very well.
I guess I agree with your “should” in a world where we have infinite dollars to spend. Sadly we refuse to treat it as existential, so the dollars we have to spend are roughly fixed. In that world we live today any dollar spent on nuclear for 10 years from now isn’t spent on renewables today, so it costs us more emissions.
When we can't even get offshore wind to be built because the current Trump administration is setting the precedent of paying hundreds of million dollars to cancel good, money saving projects, while funneling reactor approval to corrupt companies that don't have the engineering chops to deliver on their promises, an "all of the above strategy" doesn't really work.
Sticking with well proven technologies, such as batteries and solar which are deployed at massive scale by profit oriented investors on the Texas grid, makes far more sense than wasting precious few dollars and approvals on pie-in-the-sky nuclear projects that never meet their promises and might not even finish construction.
Building nuclear is hard, risky, expensive, and slow, in the very best cases. It's a shitty technology unless you have zero renewable resources in your country.
If you place the climate crisis into the context of every other potential crisis then yeah, the world is weighing up nuclear proliferation against climate change, both of which are potential extinction risks but not all that likely in the short term.
I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.
>Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables
This is not the cheaper option.
You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
> You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power.
This is a complete myth, somebody pulled "a week" out of their butt a decade ago, it gets repeated a ton, but it's not based on reality or studies or numbers. This is a consistent problem with online nuclear advocacy: there's no basis for the numbers, nobody calculates anything, and if they bother to do a calculation they only calculate the upper bound and then assert "see look a big number" and say that's a proof of impossibility.
What event requires a week of storage? Nobody can name one! When has there been a week with zero generation? No one can name it! The assumptions that one has to make up in order to make a "week" even sound plausible are in turn themselves so implausible.
> There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
Imagining there's a fixed battery capacity is a very short sighted view, it's growing by 10x every year.
So let's take your "week" as the measure, even though it's wrong. If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.
> If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.
The 2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025 amounts to a bit under 3 days of California's average 750GWh daily electricity consumption, not 4 days. And more broadly, I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible.
To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs.
Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves.
Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
> I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible.
It was pointing out that the comment making off-the-wall requirements of battery storage was already not aware of the order of magnitude of existing batteries.
You don't know the exact
> To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs.
What's your implication here? If you are trying to say this means that batteries can never scale, it's certainly not making that point. Even the distinction between grid and EVs is immaterial, because where do EVs get their power? The grid. That's all flexible demand, that can be shifted a huge amount.
> Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves.
The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries.
Unlike oil, we are in the early days of discovery for battery materials, because we never looked for them before. Just recently fracking in the southeast quarter of the US turned out to be producing a fair amount of lithium, which nobody had bothered to even investigate before.
Batteries are a new technology, not an old technology like oil, and the dynamics are far different. One can't simply recycle reasoning that applies in oil without examining the first princiles.
> Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
"Even if" is a preposterous thing to say, of course it will!
EVs are higher value destination for grid batteries, so more batteries will go towards that right now. And as long as there might be "diversion" as you say, there is need for more production capacity, and production capacity will expand.
> The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries.
Such as? Is your proposal that we use lead acid batteries instead of lithium based batteries? Those have much shorter lifespans, which drives up cost. Sodium batteries? 9 GWh of sodium batteries were shipped in 2025.
To be blunt, you're just hand waving away the massive disparity in scale between battery production and the storage demands of a predominantly wind and solar grid.
Or an iron air. Or flow battery. Or sodium. Or all manner of different lithium chemistries across NCA, NMC, LFP and so on.
We’re seeing the Cambrian explosion of battery technology. From early BEVs utilizing the highest performance to even deliver a viable product to a plethora of options depending on your use case.
How about we don't bother with either fission or wind and solar? Just build fusion plants and be done with it. If we're comfortable betting trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects on the hopes that a heretofore unproven technology will pan out, let's be more ambitious than batteries!
Of course, there's no guarantee that any of those fission ideas will actually pan out. Likewise with these battery chemistries. Investing loads of money into intermittent sources with just the hope that some future battery chemistry will solve storage at grid scale is not what I'd call a wise plan.
Anybody who over the past few decades has been saying that we could not deploy batteries on a massive scale needs to reevaluate their bad assumptions, because they are wrong, and moreover we should not trust any of their current assessments until they can reconcile what they got wrong. The tech curves of batteries have been clear for decades, this tech development should not have been unexpected.
Your link reports that the USA added 15 GW of battery storage in 2025. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of battery storage at grid scale. Let's actually express the scale in terms of numbers relative to our electricity demand:
* The USA uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day
* The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day.
* Global battery production in 2025 was ~1,600 GWh, of which 300 GWh was used for grid storage [1].
At our present production rates, it'll take 100 years to provision 12 hours worth of storage at 300 GWh per year. Batter production is set to increase to 6.8 TWh per year [2], but only 12% of that is predicted to go to grid storage, or about 800 GWh per year. Even at 2035 rates, we're looking at 37 years of production to fill 12 hours of storage (12 hour of electricity storage for 2025 electricity demand rates, which will be higher in 2035).
Yes, batteries are being deployed at a massive scale today. But electricity generation is on an even more massive scale that dwarfs battery production rates.
> Your link reports that the USA added 15 GW of battery storage in 2025. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of battery storage at grid scale.
Mmmhmm, grid scale deployment is not grid scale now? You are redefining terms, which means you don't work in the field and are not at all familiar with the field, yet you make broad and sweep proclamations of incredulity that have no factual backing, and we are supposed to trust you purely on judgement?
You cite last year's deployment rate, without noting a massive increase in planned deployments for this year. You neglect to cite the year before it, which was much smaller. You looking at a puck headed to the goal, under a continuous accelerant force, and saying, "the puck is here, therefore it will never hit the goal." That's a ridiculous thing to assert, because you don't hold that afactual standard for any other technology, just batteries, yet seem to understand that all other technologies have continually changing amounts of producition.
BTW, your link is "demand" and disagrees with most other sources.
> At our present production rates
That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.
If nuclear has 0 GW new this year, how do you think it could ever get to 2GW/year, right?
You have no reasons for these strange beliefs that defy data and trends, you just assert incredulity. It's completely irrational.
Again, you have to put the scale of battery production in the context of electricity demand. 300 GWh of battery storage being provisioned sounds like a lot until you put it in the context of 60,000 GWh of electricity consumed daily. There's a reason why proponents of battery grid storage never actually put their numbers in the context of electricity consumption.
I'm not expecting readers to trust me purely on judgement, I'm expecting them to do the math and realize that battery storage deployment and electricity demand are multiple orders of magnitude off, even with the projected increases in battery projection.
> That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.
Again, I did cite the projected production figures for 2035. Did you miss that part?
We've also performed fusion in a lab. That doesn't mean it'll be viable in production at scale.
What's the annual production figures for iron air batteries, flow batteries, etc.? Sodium batteries are at 9 GWh delivered in 2025. Google tells me that flow battery capacity is 500 MWh to 1 GWh, but doesn't provide any figures on actual production deliveries (production capacity is not the same as actual delivered production). There are no iron air battery facilities currently in production, with the earliest plant trying to open in 2028 with 500 MWh per year annual production.
None of your suggestions are remotely close to operating at grid scale, and there is zero guarantee that any of them will prove more feasible than lithium based battery chemistry.
This sort of moving the goal posts is not convincing at all. First it was "batteries will never scale to grid usage" now it's "early days of production of a brand new chemistry are only at 9GWh". You seem to think that is somehow an indictment of the technology rather than a statement of an amazingly quick scale up, with no signs of stopping. That's just bad judgement to say "a rapidly scaling tech is at GWh scale even without much demand therefore it's useless".
Meanwhile, the statement that "fusion has been achieved in a lab" is optimism and wishful thinking beyond words. What energy return did that get? What was the cost? When will there be GE of generation, mic less basic safety engineering?
Those who advocate against the shipping reality of batteries, and moreover assume that they will get more expensive, are not using numerical thinking and are not thinking like scientists, engineers, or technologists. They are merely rooting for a tech like a sports team. Nuclear does not need any more fans, it needs engineers and scientists that can achieve some sort of radical breakthrough that makes it a desirable tech.
> First it was "batteries will never scale to grid usage"
You're inventing a straw man that's easier for you to attack.
No goalposts are being moved. My point was, and still is, that batteries do not presently scale sufficiently to make a predominantly wind and solar grid feasible, and our current projections even a decade out do not see them scale to that point either.
We don't know if some breakthrough in battery chemistry will make it scale. Could such a breakthrough transpire? Sure. But will it happen? We don't know. And thus we should not gamble massive infrastructure spending on the assumption that this breakthrough will happen.
Projection from past performance. There are two types of predictions when it comes to solar and storage: 1) naive, exponential, and correct, or 2) expert, with unexplained fudge factors, and wrong. What you'll see published in PR releases will be from "experts". Even Jenny Chase at Bloomberg NEF points out how "experts" always underestimate performance, and then goes and does it herself with her own projections.
I heard the projection on a podcast from a battery builder (maybe Form Energy's CEO?) in 2021 that we were at 200-300 GWh in 2021, and would have 2-3 TWh 2026, and 20-30 TWh in 2031. His "naive" prediction was correct, all the other projections have been flat wrong.
Another example, sci fi author Ramez Naam in 2020 reviewed his prior projections from 2011 and 2015 here:
naw, we'll just build enough battery to cover the nights and then use gas as emergency backup for any rare wonky weather events. that could easily get us to 90+% clean, which would be absolutely amazing. Constant base load only supply like nukes are economically obsolete. On a modern grid you need a rapid response backup. Which is gas for now, and hopefully we'll come up with something to replace that later.
Building enough battery to cover the night is still 20,000 to 30,000 GWh. For comparison, global annual battery output in 2025 was 2,200 GWh.
Of which only ~ 300GWh went to grid storage.
Even just diurnal storage for a completely renewable grid is a truly enormous amount of storage.
More like a few decades, if ever. Battery production is estimated to reach 6.8 TWh per year in 2035 [1]. But only 12% of this is expected to go to battery storage systems, yielding just 800 GWh. 12 hours of storage worldwide at current electricity demand is 30,000 GWh. And by 2035, electricity demand is going to be more than that, as transportation and industry is increasingly electrified and migrated off of fossil fuels.
To reiterate, this is just for 12 hours of storage. Seasonal fluctuations can depress renewable generation for days or even weeks.
wind runs through the night, and so does hydro and existing nuclear. So lets say, 15,000gwh that needs shifting? Still a big number, but...
BESS increased 45% y/y in 2025, and is looking like higher growth than that in 2026 already ~60% (1). Im optimistic that the mckinsey conservative linear estimates of growth are missing the s-curve of scaling new tech, just like they did for solar. They only have to be wrong by a little y/y and we get to 1000ghw a year by 2030 (note, they released a more recent study that pulled 800gwh/year in to closer to 2030 [2], the previous study was already too conservative) . At 1twh a year we're seriously chipping away at emissions, we're done in 15 years if nothing else changes (which of course it will, both on the demand and supply side). Still, thats actually incredible!
Wind doesn't cut out at night, but it also experiences long periods of low production: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46617 It is unquestionably an intermittent source that would require overprovisioning and large amounts of storage to even out periods of underproduction.
The projections for battery growth might be off, sure. But it's also possible the growth is a little bit under the projections year over year, and then we're looking at much less battery production five years. You're invoking uncertainty, but only considering it in one direction.
Large geographic networks like the EU really help to smooth that variance out. Anyway, on average is all that really matters here. Remember, I’m not saying we can only have batteries and if they run out we’re in the dark. We’ll use gas to fill the gaps, and emit emissions for it. All that matters is the total emissions for the year.
Yes, im explicitly considering it only in one direction, as I said I’m optimistic. I have seen plenty of data, my own & others reasoning that leads me to believe in the optimistic case here.
EDIT: look at the graph in that second McKinsey link. Look at the step for 2024, and then the massive step for 2025. And then they project much tinier steps for 26 and beyond? That’s obviously nonsense. And we can tell it’s nonsense as the number for 26 are coming in at another 60% increase y/y, and all reports point to huge increases in deployed capacity this year. And they have it at like 20%. Cmon, that’s nonsense.
That link is a graph of battery electric storage, specifically. Mckinsey's projections have battery production continuing to accelerate, but the lion's share of the output dedicated to electric vehicles rather than grid storage: https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...
Rather than just proclaiming the projection as "nonsense" it'd be a lot more productive if you shared an alternate projection and explained why it's methods are superior.
We of course can’t scale the grid portion of battery production as fast, or even faster than what we’ve done for BEVs?
And this also disregards that second life automotive batteries are incredibly hot on the market. All those TWh of batteries will become available for stationary use when the cars are scrapped.
Maybe not in western markets due to labor costs, but definitely in developing economies.
As you have been reminded of in other comments, there is no "enough battery backup". These weather events aren't exactly rare either. Germany for example has on average multiple episodes of both subnormal wind and sun energy production in high-pressure systems.
Did you read my comment? 10% budget for gas backup buys you 35 days, if on those days there is 0% other production (extremely unlikely). Seems pretty conservative to me?
Even with Danish insulation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses.
This article conveniently doesn't include flexible demands and energy storage, both of which are a solved problem with nuclear but completely unrealistic with renewables.
Nuclear does neither flexible demand nor energy storage, those are in fact the things that nuclear does not solve! There are a few flexible nuclear plants in France but they push up costs. Some of the new modular nuclear rector designs are considering storage/flexibility, but cost there is also expected to be far higher than an AP1000.
Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization.
Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.
Nuclear can deliver flexible demand if required, it just involves either lowering the reactivity in the core, or if the drop in demand is sudden, bypassing steam from the turbine and running it directly to the condenser. But since their operating costs are so much lower than their construction costs operators run them at 100% capacity as long as they can.
The only situation where deliberately operating a nuclear plant at under 100% output is when nuclear makes up a very large chunk of a country's generation capacity. It's not that only French nuclear plants can reduce output it's that only the French have ever been in the situation where their nuclear capacity exceeds their minimum electricity demand.
Not economically. EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
It's never economical to operate an asset at under 100% capacity. Intermittent sources of energy like solar and wind encounter the same problem when they start to saturate demand during peak periods of generation. Install a new solar panel in California, and chances are you won't actually be able to sell any electricity around midday since demand is saturated.
The difference is that nuclear will keep running at night, in the winter, regardless of how strong the wind is blowing. A cheap, but intermittent source of carbon-free energy is not comparable on a dollar-by-dollar basis to a non-intermittent source of carbon-free energy.
The common retort is to use batteries, but let's put this in perspective: France uses 1,219 GWh of electricity daily (note that this is just electricity and doesn't include things like transportation, fuels in smelters, chemical feedstock etc.). 12 hours of storage would be 600 GWh. Seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar are even more extreme, and might need days worth of stored energy. But let's be humble and just see what it'll take to provision 12 hours:
At $150/kWh that'll be 90 billion dollars. These batteries will be good for 2,000 to 5,000 cycles. Let's say 4,000, so it has an 11 year life span. Over the course of 55 years that'd cost $450 billion. Just for the storage, mind you, France has to build the renewable generation on top of the storage.
On the flip side, the Flamanville Nuclear plant has a lifespan of 60 years. You could build 12 Flamanville nuclear plants and satisfy 100% of France's electricity demand. At €19 billion euros, or about $22 billion USD building 12 Flamanville plants would work out to $264 billion. The cost of storage to even out intermittent sources is much more expensive than just building the nuclear plants.
That ignores operating costs and battery costs are falling fast and your assumptions seem overly pessimistic. A 2025 project in Italy came out at $120/kWh made up of $70/kWh in equipment and $50/kWh in engineering and grid connection costs. (The grid connection will still be good and concrete pads can be reused so replacing after 20 years will cost less even before price drops in equipment.)
Even with a 7% cost of capital that gives a levelized cost of storage of $65/MWh or an additional $33/MWh on top of the levelized cost of electricity of solar to spread it across day and night [1].
With a 4% cost of capital the still being designed EPR2 with 30% savings over Flamanville 3 comes in at €93/MWh or $110/MWh [2].
So solar costing less than $77/MWh or €66/MWh + storage should be cheaper than EPR2.
The same applies to nuclear power, though: when France built multiple copies of the same plant design, the first few builds were expensive but costs declined for subsequent models. It's fine to include projected costs reductions into your cost estimate, but you have to apply the same logic to competing systems.
These numbers already include a projected 30% drop in costs for EPR2 across building six reactors with the first coming online in 2038.
Building a series of nuclear reactors with overlapping schedules (about one completion every year or two) in one country should help. But it’s simply far easier to find cost reductions for wind turbines which are manufactured in the thousands per year or solar panels and batteries which are manufactured in the millions.
That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s. Technology has changed over 50 years. France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear.
It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects.
The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster.
People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work.
The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.
> France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear.
As always this is a political problem, not a technical or economic one.
The Hollande government put a law on the books that made it illegal to increase nuclear generating capacity beyond the then-installed 63.2 GW
The only way they were even allowed to build/operate the single EPR in Flamanville was to shut down two old reactors in Fessenheim. Even that was questionable, but shutting down more perfectly fine reactors would be economically suicidal.
That law was only rescinded in 2023 (by 2/3 majority), and so after that they began plans for the 14 EPR2s, six now, eight later.
Now that that is in place (and France currently has more electricity than they need), the newest energy strategy calls for massive reductions in solar and wind build outs.
Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example of this: the plants are so much more expensive per megawatt than what the navy builds day-in-day-out because of 1) lawsuits every step of the way 2) regulatory paralysis and 3) we haven't been doing it for 50 years so the talent and patterns aren't there.
Which directly contributes to your later point:
> We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi
I wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi. Nor would I consider the ongoing rollout of reactors in China, which haven't seen the cost overruns of western nations, scifi. I'd consider those things consequences of the systems they were developed in. China's power plants have come in at about $2M/megawatt, which is coincidentally almost exactly what the US navy spends on their reactors and appears to be the cost of doing business in a well functioning environment. Solar is cheaper in the buildout (~$1M/megawatt), but not nearly to the extent that opponents of nuclear have made it out to be. It turns out when you make it almost impossible to do something, it gets really expensive!
These are problems we could solve through policy, but the lasting gift of the Boomer generation's rise to power and refusal to relinquish it is that US policy, industry, regulatory structure, and infrastructure were largely frozen-in-time 50 years ago and have been trying to cope with the crumbling shell of that ever since.
Military small reactor designs use fuel enriched to levels higher than what we want to be standard in civillian reactors. Second, military nuclear reactors are expensive as hell, and we wouldn't want to power our society with them.
We build nuclear submarines because operationally they are unsurpassed, there's no alternative, and the operational benefits are worth sky-high costs. When it comes to the grid, we have cheaper, more flexible, and faster to deploy options.
> Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China
That's quite a comparison given China's governance and environmental record. China will take your land, poison you, imprison you if you protest and suppress any mention of it on social media or in the press. Of course a business can get a lot done in that environment, is that really something to aspire to?
Some level of permitting reform is warranted but I would think hard about whether you want to adopt China's policies.
china is a single party state. they can order whatever plants they want and they'll get built - regardless of how much they cost, regardless of if the power is economically competitive, with no need for insurance (the state will clean anything up if it comes to that), and with no need to factor in disposal or decommissioning costs. They can do all this and need not worry if the math pencils out long term, or if the bet was wrong vs renewables. They cant get voted out. Yes their buildout is impressive, but its just not a comparable situation in any way to the mostly free market driven west.
Similarly the US navy does not have to produce commercially viable nuclear power on an all in cost basis. Different goals, different situation.
>That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s.
I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s.
>But this time it's different!
Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
> I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s
What you haven't heard every decade since the 90s is that storage, solar, and wind are cheaper than nuclear. Technology has changed. We're no longer running 486dx or pentiums, we have something better.
>> But this time it's different!
I didn't say that, and I'm not sure what you're referring to. Do you think energy technology is not going through a massive disruption, completely different than the 1990s, or 2000s?
> Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
This is very cryptic. Climate change doesn't threaten the industrial supply chains for nuclear, it does threaten the standard cooling sources though, such as rivers and other aquatic ecosystems. "If we don't do it" not sure what the "it" is bet no path leads to cannibalism.
A bit unrelated to the Belgium story but I recently visited Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, CA and learned a ton about the technical details, safety systems, and policy decisions that go into operating a nuclear power plant. When operating at full capacity, it provides up to 10% of California power! While there is certainly always more such facilities can do for safety and efficiency, my impression is that smart people are working hard to ensure the lessons of previous disasters and potential future ones are mitigated, and that nuclear energy, whether through next-gen small module reactors or legacy systems, will be an important aspect of our future energy grid, especially with the rapidly rising energy demand predicted over the next two decades. If you are interested in a tour, the form can be found here:
https://www.pge.com/en/about/pge-systems/nuclear-power.html
I did some research about that nuclear power plant. In 1985 dollars, the total construction cost was 5.6B USD. That is an astonishing amount of money. That is at least 16B USD in 2026 money. If you also include decomissioning costs of about 4-5B USD... how the fuck does nuclear power make any economic sense? PV solar plus batteries: ALL THE WAY. To be clear, I am not anti-nuclear power by any means. I think it is a terrific way to power our countries, but the ship has sailed. PV solar has won, and now we can add batteries (and some wind) to get reliability.
$5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power. While solar is definitely cheaper for 2GW of power, you still need batteries for when the sun is down. So you probably need approximately 30GWh of batteries to just replace this one power plant. The batteries alone would cost nearly $7B of grid-scale batteries that must be replaced every 20 years.
Ignoring the fact that the nuclear plant already exists, this still seems like the right way to go mostly because it's impossible to build this nuclear power plant for $16B in the US anymore (or so it seems).
Due to increased regulation etc you cannot just translate 1985 $, £ or Euro to a 2026 one. There is an actual example in the UK Hinkley Point C current estimate $43b, (£35b) where as sizewell B commissioned in 1987 was $3.2b billion (£2b) or about $7b in todays $. This is probably the worst example but makes the point.
> $5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power.
I don't understand. Are you talking about 1985 dollars of 2026 dollars?
After some research, I learned that thermal powerplants (coal/gas/oil) completed in 1985 cost about 0.8B to 1.2B USD per GW. 5.6B USD in 1985 for 2GW sounds like a terrible price -- at least twice the cost.
Nuclear is high capex low opex. It needs such a miniscule amount of fissile material per year, whereas purchasing coal is an eternal ongoing cost.
Just to put some numbers on it, a 1GW conventional reactor consumes about 25 tonnes of enriched uranium per year, while a 1GW coal plant goes through 3.3 million tonnes of coal.
I'd double my electricity bill if that means saving somewhere between 3 and 9 million lives per year[1], better health for myself and the people around me, and that's completely ignoring climate change benefits where prevention both saves money and reduces deaths/displacement/poverty in the long term
Either short-term solution is fine (nuclear or full renewable), but we're currently doing everything piecemeal. Plopping down a few big reactors in 20 years while people (in countries without salt planes, at least) are still trying to get permits for the remaining reasonable wind turbine and pumped hydro locations... it just feels like seven-mile boots for the energy transition
If we can make seven-mile steps by plopping down wind/solar plus the required storage in gigawatt quantities, all the better, but that hasn't been happening. We'll run out of uranium eventually but, for now, such reactors buy time. Of course, this discussion has been happening for so long that the "it takes too long to build" naysayers will get their way soon, even at the slow pace we're currently going full renewable at. It's now or never, we need to commit to an option, no matter which one
It makes economic sense because they require a large initial investment (CAPEX), but low cost per year to keep functioning for many decades (OPEX). In contrast to say wind or solar, which are smaller CAPEX but higher OPEX.
So when you compare average cost per year over the complete expected lifetime of the plants, nuclear is good, but when you compare the up-front cost to build it, yeah it looks bad.
Another thing is that nuclear in the US is far more costly than in e.g. France. The key is that France standardized a few reactor designs that they kept building again and again, which made both construction and maintenance cheaper over time. While in the US, each nuclear plant is a unicorn, which can perhaps result in better individual designs but ends up more expensive.
Unfortunately France can no longer build nuclear plants cheaply either. All of the recent nuclear plants built by the French state owned company EDF in France, Finland, and the UK have seen enormous cost and time overruns.
Cumulative emissions matter. We simply don’t have the time to wait the 20 years it takes to build new nuclear plants.
Also wow, for Solar the property taxes are OpEx. So if there's more sunlight because of good weather these "Operating expenses" decrease because they're based on taking fixed costs like property taxes and just dividing them by power output that's unrelated.
I assume property taxes for a gas turbine are likewise OpEx but they just disappear in the noise of buying enormous amounts of methane as fuel.
Human labor is very expensive, and every time we make humans more productive, that makes human labor more expensive, because their time becomes more valuable. Technological growth does that.
The cost of nuclear is primarily in labor and long-term financing, due to the very long lifetime and upfront labor cost. Until somebody has some sort of technological breathrough to decrease the labor cost of nuclear, it's not going to be able to compete. Even decades ago it had trouble, and now it's far worse.
You are talking only about the operations of the nuclear, and ignoring all the high energy process required to mine and process uranium before it can be used as a fuel, and after as waste. But let’s pass this problem to the next generation, they will know what to do :)
You underetimate the energy density of nuclear power. Yes. Uranium needs to be mined - slightly more 3xpensive if you extract it from sea water or recycle the fuel - but you need just one bathtub of fuel pellets to power a plant for 2 years. Solar and wind require more mining. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Nuclear GHG are lowest per UNECE and NREL which do account a lot of factors. Nuclear requires least amount of mining vs any alternative so this argument makes little sense. Nuclear waste can be stored in facilities like onkalo or recycled like at la Hague(now) or Superphenix(in past)
The energy density of uranium is such that the amount of energy required to mine and process uranium is trivial relative to the amount of power produced. The carbon intensity of nuclear power is lower than solar: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/kountz1/
It's a large amount of money, but the plants have a long service life. And once a nuclear plant is built, it's operational costs are much lower than other forms of electricity generation.
Simply saying "use PV plus batteries" really does not engage with the scale of storage required. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Annual global battery production is around 1,500 GWh, and only ~300 GWh of that production is used for grid storage.
Even just provisioning enough batteries to satisfy the requirements for diurnal fluctuations of solar is far beyond the scale of what battery production can provide. Let alone fluctuations due to weather and seasonal output changes.
Or solar / wind (which mostly anticorrelate) + biomass + storage + interconnectors + smart demand.
The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.
Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.
Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.
Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.
With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.
With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.
And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.
And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.
Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.
Lot of the biomass used in Denmark to form baseload power generation is imported.
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
No but every region has their own pros and cons. The idea Belgium has no other option than coal gas or nuclear is refuted, and biomass is just one of the reasons.
> "just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years."
One problem I've heard about this idea in the past is that cars and their batteries are expensive, and people won't want to run down the lifetime of their car battery more quickly by also using it as a home battery rather than just for driving.
Obviously this can be solved either by making it so cheap to replace car batteries that nobody cares, or by legislating that people have to use their cars this way. But is either of these solutions easy to happen any time soon?
I don’t think its a long term issue. The cost of battery storage is below 10c per kWh, whereas a peaker plant costs above 20c per kWh and runs 10% of the time.
So if you get paid double the value of your battery the incentives are there for an economic model to work. Today.
And batteries are only getting cheaper, gas is the opposite.
Plus batteries take surplus solar/wind, at these times they have a negative value. Add that and the economics are a no brainer. It’s a matter of time.
The issue with "base load" is that people usually omit to mention how much GW they are talking about and for how long. Which makes it a bit of a bull shit argument.
As an insurance against unspecified lack (how much for how long?) of wind and solar (and batteries, cable capacity, hydro, etc.) base load is supposed to swoop in and save the day when those temporarily fail locally. So, it's a valid question to ask how much insurance we need against that. Nobody seems to really know. There are loose estimates of course. And people seem to assume it's months and that renewables are going to 100% be offline throughout that very very long period. In reality in most connected energy markets, we have a short gap of a few weeks or so in winter at higher latitudes of reduced output that we already manage to cover with flexible generation.
It's more constructive to think in terms of dispatchable power rather than base load. When the sun doesn't shine or there is no wind, it's nice if you can quickly bring online additional generation, tap into battery reserves, or bring in power from elsewhere (via cables). That favors flexible power, not inflexible power. Nuclear and older coal plants are a bit inflexible. Shutting down and starting up a nuclear plant is really slow and expensive and requires a lot of planning. And especially older coal plants need quite a bit of time to bring their boilers up to temperature such that they build up enough steam pressure to generate power. Until then, they are just blowing smoke out of the chimney. Modern coal plants are a bit better on that front. Same with gas plants.
The modern ones only need about 10-20 minutes or so. Still quite slow but something you can plan to do. Slow here means expensive as well. Because shutting them down when there is a surplus of renewables (which is a very common thing now) is really inconvenient. Which means consumers have to pay extra for perfectly good electricity from renewables to be curtailed. That happens by the GW in some markets and keeps consumer prices higher than they should be because they have to pay for gas/coal that is technically not actually needed.
Batteries have a much lower LCOE than gas or coal plants (never mind nuclear) and it's being produced by the TWH per year now. A lot of markets are serving much of their peak demand using batteries now. Australia and China are good examples. Even in the US, you see batteries being deployed at a large scale now. That's starting to push gas and coal out of the market. A gas peaker plant that rarely runs is just really expensive.
When it comes to residential/consumer use base load is irrelevant - but when it comes to business (especially industrial) use base load is a strict necessity. The proportional requirements of base load are fading but it is still something that needs to be considered carefully.
Do fossil fuel companies overstate the importance and scale of base load to justify additional fuel subsidies? Indubitably - but don't let their bullshit hide the truth within it that actually is a critical requirement for our power grid.
What you need - the only thing you need - is dispatchable power. That is power supply that can rise and fall to meet demand. That is not what baseload is. It's also not what wind/solar provide.
What baseload is is electricity supply which is only economical if you use it all the time. Nuclear falls into this category because of its very high capital cost and low op-ex. If it's cheaper than dispatchable power (nuclear isn't) it's nice to have as much of it as the minimum demand that you see on the grid, to lower costs. If it's as expensive, or more expensive, than dispatchable power, that's fine, you just don't need it at all and can replace it entirely with dispatchable power.
It's similar to wind and solar in this, which also aren't dispatchable (though there supply curve looks different than the constant supply curve which "base load" is used to mean). Except wind and solar actually are cheaper than dispatchable power so they make economic sense.
The term is half marketing term and half a theory that constant supply non-dispatchable power would be significantly cheaper than dispatchable power so we should organize the grid around it. That theory didn't really pan out (apart from some places with non-storable hydro, and a few with geothermal).
basically, base load means the lowest point of demand on the grid. And you matched that with slow-to-respond thermal power plants (coal mainly, also nukes). Because those are slow to respond and are most profitable running at 100%, so you tried to keep them there. So called base load generation.
But note there is no rule of the universe that says you have to meet the base load demand with some static constant power source, you can get it from anywhere. And now, since renewables and batteries are cheaper than this base load generation, it knocks them off the grid rendering it unprofitable. So the whole concept of base load supply is obsolete. Anyway, the linked blog explains it better.
You don't need to run coal power plant close to 100% to be profitable. You want to run nuclear power plant close to 100% because fuel is cheap and you want pay back CAPEX as early as possible.
The article you send is perfect example why it's not economic to build new coal or nuclear power plants in US. The reasons are: very cheap natural gas and no CO2 tax. In US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity.
In Europe the situation is very different.
"Europe is in the opposite spot. The continent's main gas point, the TTF benchmark, nearly doubled to over €60/MWh by mid-March."
so what should europe do? gas being expensive doesnt make nuclear economics better for the role of variable backstop of an increasingly renewable grid. Its still a fatal economic equation for nuclear.
Btw battery is rapidly changing the math on
> US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity
california went from 45% gas in 2022 to 25% gas in 2025 almost entirely because of batteries (and more solar), and they're just getting started. I know its not generally true across the US, but very soon batteries are going to be pushing a huge amount of gas off the grid.
it actually is a choice between nuclear and PV, because base load supply is an obsolete concept. Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear. You cannot make them work without massive state subsidies.
Gas is far better suited economically to backstop a variable grid. I wish it werent true, because i dont hate nukes, but it is just economics.
I will also point out that california is down to 25% fossil sourced power in 2025, from 45% in 2022. Due to renewables and batteries, and there's far more coming. The amount left to backstop on gas in a few years could plausibly be 10%! which is amazing.
In the long term nations will likely end up with whatever renewables work for them (hydro/solar/wind/thermal) plus the appropriate amount of batteries and expensive, low use (stored) gas/oil plants for "emergencies" where the renewables do not deliver and the batteries might be exhausted. Some nukes will be in the mix obviously but they will not be widespread globally.
The future is all about sovereign power generation and distributed reliability.
Maybe there is a discussion to be had about WHY it needs to make economic sense? Power is a natural monopoly, maybe it doesn't need to be a part of the economy?
It was not a good idea for Germany (and certain other parts of the EU) to be so dependent on Russian gas. It was also not a good idea to become dependent on LNG from Qatar or the US. Spain uses natural gas from Algeria (via Morocco), also not great. Italy also gets some from Algeria/Tunesia, still not great. Inside of Europe, we are far too dependent on Norway. Not because Norway is likely to turn on us (or we on them), but because the pipelines are relatively easy to disrupt.
The transition from coal to gas gave us cleaner air (and less CO2) but it definitely also had costs, some of them in the form of many thousands of dead Ukrainians, some of them in the form of concessions to the US.
And $ cost is a poor metric to chase when what you really care about includes a lot more-- exposure to the whims of geopolitical forces you can't foresee or control, which have both $ cost and more.
I agree to an extent… but a state forcing a nuclear share and locking the populace into higher power prices for 30+ years is going to politically very unpopular. Short term economic concerns dominate today.
Tough luck. That's the point of representative government: look out for the interests of the nation and sell it to your populace. If you can't sell it, be prepared to be voted out, but do the right thing.
Because if a thing is valued by thing-consumers at x and you set the price to <x, then you are incentivizing people to use more of the thing than they need, even to waste the thing. This thus requires more infra than is actually needed or wanted.
This doesn't go away under socialism/communism/collectivism. If you set the price too low, you either have to build far more production capacity at public expense than needed, or you cope with regular blackouts.
it's not about ussr, what a nonsense. It's about having good supply chain. Like France had during messmer or Korea now (albeit far from china).
China is building the same ap1000 copycat much faster and cheaper
> how the fuck does nuclear power make any economic sense
Because these plants run for 80+ years (some countries are now considering 100) while most renewables run for 25 at most. And also because `plus batteries` doesn't exist. The world battery capacity isn't enough to power California for a single week. Large scale battery technology isn't even in its infancy, it just doesn't exist.
Don't forget, you've paid for the nuclear power plant once. You will pay for a new set of renewable capabilities every 25 years in <current-year + 25> dollars.
So in essence they studied all of six (6) panels in a non-dusty region with a mild climate and without notable saline corrosion AND the article even mentions that most other studies are well in the 25-30 year range. Also the study clearly outlines that older silicone panels can't be compared against modern mass produced variants. Finally the study only examines modules that are still working, failed or removed systems are not in the dataset so you have heavy hidden distortion.
The sample size is extremely limited. Six systems are not at all robust enough for global conclusions. This popsci article of yours doesn't hold up to scrutiny and neither it nor the study are enough to make sweeping generalizations like declaring the common 25 year lifecycle a myth.
The “common 25 year lifecycle” was never a drop dead expectation. That’s usually just what they’re warrantied for. It’s always been a common misunderstanding
Edit: If you don’t trust my source , please show one of your own that proves they need to be replaced at 25yrs
The problem has never been the lack of smart people for Chernobyl or Fukushima. Rather the fact that dumb, short sighted people were in power and drove the smart people away.
And unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this is going to stop any time soon.
I really wish the same could be said for San Onofre. To say nothing of its value as a landmark -- it will live on in our memories as the great San Onofre boobies
One upside -- is that SONGS being decommissioned gave the energy storage market the ability to level up in a big way back then. They filled part of the gap with some large MW procurements. Allowed BESS to be part of the collective energy solution. Nuclear + Solar + BESS + some small amounts of NG is a dream team.
"Ironically, what originally motivated pumped storage installations was the inflexibility of nuclear power. Nuclear plants’ large steam turbines run best at full power. Pumped storage can defer surplus nuclear power generated overnight (when consumption is low) to help meet the next day’s demand peak."
Yeah, nuclear provides a steady base load, so the percentage goes up or down depending on overall grid utilization. Right now its doing 2.28 MW [0], which is more than what Wikipedia claims as its "Nameplace capacity" of 2.256 MW [1].
To use the strongest plausible interpretation, the writer could be from Belgium, where the meaning of 2.256 depends on whether they wrote the number in French, Dutch or German.
The Belgians apparently typically invert the meaning of . and , in numbers (from how they are used in the US).
To make large numbers readable, Belgians use either a period (.) or a non-breaking space. Example: Two thousand thirty-six is written as 2.036 or 2 036. In formal Belgian French, the space is increasingly preferred over the period to avoid confusion with the Anglo-American system, but the period remains very common in Belgian Dutch and everyday shorthand.
I would guess Europeans tend to be better at SI units than people from the US. And let's not mention the the cancer of changing the value of G depending on context.
diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously. about 2.2MW/hr they both aren’t always on but that’s the goal. It’s closer to 2MW/hr actual
the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective.
mount signal, the largest PV plant in california makes 1,200GW/hrs per year. it would still take ~15 copies of mount signal for a single diablo canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar
my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of humanities energy needs because it’s not efficient enough. we should still keep building solar. but if we aren’t building nuclear too its not enough growth
Did you ever calculate the cost for a hypothetical battery that could keep solar power available whenever the sun does not shine? This is where nuclear, well, shines
The other day I calculated what it would take to run my entire country on pure solar, assuming magical infinite storage capacity. Even here in Central Europe, the required area for all the panels was a pretty insignificant number that, even if built as a single huge circle, would easily fit in many different places.
> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously
MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)
> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.
Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).
There is so much misinformation in here, so densely packed.
Ivanpah is is not the largest solar power plant in California. It's an experimental solar-thermal plant. Talking about megawatts per year is not a meaningful term (megawatt-years would be). Ivanpah despite its much talked about failures delivers between 350 and 850GWh per year.
The largest solar plant in California is Edwards Sandborn, producing somewhere around 2500GWh per year (it's newer so numbers are less published).
Diablo Canyon produces around 18000GWh/year, which is huge.
But with all costs combined, Diablo's price per MWh is close to ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS off of a massive initial capex. Modern solar battery installs trend towards $30-60 for the same output.
So I'm sure your tour guide had some neat numbers but you should be careful not to repeat them verbatim (or unremembered).
It doesn't. Watts were a mistake by whatever committee it was that standardized unit names. Power should not have been given a unit; it should have been left as ∆energy/time just as velocity is distance/time.
Joule is a derived unit, it is kg*m^2/s^2. There are lots of derived units, like hertz and newton, because they useful than writing out the whole thing. Electronics would be really annoying if had to write out volt, ohm, and watts (ampere is base unit, coulomb is derived).
Don’t put words in my mouth. I only said that power should be J/s instead of watts. The “per second” part of that is what is most important thing about power. It’s the rate at which energy is accumulating or being used up.
Using watts is fine for anyone who deals with energy and power all the time. The problem comes when the lay person tries to reason about power. If power were written as J/s then they could use the same reasoning that they are already familiar with from dealing with speed and position, or with flow rate and volume.
I regard that as a downstream effect of giving power a unit in the first place, but yes. We should have just stuck to J and J/s. It would have prevented the kWh and also abominations like the mAh “capacity” ratings you see on batteries.
Diablo Canyon can output 2.2 GW, if you assume 50% (1.1 GW) for the sustained output, I come up with 9636 GWh per year, or ~19,200 GWh per year if it was able to run at 100%
Strictly: France will no longer decommission Belgium's nuclear power plants, as Belgium will buy them. The current owner Engie are majority-owned by the French government.
I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
> "Belgium's federal law of 31 January 2003 required the phase-out of all seven nuclear power reactors in the country. Under that policy, Doel 1 and 2 were originally set to be taken out of service on their 40th anniversaries, in 2015. However, the law was amended in 2013 and 2015 to provide for Doel 1 and 2 to remain operational for an additional 10 years. Doel 1 was retired in February this year. Duel 3 was closed in September 2022 and Tihange 2 at the end of January 2023. Tihange 1 was disconnected from the grid on 30 September this year."
> "Belgium's last two reactors - Doel 4 and Tihange 3 - had also been scheduled to close last month. However, following the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February 2022 the government and Electrabel began negotiating the feasibility and terms for the operation of the reactors for a further ten years, to 2035, with a final agreement reached in December, with a balanced risk allocation."
It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.
> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
Funnily, I have almost the opposite view. I'm terrified of old nuclear because those first gen power plants are all missing a lot of safety lessons. Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.
I want old nuclear plants to be either upgraded or decommissioned. I have much less concern about new nuclear (other than it taking a very long time and an a lot of money to deploy).
A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.
Nuclear reactors are regularly maintained, tested and checked. When possible, old plants are upgraded to new safety standards.
You can upgrade certain components, and safety systems. However things like the containment structure or pressure vessel can't be changed. You for example can't retrofit a core catcher, but you could improve the turbines, I think Steam Generators as well, replace PLC's, Tsunami proof your site by building a larger tsunami wall / making your backup generators flood proof...
Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues. They have been dragging their feet for decades on the subject and instead of building new reactors 10-20 years ago, they are now un-decomissioning older reactors..
> Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues.
I want to point out that Belgium has the (global) gold standard of nuclear regulation. They have annual reviews, 5 year major reassessments, and 10 year Periodic Safety Review (PSR). The purpose of the PSR is to build a plan to keep all nuclear plants up-to-date with state of the art safety mechanisms. Each PSR has mandatory upgrades. If operators fail or refuse these upgrades, they are forced to shutdown. There is no one other country who does nuclear safety quite like Belgium.
Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission.
These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
Hmm, I may have been too vague. When I stated "these" I was talking specifically about the Fukushima plants and not Japan's policy for reactors nationally.
Are they planning on restarting the Fukushima plants? I didn't think they were.
> These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
This was about the Fukushima reactors that were completely destroyed? In response to a discussion of Belgian reactors that are completely different?
All nuclear reactors are massively safer than coal power plants though. If you excluded climate change and Co2 emissions entirely and measured harm/deaths adjusted by the amount of power generated the difference would be astronomical.
Or you know, just build renewables and storage. Displace vastly more coal faster with a death per kWh where the only injuries comes from traditional construction and mechanical industry work.
theres the well known inherent problem with the graphite at UK AGR reactors which could be very bad (can crack or misshape in such a way that the control rods or fuel rods cant be moved), not to mention the boiler cracking at the weldseams, they only mitigated this at some sites because they all are slightly different in design, they basically ignored it in the ones which didnt yet have it for decades ,the regulator ended up finding exactly that lessons learnt on older reactors were not being applied to newer ones which had the same problems inherent to them
Well yes, Russia is Russia. The RBMK with its well-known design flaws could never have been certified/built in the West. Yes, these design flaws were well-known long before the Chernobyl accident.
In his posthumously published memoirs, Valery Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK had significant design flaws. Legasov's suicide in 1988, following frustrated attempts to promote nuclear and industrial safety reform, caused shockwaves throughout the scientific community.
However, the units that are still operating were modified after the accident to remove at least a few of the elements of the accident chain that made the reactor inherently unsafe.
Still no containment, and still not anywhere close to the requirements for Western reactors, but they seem to be operating reasonably safely.
I think the issue comes with unknown unknowns. Before Fukushima someone might have said the same thing you just have, but a new disaster still came along and caused a lot of issues. I am still bullish on nuclear, but I think waving away concerns might do more harm than good.
Fukushima was a known risk though, they just never bothered to fix the problem. Plus just being planned in the 60s meant the initial design was born only about 15 years after nuclear power was invented. Fukishima was like driving around in a Model T, being told original brakes and tires and lack of seatbelts were unsafe, but still being regularly driven down busy roads without bothering to upgrade those features.
The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.
The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.
Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal
I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'
Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
>How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
When did a dam failure in the Ukraine affect wildlife in Sweden for 30+ years? It's kind of a several-orders-of-magnitude larger area being affected for orders-of-magniture longer timespans.
Exxon valdez and even deepwater horizon is ancient history, Chernobyl is not, in fact it's current events. And will be, for the foreseeable future, as will Fukushima.
No Japanese alive today will stop paying for Fukushima for as long as they live. Are any other costs from the tsunami still ongoing?
>Happy to be proven wrong, but
Won't prove you wrong but maybe it will make you reconsider the link as a support of your argument:
Danger is what could happen, not what has actually happened.
A loaded gun is dangerous even if it hasn't been fired yet, nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam.
This is exactly my point. You are looking at a single fantastic instance: you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction, illness, and death per TWh. To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim
> nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam
Banqiao dam was a single hydroelectric installation, for which the estimated death toll of its failure is in the ballpark of every nuclear death combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
>you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction
Sorry but this isn't true. You base this claim on what has happened but not what could have happened, which is a mistake.
The actual truth is that 1 Chernobyl almost ruined Europe. If the heroic individuals who managed to stop the graphite fire had said "f it I'm outta here" instead of sacrificing their lives, it would have made large areas in far corners of Europe uninhabitable, and even larger areas unsuitable for farming, for decades.
This is not hyperbole, it is a likely outcome based on the amount of material that would have been released and prevailing weather patterns.
It didn't actually happen, but it could have. We were spared the worst case scenarios from Chernobyl.
100 Chernobyls would not have been 100 Chernobyls that lasted for a week, most of them would have pumped out sterilizing levels of radiation for months. Nothing humans have done to date would be comparable to such a scenario.
Danger is not related to what has happened, but what could happen. This is important to keep in mind when discussing things that will have consequences for centuries. Many things happen over centuries, we're not even a century from WW2 yet.
>To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim
Figuratively, of course. I meant that the deepwater event is handled and done. We don't actively need to consider how to handle it today. Nature is still recovering but you can eat any fish you catch in the gulf without worrying about the oil spill and you don't need to clean any birds.
Chernobyl is not over, and won't be for the foreseeable future. It could cause new fallout 100 years from now, our grandchildren might have to pay for a new sarcophagus, at the very least pay for maintenance of the existing one. It is an ongoing cost on several national budgets.
Only a very few things that humans do really compares to the the consequences from nuclear power. It's troubling to see it being so severely misunderstood and belittled even on a forum like this. If we decide to do it it should at the very least be with a good understanding of the actual risks.
> it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable
The big fear for me would be that this happens to a nuclear power plant that is located in a densely populated area (of which there are many). Chernobyl was bad, but imagine the impact if the exclusion zone contained a major city.
The only real problem with the Fukushima incident was the (unnecessary) evacuation. It really would be best if they weren't built too close to where people live.
"Every year, sheep herds in selected municipalities must be brought down onto cultivated land and given clean feed for a certain number of weeks before they can be slaughtered, in order to bring the levels in the meat down below the maximum permitted level."
Germany 2026, 3000 boar at 100-200 euros compensation each:
“It has taken nearly 25 years for the contamination of Scottish soils to decay to officially safe levels – and we're 1,400 miles away,”
Northern norway - scotland - bavaria - ukraine, that's about half the continental US affected for decades, so it's a fair comparison wouldn't you agree?
> disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common and more importantly don't allow Soviet engineers to design and operate your nuclear power plants.
> Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though
I mean, when we get Chernobyl 2.0 with hundreds of millions of victims, will the fact that it was caused by "variables that can be easily controlled" somehow make the situation any better?
Fukushima. It was a Gen 1 plant which already has the issue that a thermal runaway is possible. There were other examples of this happening like TMI. The backup for Fukushima was onsite generators which were flooded and ultimately failed causing the meltdown.
The safety lessons we learned from all gen 1 reactors was to apply passive shutdown mechanism where if input power fails fission ultimately stops. That's not something that can be applied across the fleet because it requires more infrastructure and an almost complete redesign of the reactor's setup. Which is why these early reactors all have a potential risk of thermal runaway.
Edit: It looks like all gen Is have been decommissioned as of 2015, which is great. But we really should now be talking about decommissioning gen IIs and leaping forward to Gen IVs.
2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done by a power generation mechanism.
> Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Yeah, crazy stuff happens and radioactive spills have longterm effects on the environment that are hard to address.
> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
That's a non-sequitur.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Japan has spent the equivalent of $180B cleaning up the mess Fukoshima left behind. [1] Decomissioning the old reactors and replacing them with the safer to avoid unexpected disasters which cost hundreds of billions does seem like a good use of money. Far better than just hoping something unexpected doesn't happen.
We could for example argue that Japan, by stopping it's nuclear power plants for long time and replacing it's cheap nuclear electricity with expensive imported gas electricity caused more deaths than by direct radiological impact of Fukoshima accident.
"Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident"
"In an effort to meet the energy demands, nuclear
power was replaced by imported fossil fuels, which led to increases in electricity prices. The price increases led to a reduction in electricity consumption but only during the coldest times of the year. Given its protective effects from extreme weather, the reduced electricity consumption led to an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that the increased mortality resulting from the higher energy prices outnumbered the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting that applying the precautionary principle caused more harm than good."
In term of money, you have look at the sums that Japan has been pouring into importing gas, which was needed to replace the missing nuclear power generation.
"With the Japanese government’s blessing, these companies are encouraging other countries to use more gas and LNG by investing US$93 billion from March 2013 to March 2024 in midstream and downstream oil and gas infrastructure globally."
I'm not actually arguing that Gen II plants need to be decommissioned immediately. I'm arguing that they need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
The process that takes can look like running the Gen II reactor while a replacement Gen IV reactor is being built and then decommissioning after the IV reactor is up and running.
I'm not against using nuclear, far from it. But I do think we need to actually have a plan about how we evolve the current nuclear fleet.
> Gen II … need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
Why? The overwhelming majority of Gen II reactors aren’t on the east coast of Japan.
And the lessons learned from Fukushima Daiitchi can be applied elsewhere to mitigate similar risks.
My opinion is it’s more prudent to run the existing fleet for its economically useful life, remembering that reliable base load can have more value than intermittent wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
You also don’t get process heat not district heating from wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
Gen II reactors everywhere are subject to war and sabotage. Places that are currently safe aren't always safe.
Fukushima was a demonstration that these reactors can still melt down. It doesn't take exactly fukushima to cause a meltdown.
The reason to prioritize decommissioning is because the new generations of reactors are completely safe. There can be no meltdown, even if they are explicitly sabotaged. Then the bigger risk becomes not the reactor but the management of waste.
What Gen II reactors are is effectively a landmine in a box. The proposed solution to avoid detonating the landmine is adding more pillows, buffers, and padding, but still keeping the landmine because it'd be expensive to replace.
I think that's just a bad idea. Unexpected things happen. They don't have to (and probably won't) look exactly like a Tsunami hitting the facility. So why not replace the box with a landmine with one that doesn't have the landmine. Yes it cost money to do, but it's simply safer and completely eliminates a whole class of risks.
There are many kinds of Gen IV reactors. Which of the Gen IV reactors would you prefer? Which Gen IV reactor can not melt down, even if explicitly sabotaged?
TBH, probably the SCWR. They seem like the easiest to build without a lot of new surprises.
> Which Gen IV reactor can not melt down, even if explicitly sabotaged?
One like the BREST. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor) . Funnily my preferred reactor, the SCWR, would probably not be immune to some sabotage, specifically explosives around the reactor. But a reactor which uses a metal coolant would be. It just so happens that the nature of a SCWR cooled with water means that the reactor core has to be much beefier anyways, so it's a lot harder to really damage even if that was an explicit goal.
A country that is having a hot war with its neighbour Russia(!) is getting the fuck on with it, while the rest of the Western world still thinks windmills are cool.
There have been plenty of direct deaths caused by coal power. Coal dust can be quite explosive and has caused a lot of deaths over the years. And plenty of coal fired boilers, both stationary and mobile (locomotives) and failed causing plenty of deaths.
> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done
By that definition housefires also lead to very few direct deaths if most people die due to smoke inhalation instead of burning alive.
Unlike with nuclear that, even if we entirely ignore CO2 emissions and climate change the remaining "indirect" damage due to pollution and long-term effects on the environment are largely know and quantifiable and are astronomically higher per MHw produced compared to nuclear power.
There are plenty of smaller nuclear power reactor issues listen on Wikipedia, but the three big ones are Chernobyl, but that was an RMBK, which no one built except those crazy Russians, TMI which didn’t kill or injury anyone, and Fukushima Daiitchi which resulted in one death.
So we’re not really talking about deaths from nuclear power reactors, because there aren’t any, discounting Chernobyl because that won’t ever happen again.
So we must be talking about the deaths from that one natural disaster associated with the Fukushima Daiitchi meltdowns. Otherwise, I dint know what deaths you’re talking about.
More people injur themselves falling off ladders while trying to clean their solar panels than nuclear power ever will.
The idea that nuclear isn’t safe, and can’t be competitive in thr market is just nonsense.
Seventeen AP1000s are currently in operation or under construction. Four are in operation at two sites in China, two at Sanmen Nuclear Power Station and two at Haiyang Nuclear Power Plant. As of 2019, all four Chinese reactors were completed and connected to the grid, and as of 2026, eleven more are under construction.
It goes on…
Two are in operation at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant near Augusta, Georgia, in the United States, with Vogtle 3 having come online in July 2023, and Vogtle 4 in April 2024. Construction at Vogtle suffered numerous delays and cost overruns. Construction of two additional reactors at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station near Columbia, South Carolina, led to Westinghouse's bankruptcy in 2017 and the cancellation of construction at that site. It was reported in January 2025 by The Wall Street Journal and The State that Santee Cooper, the sole owner of the stored parts and unfinished construction, is exploring construction and financing partners to finish construction these two reactors. The need for large amounts of electricity for data centers is said to be the driving factor for their renewed interest.
Twenty-four more AP1000s are currently being planned, with six in India, nine in Ukraine, three in Poland, two in Bulgaria, and four in the United States.
China is currently developing more advanced versions and owns their patent rights. The first AP1000 began operations in China at Sanmen, where Unit 1 became the first AP1000 to achieve criticality in June 2018, and was connected to the grid the next month. Further builds in China will be based on the modified CAP1000 and CAP1400 designs.
My case is that Gen II reactors have a design flaw which gives them a risk that should be eliminated. We should replace Gen II reactors with Gen III or later reactors as none of them suffer from the same problems as Gen II reactors do.
The rest of your post is about AP1000, which is a Gen III+ reactor. A fine reactor to replace Gen II reactors with.
I've made this point, to you, a couple of times so now I feel like you aren't actually reading my responses.
Yes we actually are talking about deaths from natural disasters.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant was destroyed by the Tsunami. It didn't spontaneously combust.
A lot of other infrastructure that was impacted/destroyed by the Tsunami claimed lives. For example, a dam broke due to the Tsunami and that dam breach killed 4 people. Which coincidentally happens to be 4 more than were killed by the nuclear power plant when it was destroyed by the Tsunami.
IDK why you'd think a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors in an article about decommissioning nuclear reactors should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters.
More people die from car accidents and heart attacks. More people get radiation poisoning from sun exposure. Also non-sequiturs because we are not talking about that here.
It is very tangentially related because the nuclear accident in the current thread was caused by an earthquake that also killed people. Not something that affects the discussion about how we should handle nuclear plants in the future because "This number is bigger" is a meaninglessly point to make.
> a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors
This is actually an article about Belgium taking over nuclear plants for restart.
> should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters
How did we get to natural disasters?
Well:
You brought up Fukushima, where a natural disaster destroyed a nuclear power station. You also incorrectly claimed that Japan had "decided" to "decomission" "these" reactors, rather than "rebuild" them.
Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission.
These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
I think most people who read this interpreted this as "these" meaning "Japan's reactor fleet". Because that's the only interpretation that makes at least a little sense (though it is wrong).
It certainly can't mean the reactors at Fukushima, because those have been destroyed, there never was any question of "rebuilding" them and so no "decision" not to do that. And not due to some unfixable "design flaw", but due to a Tsunami that another plant of the same design withstood without damage.
So: we got to natural disasters because you brought up natural disasters.
And yes, technical equipment and infrastructure gets destroyed in natural disasters. Like that dam in Japan that killed 4 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami. Like that nuclear power plant that killed 0 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami.
Even in a highly regulated environment like the United States, coal mining is not a zero-fatality industry. United States: According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), there were 8 coal mining deaths in 2025 and 10 in 2024. This is a massive improvement from 1907 (the deadliest year), which saw 3,242 deaths.
In countries with less stringent safety oversight, the numbers are much higher. For example, China's coal industry—though improving—has historically recorded hundreds to thousands of deaths annually.
In 2022 alone, hundreds of people died in global coal mine accidents.
Chronic Disease: "Black Lung" (pneumoconiosis) is still a leading cause of death for miners. In the U.S. alone, thousands of former miners die every decade from lung diseases directly caused by inhaling coal dust.
> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths.
Huh? Are you not counting coal mining, which historically caused thousands of deaths per year and presumably still causes at least hundreds per year (not sure what info we have on that from China).
"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.
> 2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Sure, but Belgium has to be prepared for something like the North Sea flood of 1953 - which climate change is only going to make worse.
> 3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Irrelevant.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Correct, but a nuclear power plant in Belgium should be safe enough to survive the kind of disaster which is likely to happen in Belgium - which is very much a topic of debate.
If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
> "Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
The actual death toll of the accident itself is zero.
There was one incident of cancer that was ruled a "workplace accident" by an insurance tribunal that went through the press without much vetting.
However, this was for his overall work at the plant, largely preceding the accident.
The WHO says there has been and will be no measurable health impact due to Fukushima.
What caused a lot of deaths was the evacuation that almost certainly should not have happened.
"The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
You should read the article you linked to. It actually explains that nuclear is defacto not insured, and that is the reason why they have only paid 15000 euros in total.
The TLDR is that basically no matter what happens, the cost is covered by the government of the country the plant is located in, and secondly other governments.
This is course also true even if nothing goes wrong with the plants, future tax payers pay for decommissioning, maintenance, storage etc.
None of this addresses the points made. It is talking around the subject by trying to shift the focus or narrow the perspective.
The cleanup bill is real.
The inability to get insurance is real.
The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
The possibility of Fukushima scale accidents all depend on local conditions. And it may be as trivial as upgrades and component changes over the decades leading to safeties protecting the component rather than the larger system causing defense in depth to fail. Like happened in Forsmark in 2006.
Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history. There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
This still feels irrational compared to other dangerous industries.
> The inability to get insurance is real
It's real, but how much of it is rooted in emotional fear or bad industrial policy?
> The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
And that's one of the lessons to learn from the Fukushima accident, that's why Canada changed their evacuation plans to be more granular for example.
> Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history.
Storage gets very expensive as your share of renewables increases (because the capacity factor of storage goes down then). Having an amount of clean firm generation (nuclear) brings the overall cost of the system down.
edit: capacity factor might be the wrong term for storage, the point is their rate of utilization goes down and so does their profitability.
> There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
I don't understand what we could effectively do with civil nuclear builds decades ago cannot be replicated today. Let's also talk about the cost of the transition to renewables in Germany please.
It's not clear the mismanaged massive evacuation was even necessary. In hindsight its like that less people would have died if they just stayed there for a few more days.
How can that be irrelevant. The disaster was directly caused by a very specific external factor that was not properly accounted for when it was built i.e. it's not generalizable to all nuclear plants in different areas.
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Because it doesn't make sense from a risk management perspective, the risk is astronomically low and impossible to estimate, just like the potential damage which might be huge and again impossible to estimate. How do you even calculate the premiums or anything else for that matter?
You have to understand that Japan is unusually well prepared for natural disasters. From earthquake resistant building codes, to alarm systems, education, to building, to earthquake refuges. I would venture to say that it is the most earhquake-prepared country in the world (although I have no proof of that point and I don't feel like looking for evidence on that it). Earthquakes that would have killed hundreds in other countries are footnotes in the news in Japan.
The earthquake alone was not enough to bring down Fukushima; the reactors shut down, as designed. The earthquake wasn't the direct cause of many deaths. It is difficult to estimate given the circumstances, but tens or maybe hundreds.
So in in that sense, yes, the earthquake is irrelevant.
However, after the earthquake, came the tsunami. That did shut down the Fukushima backup generators. No generators means no cooling, which means meltdown.
The tsunami also killed the most people. Now, why is this relevant?
Because the Japanese have had drills and tsunami education for decades. They have seawalls, strong buildings, and prepared infrastructure. The tsunami hit the least populated areas of the coast. In short, they were aware, trained and prepared, and they were not hit where most people live.
And still, ~15000+ died. That gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.
Sure, but Chernobyl didn't require a massive tsunami, and neither did Three Mile Island. On top of that there have been dozens of near-misses. On the other hand: what would have been the result of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami hitting a wind farm, or a PV installation?
Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business, with virtually unlimited damages if something goes seriously wrong. I'm sure all the reactor operators reviewed their flood procedures after Fukushima and a 1:1 repeat is unlikely, but why didn't they do so before the incident? What other potential causes did the industry miss?
In this case it was indeed a large-scale natural disaster which caused the accident, but how sure are we that some medium-scale terrorism can't do the same, or some small-scale internal sabotage or negligent maintenance? The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.
Thought experiment: imagine nuclear were 100 times as deadly as it is, but ten times more prevalent (supplanting other fossil fuels, or even hydroelectric)
What would be the net effect? (I think it would be roughly on par with gas or hydroelectric and an order of magnitude safer than other fossil fuels even with this extremely pessimistic hypothetical)
It wouldn't be a linear increase i.e. you can more or less estimate how many people would die per MWh produced in hydro, gas, coal etc. plants.
With nuclear if somebody dies that means a some sort of catastrophic event likely occurred regardless if a 1 or 100+ people die the reactor will be out of commission and it will cost a massive amount of money to contain it.
I'm not following the argument for being able to estimate deaths per [T]Wh for hydro, gas, etc. but not nuclear. I think hydroelectric is especially analogous
> Sure, but Chernobyl didn't require a massive tsunami, and neither did Three Mile Island.
Three Mile Island was a success in the sense that even the worst case scenario the safety measures are sufficient to more or less fully contain it.
In Chernobyl's case... well yes it proves that if you let incompetent and stupid people build and operate nuclear power plants horrible things can happen.
> Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business,
Well, let me introduce you to airplanes — flying is inherently risky, and so many people have died on commercial flights. We should abolish it immediately!
> The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.
Maybe. I'm more concerned about coal plants that are, as we speak, dumping metric tons of harmful materials, including radioactive ones, into the atmosphere we all breathe, which causes approximately 100_000 people to die each year.
These are real things happening right now, not some hypothetical problems that may happen, but haven't in the last 60 years of commercial nuclear reactor operations.
Seriously, all you can cling to are what, 2-3 major accidents in all this time? With negligible death tolls? Please. This is just concern trolling.
The impression I've gotten is that almost all of the massive bills associated with nuclear power are because of an irrational fear of the radiation. Factoring in all the nuclear disasters and the radiations released from them, nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.
> nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.
If we demonstrate scientific honesty and begin to apply the same level of techniques that are used to obtain the result of "10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt", we can come to the conclusion that even a small accident at a small nuclear power plant can destroy life on planet Earth as a phenomenon.
No? It's like saying that its safe to have more zoos with tigers because tigers pretty much never get out of their cages and get a to kill people unless there is some massive fuckup (i.e. you let soviet engineers supervise your tiger)
>No? It's like saying that its safe to have more zoos with tigers
No, then the original statement would have to have been "we should keep paying big bills so we can have safe nuclear", but it wasn't.
To be more direct, using statistics about incidents to claim something is safe a fallacy. Something extremely dangerous that is kept safe through effort and expense won't appear in the stats until you remove the effort and expense.
Not quite, because there have been disasters and radiation leaks. And if the number of deaths per megawatt produced is 10,000 times less than coal, despite those radiation leaks, radiation leaks cannot be anywhere as dangerous as commonly perceived.
“Better than coal” is a weak argument. Coal hasn’t been in the “game” for decades. The problem for nuclear isn’t anything irrational - it’s economics and operational and deployment flexibility - newer tech like solar PV, gas turbines, batteries and wind have created a new Pareto frontier for electricity generation and nuclear just isn’t anywhere near this frontier for any objective.
India is the fifth-largest geological coal reserves globally and as the second-largest consumer, coal continues to be an indispensable energy source, contributing to 55% of the national energy mix. Over the past decade, thermal power, predominantly fueled by coal, has consistently accounted for more than 74% of our total
power generation.
The last new coal power plant to come on-line in the US was in 2013 at Sandy Creek - 13 years ago. The last new coal power station built in Australia - Bluewaters Power station was built in 2009 - 17 years ago. In Europe coal's share has dropped from over 40% of generation at its peak in 2007 - about 20 years ago - and has declined to about 9%. Coal's days are over - natural gas is cheaper and more flexible, while solar PV and wind are cheaper.
There is of course a large installed base - a coal plant will last 50 years. The fact that developing countries have large installed coal capacity is neither here nor there.
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Almost every plant is bespoke, leading each plant to have unknown failure modes and rates. Additionally, insurance works by pooling risk amongst a large group of individuals but the statistical uncertainties of failure rates (too few events) and low total rate of plants leads to an incredibly uncertain risk profile.
The fact that it's impossible to estimate the risk because the failure rates are unknown is concerning?
Yes, more frequent failures would make it easier for insurance companies to estimate the risk and calculate premiums but I don't exactly see how that would be good thing...
Or not having your plant destroyed by the biggest Tsunami in recorded Japanese history, much larger than the size they planned for when they built the plant.
Or upgrading the seawall to the size mandated after scientists found out that Tsunamis of that size could actually happen, despite having no historical record of them. One of the reasons TEPCO was culpable.
A sister plant of the Fukushima plant actually survived a slightly higher crest and was even used as a shelter for Tsunami victims, because one engineer had insisted on the sea wall being higher.
German plants for example, despite facing no immediate Tsunami risks, have bunkered and distributed backup generators as well as mandatory hydrogen recombinators. Any German plant at the same location would have survived largely unscathed.
A larger seawall can still fail. Better to put the generators on a platform. Simple and cheap.
Another backup would have been a pipe leading away from the reactor, where one can, from a short distance, pump water into it and it would cool the reactor.
After SL-1 we realized that that we needed to allow a reactor to fully shut down even with the most important control rod stuck in a fully withdrawn position.
I used to work at Boeing on airliner design. The guiding principle is "what happens when X fails" and design for that. It is not "design so X cannot fail", as we do not know how to design things that cannot fail. For Fukushima, it is "what happens if the seawall fails", not "the seawall cannot fail".
Airliners are safe not because critical parts cannot fail, but because there is a backup plan for every critical part.
Venting explosive gas into the building seems like a complete failure to do a proper failure analysis.
I don't know but i feel like Nuclear reactors are something worth taking to the 99.99% percentile of safety. How much money does it really cost? And how does that money compare to the economic prosperity of the land that is currently radiation free. As well, i think us (assuming) not knowledgeable Nuclear engineers discussing the cost benefit of reactor safety should be basically locked out of the conversation. Plausible sounding soundbites are just too easily generated these days for anyone without credentials to have stake in these decisions.
Nuclear is already at a much higher safety standard than 99.99%!
About costs: it is actually cheap. 95% of the average total cost of a MWh is in building the plant. Comparisons sometimes show the cost of a MWh from wind or solar, but is a fallacy because they assume an infrastructure on the side to ensure 24x7 power generation (i.e. they point out a marginal cost instead of average total cost).
Wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries are cheap!
Until you factor in the gas peaker plants that need to be built watt-for-watt unless you’re okay with poor people freezing in the dark, or melting in the heat. Because rich people can afford their own back up generators or on-site batteries.
The problem is as much time as it is money. We have reactors producing energy now, it will take a decade plus to replace them, and due to both climate policy and supply issues around the wars in Russia and the Middle East, we can't afford to do without the energy for that decade...
And if that nuclear would be displacing coal power, you have to consider the health and environmental costs of that coal generation which you haven't displaced.
There could be an earthquake any moment now that ruptures a massive natural CO formation that would eclipse any anthropogenic generated emissions in matter of hours. What have we done to mitigate that risk? Nothing.
There is a non-zero chance Earth will be relieved of the responsibility of harbouring complex life any moment now by a loose pile of gravel travelling at 60 kilometres a second. Zero mitigation.
Let’s work out this food-housing-energy deal for everyone before we mandate unaffordable unreliable energy that results in unaffordable everything.
Maybe your shielded from that because your own a mid six figure income at $UNICORN, but I guarantee you the rest of us have had enough of this climate change fucking bullshit luxury belief.
Air pollution has a direct negative impact on everyone's quality of life, I don't see why would you chose to decouple from "food-housing-energy". Coal would still be a bad deal even if climate change wasn't a concern.
Hey man, I live on a small farm ~50km from the city, where we get to battle more and more wildfires every year, and it no longer rains enough to keep the water supplies flowing all summer. Climate change is a bigger issue for a lot of of the world than your personal experience might suggest
Climate change isn't a risk that needs mitigation, it is not a contingency of hypothetical events. It is happening right now, and lives are already being claimed.
Maybe you are shielded from that and want to keep your lifestyle rather than adapting.
"Fukushima Daiichi Accident: Official figures show that there have been 2313 disaster-related deaths among evacuees from Fukushima prefecture. Disaster-related deaths are in addition to the about 19,500 that were killed by the earthquake or tsunami."
According to the "World Nuclear Association" (mission: to facilitate the growth of the nuclear sector by connecting players across the value chain, representing the industry’s position in key world forums, and providing authoritative information and influencing key audiences)
1) There are at least 403 cases registered of Fukushima residents developing Thyroid cancers after 2011 and the study is still ongoing. This is five times the expected cancer ratio.
Of those at least 155 cases of malignant cancers happened in children (Sokawa 2024). We know that thyroid cancers are rare among young people... except in one special place were a sudden increase in similar cases was registered since the 80's. This place is called Chernobyl. Children that lived in towns around Fukushima daichi where the accident happened have three times more probability of suffering thyroid cancer than children that lived in towns farther from the plant.
2) Not the strong excuse that it seems, after the company was warned by scientists about the possibility of such earthquake and the urgency to improve their safety measures. They had a lot of time to fix it, and did absolutely nothing
Like I said at the time, you could melt all of the cores down at the Fukushima Daiitchi site and dissolve them all in to the oceans and it would be undetectable in sea water.
The oceans weigh around 10^21 kilograms, and the six reactor cores at Fukushima Daiichi would weigh, what, several hundred tons and contain, what, several tens of tonnes of radioactive products.
It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred. Yes it could have been worse, and I suppose it could have been struck by a meteor too.
> it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water
Citation please. I suggest reading the relevant Wikipedia article in full.
> It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred.
The tsunami and tidal wave that took out the generators were unlucky.
The fantastically lucky part was that it didn’t create an explosion and spew much more radiation into the air. We couldn’t do anything to stop it, just stand back and hope for the best.
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was NOT using Generation I reactors.
"Gen I refers to the prototype and power reactors that launched civil nuclear power. This generation consists of early prototype reactors from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Shippingport (1957–1982) in Pennsylvania, Dresden-1 (1960–1978) in Illinois, and Calder Hall-1 (1956–2003) in the United Kingdom. This kind of reactor typically ran at power levels that were “proof-of-concept.”"
AIUI fission was stopped basically immediately. The problem was removing the decay heat from the fission by-products; without pumps to move cooling water that didn't happen.
I think modern reactor designs have enough passive cooling that this failure mode can't happen. There are a lot of active reactor plants where it still could be possible though.
You used plural? What disasters are you talking about?
Even Chernobyl wasn't technically first generation (not that it has anything to do with power plan safety in western countries anyway).
Three Mile Island kind of proved it was fairly safe given that's the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors (like tsunamis or being designed and run by soviet engineers..)
I may agree with your conclusion that old plants are safe enough (or at least take a deep dive study to see if their expected externality is worse than whatever would replace them). However:
> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors
The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.
The Fukushima quake was a truly extraordinary outlier though!
4th biggest quake ever recorded in history hit at the exact spot where the tsunami could overpower the protective wall at the reactor. Yet nobody died from the radiation.
Meanwhile the 20k people who died in the tsunami are forgotten. No one demands we stop building cities by the ocean.
Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.
There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.
We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.
> Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.
That's a bit of an impossible ask.
To give you a comparison with airplanes, F16 aren't "upgraded" to F35s. But there is an upgrade process, and F16s today are vastly different from F16s as they were in 1978.
Likewise for nuclear plants, reviews are done following incidents and new discoveries, and overhauls are done, both in terms of process and material changes. Gen2 plants aren't the same as they were when they were built.
The difference between different generations is wildly different and regulations aren't structured to allow for upgrading. It becomes a cost and regulatory burden thing - might as well rebuild then upgrade, very little to do with safety.
And I agree. I think this is a place where the regulations are broken. They should be changed to encourage new gen nuclear be built. Ideally, they could be tweaked so that the sites of old nuclear plants can be reused to produce new nuclear plants.
>I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
Time and Cost seem like excellent reasons to get started now, so we can finish by 2035 and get some materials purchased before inflation gets even worse.
All of the excellent arguments Pro-existing plants apply to new ones too.
If you are starting now wind and solar are almost always your best investment. Some form of storage is next, but not until you have large amounts of wind+solar in the system. (which many areas are already reaching)
This just seems like kneejerk anti-Nuclear stance in disguise. Maybe you did intend it as just a neutral observation but it's hard to take it that way.
Like maybe you're right... why not also support Nuclear plants, which we in fact need for baseload energy? Surely there are better places to cut the budget than other carbon-free energy sources.
I have no argument with building out solar and wind maximally. I will always push for new Nuclear as part of the mix.
Where does this "need for baseload" energy come from? Baseload is a demand side concern. It can be fulfilled by any number of sources and we already have grids operating with zero baseload.
The grids have dispatchable power. But that is a different concerns.
You also have to look at it in terms of outcomes. How do we get the most decarbonization the quickest per dollar spent?
Focusing on reducing the area under the curve. Looking at it from that perspective wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power leads to spending longer time entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
We don't need baseload energy! That is something the coal lobby likes to repeat but it is false. We need enough energy to supply demand. These days gas peaker plants amortize cheaper to run 24x7 than a new baseload plant and so a lot of new "baseload" is actually covered by a peaker plant.
Baseload doesn't have a consistent definition, but the general concept is some power plants are cheap at 100% output, but don't throttle back well, so you have a mix of these cheaper baseload plants, and the more expensive to operate peaker plants that are more expensive to operate, but can start/stop/slow as needed. However we don't need that. In any case even when baseload is cheaper than peaker, it is still much more expensive than wind+solar which have zero fuel costs, and so when you amortize the costs out wind+solar plus peaker plants to make up the difference is overall cheaper.
25 years ago I was with you - nuclear was the best answer. However wind+solar have really grown since then and now they your best bet. Because the times have changed I've in turned change. I'm against nuclear because it no longer makes sense even if the price was reasonable. (nuclear would still make sense for ships, I don't know how to push that though)
Edit: Come to think of it, I'd go so far as to say if you have a baseload coal plant today, you should be shutting it down immediately for new wind and solar plus gas peaker plants. It is economically stupid to not be doing that. Now, there may be coal power plants that are not baseload, but instead can be dispatchable. If so, I don't know how the economics of those play out. And likewise, nuclear, although it is baseload, probably is cheap enough to continue running as long as it's not too expensive to keep maintaining, and I would keep it running for the near future.
Gas peak plants are neither clean nor economical stable in Europe. The war in Ukraine and now the war in Iran has demonstrated how extreme the price of energy can become if we allow demand to exceed supply for any extended period, and multiple European governments in the last few years got elected explicitly to solve this. Having a single month cost as much as a full year, or even multiple years, is a costly lesson for voters and the economical effects are not slow to provide a second demonstration on how important stability is in the energy market.
Coal is not an option, nor is oil nor gas. Batteries for something like central/northern Europe is also not an option as a seasonal storage of weeks/months are prohibitively expensive. Hydro power has demonstrated to cause (near) extinctions of several species and ecosystems, modern research on soil has show some terrible numbers in terms of emissions, and the places where new hydro power could be built are basically zero. Biofuels from corn and oil is prohibitive expensive and also bad for the environment, and the amount of fraud currently being done in green washing corn ethanol as being "recycled" food waste is on a massive scale and not something Europe can build a seasonal storage on. Green hydrogen is not even economical yet for being used in manufacturing, not to mention being burned for electricity and heating. Carbon capture for synthetic fuel is even further away from being a realistic storage solution.
That leaves very few options, and if current world events continue as they have we will see more governments being elected on the promise of delivering a stable energy market. Wind+solar+Gas peaker plants are not that. It was already an bad idea when it got voted as "green" in EU, as it cemented a dependency on natural gas from Russia and middle east. In 2026 it should not be considered an option. Gas need to be phased out, as should the last few oil and coal plants.
you people have been saying that for at least twenty years. In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe, sentiment is increasingly pro-nuke but your adage keeps things still. Of course yf you never start, you never finish.
> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.
> twenty years
When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.
Heartening to see someone talking about both the pros and cons. I find here and on, for example reddit or twitter, that people are unanimously in favour of Nuclear.
I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.
I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.
But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.
Not only this, but the benefit of SMR is based on the possibility that they can be mass-produced at low cost. Until that happens, the benefit doesn’t exist. Solar and batteries and wind have already passed that threshold, but cheap mass-produced SMRs don’t exist yet, even if someone can point to a couple of expensive, bespoke SMRs.
It doesn’t really matter if people on HN or Reddit are in favor of nuclear. At the end of the day, nuclear will get built if someone thinks the cost is worth it over the alternatives. The Internet fan club is mostly irrelevant.
That relies on imports of nuclear from France and isn't winter, its easy to say you don't need nuclear when you import a massive amount of others nuclear when the sun doesn't shine as much.
UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.
In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear.
As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.
In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.
> renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.
If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?
Yes. On the other hand nuclear is still single biggest source of power in EU, despite german phaseout)
There is still not a single country matching french emissions with ren alone if it doesnt have hydro/geothermal
Because there's a minimum demand you must be able to supply.
Here in Norway we get just about all our power from hydro, and we have a lot of pumped storage lakes which we use as "water batteries". However, eventually hydro relies on water falling from the sky.
Not long ago there had been some really dry years, and our storage was running at record lows. Had the subsequent year been dry we'd be in a real pickle.
Another aspect here is that production is one thing, but grid-scale renewable production rarely happens right next to the primary consumers, and has to be transported. And the grid might not be able to.
Again here in Norway, we had a situation not long ago where the price difference between the north of Norway and the south of Norway was 100x because the south struggled to produce while the north was overflowing, but there was insufficient capacity on the grid to send all the energy being produced up north down south.
> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.
First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.
It's not France but Engie, a french company with lots of gas business. New nuclear makes sense if it doesnt take 20y to build. Probably that's why US wants to partner with Korea/Japan
> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
As you explain in your next paragraph, none of Belgium's power plants are within their planned lifetime. Tihange 1, Doel 1 and 2 were operating on an extended service cycle for a decade before their shutdown. The two youngest reactors (Doel 4 and Tihange 3) surpassed their planned lifetime last year.
Not really sure what the relevance of this is, other than an argument against proliferation? I note that Pakistan has had a very rapid solar transition extremely recently.
> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
This is pretty much the summary of the whole discussion. Building new nuclear is a debate, seeing as renewables are dirt cheap it might or might not make sense to build new nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Shutting down existing nuclear capacity to replace it with Russian or Saudi or Qatari oil and gas though........
> We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.
The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.
That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.
Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.
thing is, when you look at what ABWR achieved, I wish we just thrown money at hitachi for a messmer like deployment in all EU countries that want nuclear
People said that 40 years ago and see where we are today, if people hadn't said that we would have a much cleaner world today. We might have that good and cheap batteries in 20 years, but also possible we wont have that. Would you really wanna bet our planets climate on your gut feeling that batteries will get that good?
Nuclear isn't an economically viable option for base load. Nuclear is the most expensive form of power generation. If there is excess supply, forcefully turning off renewables to buy electricity from nuclear would make the electricity needlessly expensive and kill the free market. In other words: it can only be a base load if we massively subsidize it and throw away free renewable electricity.
On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.
More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions.
With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).
But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.
One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.
The main benefit of battery storage is that it is trivially easy to decentralize, so if anything it will save money on grid upgrades. Same with solar: no need to upgrade long-distance transmission lines when production happens right next door to consumption.
Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable.
I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?
Solar is REALLY CHEAP.
And provided you keep existing central European gas heating infrastructure around for a while, you can basically just wait out the really good energy storage by using existing caverns you pre-fill with methane to keep your people from freezing.
If you're not curtailing a substantial fraction of PV yield (yearly) in central Europe that's a sign there way not enough capacity yet.
Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate.
We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.
I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amounts of fuel.
"PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)."
On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.
Good news: nuclear costs the same to run at max output as it does idle! No change in fuel costs.
Other good news: solar and wind is trivial to curtail at the press of a button. And very cheap to deploy far more than needed on a day with perfect conditions.
Thus the obvious solution is keep your nuclear running at full load 24x7 and vary the rate at which you feed solar and wind into the grid on those days of optimal production. Idle solar is nearly free, which is one of its largest benefits! This way you have enough solar and even short term battery to meet peak daytime demand even on relatively cloudy days, and don’t need to overbuild your nuclear fleet. But you still get seasonal energy storage in the form of extremely dense nuclear fuel.
Nuclear compliments renewables quite well if you remove the fake financial incentives of “I must be allowed to be paid dump every watt possible into the grid at all times even if not needed, but cannot be called on to produce more energy when required”. Solar produces the least valuable watts. Nuclear the most. So use the cheap stuff whenever possible but fill it in with the expensive reliable source when needed.
That or you’re just gonna be backing renewables with natural gas. Which is of course cheaper, but not all that green.
No not at all. You can vary reactor output, its generally as simple as pulling rods in or out. But they cannot just turn on and off. That takes a ton of time and effort.
It's generally uneconomical to throttle output once the plant is built. because the fuel is so cheap. The real cost is building the plant and decommissioning it.
Some reactor types are better at going up and down in power fast than others. It is definitely a solved problem, though, and has been for decades.
I remember, decades ago, that anti-nuclear activists (some of them were even university professors who ought to know better) argued that it was impossible while France had already been doing exactly that for decades (at the time).
There is a lot of disinformation about nuclear power that has been so widely and consistently disseminated that it has basically diffused into the background.
Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point.
New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.
It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.
> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.
I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
> I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.
> The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price.
They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.
Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.
The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.
For better or worse, we live in a highly capitalist world, and most western electricity is an open market. In this construct we only make decisions based on money.
The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the 30+ year lifetime… is not a popular move. It works only in single party states (eg china)
This is just the reality of economics and the world we live in
Power build outs are rarely driven by cost structures in a vacuum, or we'd all still be digging for coal. They're regularly driven by policy. It is a farce to think electricity choices are entirely capitalistic in nature, although maybe that's the case in some localized regions that probably (and regularly) hold other backwards policies in the name of "capitalism".
Where? In every country in the world? Because the world met something like 85% of the energy growth of 2025 with renewables. All regions of the world are seeing massive and accelerating renewables buildout. All forced by the state? Extraordinary claims require evidence.
The state's role is to help shape policies that might help people over a time horizon greater than a couple of years. Often, this means current people are supposed to subsidize the world for future generations. This used to be the societal handshake that let kids have better outcomes than their parents. Somewhere along the way, the average joe seems to have lost sight of that societal contract and is more focused on instant gratification and short term payback.
I agree in general, but you may as well be wishing for ponies and unicorns as for change here. Short term economics is the current dominant force.
Also consider that if you’re wrong about the progress of clean tech, and it closes the gaps on storage, the kids “better outcome” is going to be being locked into paying higher energy prices for a lot of their life. (Of course if you’re right it will help them)
Except they are mutually exclusive. Money spent by utility companies (or by taxpayers more broadly) to add new generation is not infinite, every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on other renewables.
> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime
I completely agree, but that's a massive "but". Belgium's nuclear power plants are mostly known for their reliability issues.
They are outdated 2nd-gen PWR reactors, designed by a company with no other nuclear experience, operating in some of the most densely populated areas of Europe. Keeping them operating long beyond their original design lifespan probably isn't the best idea - and it is almost a certainty that cleanup costs are going to be significantly higher than expected.
To me it sounds like Engie has struck an incredible deal by offloading a giant liability to the Belgian government.
reliability issues doesnt mean unsafe. Most EU units are gen2 and doing fine. Engie wants units shut down to push for new gas plants. If belgium keeps reactors on engie will suffer massively.
Decomissioning of npp is generally fine too. Isar2 decom in germany is going full speed
The "old car" analogy seems right, with the extra complication that the car is supplying a non-trivial chunk of the country's electricity and replacing it is not quick
> It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.
This is a different choice because the car analogy usually has "buy new one" as a term. Not having to build a new plant makes the choice far less controversial and also cheaper.
At a cost which could generate ~10 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for decades if invested in renewables.
Also remember that large parts of a nuclear plant is replaced over its operational life. Control systems, steam generators, turbines, generators, tubing, valves etc.
What stays is the outer shell and pressure vessel. A nuclear plant doesn't just "work" for 60 years. And there's no trouble designing renewables with a 60 year lifespan.
We just don't do it because spending money on getting their expected operational lifetimes from decades to 60+ years is betting on extremely uncertain future returns.
but for ren you need parallel gas firming. For nuclear you need some backup, but not fully parallel grid. Paid off npp can generate very cheaply, at 4-7ct/kwh
I don’t see the difference with nuclear power? Take California, a yearly baseload of 15 GW and peak load of 52 GW. What problem is even a ”baseload” of nuclear power solving?
But we should of course keep our existing fleet around as long as it is safe, needed and economical. In that order.
EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
France does not have a fully parallel nuclear power grid ready to step in when some other half isnt working. Germany has a fully parallel fossils firming grid on top of their ren deployments.
EDF isnt crying. It's just treated poorly even by looking at ARENH tax which was replaced with another one this year, while ren business gets CFD's and curtailment payments.
French nuclear fleet is extremely flexible, RTE data is public. In fact, due to ARENH law EDF was forced to subsidize competition because otherwise that competition would not exist.
Did we have rolling blackouts from electricity shortages during the energy crisis? No.
Was the electricity extremely expensive? Yes.
Reliable electricity has a certain worth. And that is vastly lower than what nuclear power needs when running at 100% 24/7 all year around.
And that is disregarding that EDF is already crying about renewables crater the earning potential of their existing nuclear fleet due to load following and increased maintenance costs. Let alone horrifyingly expensive new builds.
You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.
Going forward, so long as you have competent engineering, the biggest risk of hydro power will be your water sources effectively drying up. (That could be literal, or diversion to irrigation and other uses, or various combinations.)
But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.
Competent engineering isn't enough. You also need to never end up being in a war zone, and being able to commit to ongoing maintenance forever, or outlawing all construction far downstream (or finding the even more scarce type of locations where nobody wants to build downstream).
In "most" military situations, the enemy would not want the dam destroyed - because it's a valuable part of what they want to conquer, or doing so would flood their own supply lines, or whatever. And having a well-placed reservoir could save your butt if a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#City_firestorms got started.
To keep providing power to the grid, everything from coal to solar to nuclear needs "forever" maintenance. Yes, an unmaintained dam is a hazard. That can be neutralized with a strategic breach, or (some locations) letting the reservoir silt up. But high-rise buildings, flood-control dikes, and quite a few other things are also "people die if not properly maintained" hazards.
The issue is that many large dams will kill a huge number of people if they fail.
The Banqiao dam failure alone is the worst power plant failure in human history by several magnitudes.
Not many dams have the potential to kill that many, but there are thousands of damns with potential to make Chernobyl look like a minor little affair.
As for wars, you just need to go back to 2023 for the last major dam to be blown as part of war. It "only" made 60k people homeless and killed 200-300. Just last year another dam was hit by drones but didn't burst.
While "big dam failed, lots of people died" is a very clicky headline, you are overselling it.
Between the direct costs (at the plant), and still having a 1,000 sq. mile exclusion zone 40 years later, Chernobyl really isn't overshadowed by the potential of thousands of dams.
> With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.
By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.
The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.
The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".
Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:
If I remember well most radioactive waste by volume is not from nuclear energy production and the share that is very small would be drastically lower if places like the US didn't ban it's recycling. It's half life can also be drastically reduced.
I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?
There are natural concentrations of radionuclides on the planet as well, there was even one place where a spontaneous fission reaction took place (Oklo, Gabon) millions of years ago. If you dig a sufficiently deep hole in a massive slab of granite (like Scandinavia), you can store all the waste of mankind there for approximately eternity.
German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.
I think a better analogy would be an old gas boiler.
Worst case for a car is that you break down on the side of the road (or I guess the brake lines give out).
Worst case for an old unmaintained gas boiler is that your house explodes. I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.
So we should burn more gas for some decades because of the ceiling of a backup system in the nonnuclear part of the plant?
Is this like when Van der Straeten with obviously no ulterior motive whatsoever decided we needed to shut them down over the ultrasonic scanning of those vats that nobody else does?
Knowing this country we'll drain a shitload of money trough a bunch of committees. Do feasibility studies of nonsensical shit and then eventually fix and improve support of the ceiling anyway whilst the backup system keeps working ...but at 10 times to cost, in a slow way and a couple years later than one would expect.
Back in reality though coal and gas and oil actually kill many tens of thousands of people every year in Europe alone, while nuclear is demonstrably, objectively safer (HBO scaremongering series notwithstanding).
It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).
The EU also released a plan in the past week to accelerate the deployment of both nuclear and renewable energy. This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts.
> This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts.
It is not only the oil shock.
Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y.
The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.
The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'.
Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power.
The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.
> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.
While this is true, we don't have a good solution for long term energy storage. Even with plummeting costs and new technologies like sodium ion, batteries still only get you maybe ~12 hours of discharge. Pumped hydro give you longer storage, but there are limited places where you can build it. Unless geothermal becomes competitive, nuclear is still the best solution for carbon-free baseload.
There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons. This is a solution that has been proven for billions of years.
We can already capture solar energy at a much better energy efficiency than living beings. Making hydrocarbons with hydrogen extracted from water by electrolysis and concentrated carbon dioxide has acceptable efficiency and already almost one century ago it was possible to do this at a large scale where fossil oil was not available.
The step that has the least efficiency for now is concentrating the dilute carbon dioxide from air, which plants do much better.
There is no doubt that the global efficiency of such a process could have been greatly improved if only a small fraction of the resources allocated to much more frivolous goals had been allocated to this purpose.
While other alternatives are speculative, it is enough to look outside to see plenty of PoCs that this is feasible.
There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons - that'll cost you in the end much more than throwing some nuclear in
~12 hours storage + overbuilt solar + load shifing seems like it could probably be a complete solution for the vast majority of the world (everywhere that's vaguely close the equator).
But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
The only way you can make it work is state subsidies and/or forcing people to buy the more expensive nuke power. Which will be unpopular. But maybe you can sell it as a “grid backup fee” or something.
Storage is not just 'a problem', it doesn't exist and won't for many many decades.
The planned solution is hydrogen power plants, but no one wants to build them because the infrastructure, including electrolysers, is way too economically unfeasible.
Therefore, Germany is and will continue to be dependent on coal and gas, as these are the main producers every night. That's your 'grid backup fee' for you.
Long term storage is a problem. Nightly will be solved soon by batteries. California is well on the way, down to 25% fossil in 2025 from 45% in 2022, due to batteries. And they just keep getting built. Australia is on the same track.
If we have to burn some gas to cover the occasional long term weather issue, I’m ok with that , if we’re at 90+% decarbonized at that point it’s still a huge win.
May be base-load is not the best term but in case if batteries and other storages will run out during long cloudy stretch with weak winds nuclear will at least allow to power critical infrastructure. It’s bad that some consumers will loose power but less bad than total apocalypses when the storage is empty and you have no unintermittent power source in the grid.
for the foreseeable future that weather-anomoly backup role is going to be filled by gas. Spins up very fast, nearly zero marginal cost while sitting idle. And yes, it creates emissions, but if you're only using it for rare weather events, you're probably talking >5% of the supply annual total that produces emissions. Which is fine.
You probably have to look at the whole picture. Having part of the energy generation from nuclear probably makes the total cheaper than having no nuclear. Even if nuclear maybe is the most expensive.
Not having enough energy or having it cut off by a neighbour is very expensive.
That is not the case. Grid modelers always land on renewables being cheaper. Except for the cases when the studies start with "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".
That is not the case. There are LCOLC, LFSCOE and others which land on renewables being way more expensive. Even without your made up claim about "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".
Like the LFSCOE study is only using one source of renewables through all weather together with 2020 data on battery costs.
Which is why I linked a recent full system analysis. With Danish data so a vastly harder problem than a place with abundant solar. So tell me what they missed.
They even tilted the study heavily towards nuclear power and assumed that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive.
Still finding that renewables are vastly cheaper when it comes to meeting a real grid load.
The way China building new reactor is not typical.
Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification.
China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type.
If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.
They have a huge number of people that can specialize in many different things.
But their government has actually explained it. They purposely diversify any tech that doesn't have a clear winner, so in the long term a winner appears and they can focus on it.
They also, most importantly, don’t have to care if any of their reactors make economic sense. It is a single party state, and the incentive structure is very different.
And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper.
And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.
You actually have to build out intermittent renewables much faster than nuclear even for comparable generating capacity due to the much shorter lifetime of the equipment. See Little's Law
China recently signed up to the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear generation. In the same time period, worldwide electricity generation is predicted to rise by 50-100%, so the nuclear share will grow by 50% - 100%.
competitive is the wrong word. It does not have to compete on price or all in lifecycle cost, because its single party state that owns everything and cant be voted out. But i do agree that if they want it, they'll make it happen.
it's not a wrong word. Competitive - it's in the sesnse of what price can it sell to get profits, even if the price is set by govt. Even our existing fleet of npp is competitive on the market ->
But chinese nuclear is built faster and cheaper vs our units even during messmer in france. So their price guarantee is lower too. Probably similar to what distributed solar got there of 0.4y/kwh in the past. Albeit subsidies for solar were cut last year to stimulate a healthier growth
> The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.
Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.
German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.
>German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century,
The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.
Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me
phaseout was adopted by redgreens in 2000 and continued by cdu in 2011. THat's a fact
German solar was just not competitive - labor, electricity and coal were more expensive in germany. Solar industry was showing problems even before cfd's reduction (which applied to chinese ones too but they endured since costs were lower)
because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public.
The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).
> It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.
Now that is a lie. The anti-nuclear push came from the Greens in the 90s. Conservatives just used it for a quick win once that policy became very popular in Germany.
And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.
germany has highest prices in eu without any nuclear. It spent on eeg double the cost of entire french fleet. and that fleet wasnt even very cheap looking at what china does now.
Germany also needs gas firming per fraunhofer ise report since bess is not sufficient
> And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.
It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice.
Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation.
A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view.
Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore.
In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent.
(1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation.
(2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around.
(3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent.
Like often: there is no silver bullet.
The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1].
I think it is actually the pro nuke case that often has misconceptions of how a modern grid works, repeating terms like “base load” etc
Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
What happens in days where renewables can't produce enough energy? Or the evenings where we don't have enough batteries (all evenings so far and for the next decade at least)? You can call it base load or whatever you want, but that energy is coming either from hydro, nuclear or a carbon-based source. And those carbons are hard to come by these days, so even if nuclear power is expensive, at least it is reliable.
It takes a decade at least for any new nuclear starting today to come online in the west. In that decade you’ve built an awful lot of batteries for the same amount of money.
No one wants to bet $10s of billions of nuke capex against the relentless progress of batteries and other tech over the next 10 years, and then the 30+ years of plant operations. It’s a suckers bet , so the only ones who can take it are nation states.
So now the discussion is not about whether base load is a thing or not, it is that you firmly believe that batteries are the answer to everything.
First it should be said that this thread is primarily about decomissioning existing nuclear power plants. It makes enormous sense to keep operating those plants until we have a world like the one you describe, regardless of how much newer plants would cost.
But more importantly, your assumptions about the future are very optimistic. I'm sure the Germans also thought they were being very smart when they decided that nuke capex was not worth it because gas was so cheap and easily available, and then now we are finding out that this decision crippled their economy because it caused a dependency. In my opinion throwing all your chips into a technology that requires materials and production capacity you don't have, and in some cases doesn't even exist yet, is a real sucker's bet. All your rosy scenarios would fall apart in one second if China decides to stop selling batteries to you.
given that we dont have nukes, and we wont for 10 years even if we started today, and we arent going to start them because theyre economic disasters...
in the medium term its going to be batteries + solar/wind + gas backups for rare weather events. If we get the total annual use of gas down to a very achievable 10% we're still massively winning climate wise. California is getting there, 45% gas in 2022, 25% gas in 2025, and adding batteries at massively increasing rate. Full coverage of an average night is within sight, using gas just for shortfalls.
We can hopefully transition the last peaking gas backup usage to something else in the long term (hydrogen? SMRs if they ever exist?) but it isnt _that_ important in the grand arc of saving the climate.
> Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y.
Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1]
> The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical.
Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost.
But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one.
In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks.
A lot has changed since the 2023 data in your link.
Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth.
> Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
That is just economics.
The intermittent nature of renewable means that overcapacity is structurally required to arrive to match partially the demand.
As an example, Germany has > 100GW of Solar installed capacity for a country where the average power demand is around ~60GW *total*.
Overcapacity means that the price of electricity naturally goes to zero (or even to negative) as soon as the sun shine. And this is very visible on the EU electricity market currently [1].
It is (obviously) terrible for the profitability of the means of production and it is not sustainable: No investor sane of mind would put money on the table for a system that sell at negative price when it produces...
To compensate that, most EU countries created the CfDs (Contract for difference) system. A minimum price is guaranteed by contract to the investor and the State pay the difference when the price are too low. The UK did it (and it costs billions) [2], France did it (and it costs billions) [3] and Germany is doing it [4].
So we are subsidizing and using public money to create an artificial profitability on top of an industry that we know is not profitable due to overcapacity caused by bad public policies.
Considering that this overcapacity is also reducing the profitability of nuclear powerplants in the first place (because nuclear is CAPEX based).
The pain is triple: The final consumer pays (1) the cost of the Grid restructuring for renewable (2) the cost of the Cfds to maintain the system alive due to overcapacity (3) the additional €/MWh to the now reduced profitability of the historical production means.
So yes, at the end, the price increase.
And it is what we see currently everywhere in Europe: Electricity price are increasing continuously even if Solar/Wind LCOE is lower than ever.
The CfDs pay either party the difference. Their effect is to make the cost of that electricity guaranteed, it's actually a remarkably cost effective mechanism.
The subsidy is that different technologies secure a premium on the CfD. For a UK solar farm the strike price most recently was £65 per MWh. In case you were wondering no, nobody will run a gas power plant for £65 per MWh, even before Trump's war spiked price 50-100%
Yes, the offshore wind farms are significantly more expensive than a solar CfD, their strike prices were close to £100 and for that much money (adjusting for inflation) you could definitely get interest from gas plants, especially before the war - but now we're into the weeds about platform diversity. A Middle East war seems like a particularly stupid time to insist we shouldn't desire diversity...
Because of how summer works, this "But solar energy is expensive, gas is cheaper" is going to take a break for a few months because it will seem very silly, but it won't go far, expect it back in autumn.
For wind this makes a little bit of sense, but for solar "whenever I want to deliver" is largely once per day as regular as clockwork for several hours and that means you can bridge with BESS.
You can already see it in charts, initially BESS shifts some of that peak midday sun energy to evening usage where it's worth more to us, but gradually competition drives down that evening price and so the BESS cuts deep into the night chasing those higher prices. It's most exaggerated in Australia today, where the reason the power is relatively cheap when you wake up before dawn isn't that somehow coal is less expensive at night - it is because much of that is solar power from yesterday and if they don't sell it to you now for whatever price they can get they've wasted a whole cycle, 'cos the sun, with free power, is coming up like it or not.
Couldn't ask for better unintended outcomes from that Iran war than to fast track deployment of renewable and nuclear energy.
Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds.
Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...
Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.
The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
Saying gas has relatively little emissions reminds me of the joke german car manufacturers are making about their latest combustion cars using relatively little fuel ('hocheffizienzverbrenner'). It's marginal gains. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-... Gas is 200gCO2e/kWh, plain old diesel is 260. Better than nothing but not going to make a big dent
Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)
All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.
Interesting fact: Belgium's neighbor Germany has commenced a search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste indefinitely in the 1970s. Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one.
All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.
The search is not expected to conclude before 2040 at the very earliest.
Yep. The anti-nuclear group's narrative is always that "but no one wants that in their backyard..." but my god if only most voters realize that the waste from their whole state/country can literally fit in one single backyard.
That’s only the high-level radioactive waste. There is also the intermediate-level with long life radioactive waste that is problematic. Overall you’re right, it’s much less of a concern than many people seem to think, but no point in downplaying it.
Yup, nuclear waste also includes all the hazmat suits and apparatus used at the site, all the fabrics and plastics that have built up sufficient levels of radiation, fluids and chemicals that can’t be treated, vehicles and equipment, irradiated concrete and structural materials…
Is that the real location or a mere simulation of size? If it's the former I wonder why close to the water? I'd understand if it was a nuclear reactor...maybe for cooling purposes but only for storing the waste? I guess it's just a size simulation, although if it were reality maybe the though is: Oceans are big enough to dilute the whole thing in case it breaks...as a watersports and ocean fan that makes me sad
How much of that waste is needed for a dirty bomb?
Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
Me neither.
BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive? The prices for consumers were still raised
> Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
That's a very dumb point actually, without nuclear Ukraine would be in a much tougher situation energy wise. They're getting their shit fucked regardless, and they seemingly have 15 active reactors producing energy right now, if russians wanted to blow them up they would be long gone.
> BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive?
So what? Energy is a national security matter, electricity is a service, subsidies are fine. Btw these prices are inflated because of European wide electricity schemes (or scams, depending on how you want to see it)
Even if germany got free, unlimited and non polluting electricity right now they'd need 50+ years to make up for how much pollution they released compared to france since ww2
The French government have been able to safely store actual nuclear weapons without incident, so I'm sure they can do just fine with a few barrels of nuclear waste.
Yes obviously. Its a trivial amount of waste generated over 60 years, less than the size of a football field. I'm pretty sure a football field can be guarded.
most of Ukraine's ren infra is destroyed or conquered by russia. Zaporozhie is in cold shutdown. Thousands died from dam collapse caused by russia.
Waste is irrelevant for bombs due to parasitic isotopes. You clearly have zero idea about the topic.
France pays no subsidies(yet, epr2 is another topic). In fact EDF was forced to pay a tax till this year called arenh to subsidize competition. This year that tax was replaced by another tax. Many read the law wrongly about 70eur. It's not that EDF will get guaranteed CFD. It's that EDF will be forced to pay EXTRA tax IF it sells above that limit.
French prices dropped both in 2025 and now in 2026. French households have lower prices vs german ones per eurostat.
Basically all your statements are nonsense antinuclear rambling
Interesting fact: Finland just built one, for €1 billion.
How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US:
Some German state governments even made this explicit, stating that they would not allow a repository to be designated until the German nuclear exit was finalized in their official coalition agreements.
Another nice little trick was changing the language to require the "best possible" site, rather than a suitable one. Sounds innocuous, but anyone with a bit of experience in algorithms know that in theory, this actually makes the task impossible, because how can you definitively prove that there isn't an even better site that you haven't looked at yet?
In practice it has made the process of finding a site incredibly lengthy, difficult and expensive. It doesn't help that the BASE, the Germany federal agency for nuclear waste has been completely taken over by the Green Party, so there is no interest in actually finding a site, and they spend almost their entire budget every year on spreading anti-nuclear propaganda.
> if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The german government and institutions were (are?) full of pro gas (pro russian/russian tied) people who spend decades in the government before bouncing of to russia to work for petro companies. It's hard enough when you try, so imagine how hard it is if you don't even try
> Gerhard Schröder, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, has worked extensively for Russian state-owned energy companies since leaving office.
Isn't it rumored that many of the activists who lobbied (successfully) for Germany to shut down all of their nuclear power plants were being unwittingly funded by Russian interests?
Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine.
It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse, and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste, plus a large amount of contaminated salt mine material, sitting above ground right where it started.
I reckon they would rather not want a repeat of this.
1. Does it matter where the radioactive material comes from? It still represents the ability of storing nuclear waste.
2. Never intended, but still used as such [0]
4. Seems like most experts disagree here
asse was never intended to be final repository. It was experimental repository without a plan to extract the waste if their experiment goes sideways. Onkalo does account for such factors, hence the name- final repository
Most of the waste in asse is from medical and research sectors
This sounds like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. There are certain types of reactors that can reuse uranium to further reduce its half life to around 6000 years so the one million years legal requirement is an unreasonable target.
Any material that is still radioactive after a hundred years wasn’t that deadly to begin with. There is a strong link between ”hotness” and short half-lifes, fast-decaying extra spicy isotopes are..fast-decaying
Actually, those materials can be MUCH more radioactive in the beginning compared to 'conventional' nuclear waste, the half-life is just so short that you can let them sit for a couple of decades and then deal with it.
IIR, those "certain types of reactors" and their supporting infrastructure are (1) very handy for producing weapons-grade nuclear material, and (2) extremely difficult to operate (historically) without sundry environmental disasters.
Which problems make them considerably hotter - politically - than no-reuse type reactors.
Most of the "danger" from nuclear waste passes in a few years as the most radioactive isotopes decay quickly (which is obvious when you think about it).
Interestingly the US/UK/USSR dumped loads of nuclear waste in the ocean in the 1950s-70s and I recently read that there was basically no trace detectable of any of it.
If you have more info on that, I'd be interested. They're currently trying to keep it geologically stable and far away from any water that might disperse it, but then dispersion by just putting tiny tiny quantities per m³ of sea water sounds... almost too easy to be true tbh. Would be interesting to read about. (Surely they've looked into this and found that stable geology was the better solution, rather than that it's just more palatable to the public!)
And do you know, even if there's no trace today (sufficient dilution), if it also didn't have an impact on the ecosystem in the area at the time?
On ash and slag heaps that are incredibly toxic to their surroundings. Current research suggests that living in the vicinity of such a heap has an immense effect on cancer rates.
Dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years is pure fearmongering. There are loads of chemicals, metals and other nasty stuff that are dangerous forever and also need to be stored somewhere safely, indefinitely.
I personally live close to a commercial Asbestos dump (an old mine) and absolutely nobody cares about it. It's so unimportant it doesn't even have a Wikipedia article.
Yet the second radioactive waste is concerned (even if it's just old rubble) everybody seems to lose their minds and refuses to even think rational.
Why would it need to be safe for "hundreds of thousands of years" in the first place? Do we not think we would find some other use of nuclear waste within the next decades/centuries, and if not, just send it to space?
Rejecting nuclear waste site is an easy and almost cost-free way of garnering browny points with the part of your electorate that has been indoctrinated into massive radiophobia.
It is almost cost-free because in reality, nuclear waste is so low in quantity and so easy/unproblematic to store "temporarily" that it just isn't a real problem. Politicians know this. So they can play this game.
And once pressure builds enough you dig a hole in the ground like you always could have and like the Fins just did and start storing.
I was referring to Germany and I am not aware, that a concept such as "swing states" exists there. Is declaring a suitable place for nuclear waste an issue in the USA as well?
Everyone focuses on the safety of power production, and I totally get that and think it's important, but the mining and enrichment of uranium should also be considered. Nuclear "disasters" aren't just 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. There are plenty of other disasters that aren't power plants.
Growing up in the USA, my home town was contaminated with uranium, thorium, and radium due to a nearby uranium processing plant that later became a superfund site. It was in the soil, the water, and sometimes even the air. I knew far too many people who've died of cancers, and I, like many from that area, have thyroid issues from exposure.
There are a small number of such sites in the US. One that fits closely with this description is a legacy of the Manhattan Project: Coldwater Creek, MO. The Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined a lot of uranium, and waste handling was about what you would expect given the prerogatives of the 1940's and the Cold War. They carried on refining for power plants after WW2.
Obviously, fuel refining hasn't just carried on like that, in the US and Europe at least. But it's one of many handy cudgels to use whenever folks get excited about nuclear.
It carried on until at least 1989, and the effects were present majorly until around 2000, and the superfund site was completed in 2006. So, like, pretty darn recent on the scale of a human lifetime.
Going in the opposite historical direction is the other side of that ledger. The actual plant in question was shut down in 1957. The AEC stepped in years earlier to triage the operation, after actually establishing formal exposure limits in 1950, which didn't exist prior to that point. Before that, the company itself had hired staff to control waste and detect contamination. They had to build their own survey equipment because there were no commercial tools available. The worst of the actual contamination was actually incurred prior to that; 1942-1945, when the gloves were entirely off building bombs.
The lessons have been learned. It's tragic and shameful history, but not terribly relevant to modern practice in nuclear power.
I see that here a viewpoint is widely reflected that we can substitute nuclear with solar/wind. And maybe today it could be feasible in certain areas albeit not always economical. What this viewpoint misses, is the fact that we will need an increasingly more power, as we always did, and I am certain that if we would have a chance to go 100 years into the future, power demand will be so high that our current abilities to supply power via nuclear and solar/wind combined will not be enough to cover the demand.
Nuclear energy is pure economic madness in a context where wind and solar power are generating a surplus of electricity. Today, May 1, electricity prices in Europe are in some cases at the technical minimum of minus €500/MWh.
Thermal power generation, which is difficult to control, is completely unnecessary in an environment where we have negative electricity prices practically every day from March to October. In Europe, we need rapidly controllable energy sources—obviously more storage capacity.
Due to the many hours during which electricity prices are close to zero, the economically viable full-load hours of a nuclear power plant are reduced to barely 3,000 hours per year, effectively tripling the real levelized cost of electricity (LOCE). In addition to the high costs of nuclear power plants, there is also the enormous expense incurred by the government for military and police security at the facilities.
Since the government prioritizes nuclear power, this leads to heavily manipulated electricity prices, with homeowners with solar panels being among the biggest losers, as they are required to feed electricity into the grid but are effectively paid the full negative prices (usually via weighted average pricing methods)
I think I'm super pro nuclear everything now. See the new Russian built nuclear plant in Bangladesh. Crazy populated country currently not able to import adequate fossil fuels due to the strait conflict.
Nuclear energy is a God send if managed with extreme care.
I love that you mention 'extreme care'. I was enthralled with this look inside a plant and the operations involved. Truly a sight to behold. And extreme care is not an overstatement.
I'm always wondering how long it will take for popular sentiment to finally shift. So many years of things like Blinky the fish in the Simpsons really did a number on our shared consciousness.
I think the series of actual nuclear disasters from the 1950s to 2000s - plus the fear of a hot nuclear war in the ‘70s - had more impact on the collective consciousness than The Simpsons.
It is not lunacy. Polish professor Krzysztof Meissner (https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~meissner/home.html) in one of the interviews called the whole process of turning off nuclear power plants as result "of the pressure of the other forces".
It was well crafted plan developed by Germany and Russia. According to this plan Germany suppose to be the hub for gas imported from Russia over Baltic Pipe - man in the middle for all UE countries. War on the Ukraine and Baltic Pipe being destroyed by "unknown people" makes this plan obsolete.
If you think that's lunacy, let me add some extra info on top of it: It was the green party that lead the closure, and then replaced it with gas power plants.
If we want decarbonation, nuclear power is inevitable until today. We can't rely on renewables for stable power for the masses. Other possible solutions for the future: hydrogen with it's problems and eFuels that need x4 energy to produce. But we said we have enough cheap solar.
There's a very dark scenario where for some reason or another (all out nuclear war or asteroid hit) sunlight is blocked, in which case having stable base load energy production from nuclear would be very useful. I know this is an unlikely scenario and hopefully it never happens, but it's always good to think about tail risks like these.
If sunlight is blocked the amount of people who die due to starvation from crop failures will probably more than make up for the difference in lost solar power energy. That is to say, we'll have much larger issues than a stable power grid to contend with.
If we directed worldwide LED production all into artificial light for farming, and grew whatever was most calorie-efficient, I think we could theoretically feed every human alive if the sun was blocked out tomorrow.
Obviously that isn't what would happen. The poor would starve whilst the rich still fed cows to eat steak.
It doesn't necessarily take a full blockage of sunlight. Extreme weather conditions that create multi week collapse in solar outputs is enough to create grid stress, if one is totally dependent on solar and 24hr batteries.
Volcanic winters are far more frequent than catastrophic asteroid blasts. Disregarding a volcanic winter possibility and its impact is like disregarding the possibility of a pandemic.
True. But if you're working in public policy in a vaguely-democratic country, and trying to get anything useful done - then the public feels vastly more familiar with "giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs" than with volcanic winters. So, just like "Zombie Apocalypse (wink)" disaster prep - you go with a "close enough" scenario which lets you achieve some actual preparation.
Surely you must realize that the fuel for nuclear power plants is not more freely available than sunlight. In the event of "all out nuclear war or asteroid hit", you're not getting those shipments from Kazakhstan.
I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil fuels.
IIRC those old Belgian reactors got in the way of more renewables for some time. They provided a very cheap base load that seemed hard to modulate, which meant that even cheap renewables couldn't really compete on price. If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
> If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
It's not new, it's that PWRs have to be built and operated with that capability (load following), which most nations didn't bother with until pretty recently because it does have a cost in complexity & efficiency. But France has done it that way pretty much the entire time.
> Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
Nukes with load following aren't peakers: PWRs can modulate output by 2~5%/minute (depending on their exact design and operating mode) between 30 and 100%. They're not reactive enough to compensate for wind, although they can work with the daily and seasonal patterns of solar pretty well.
The replacement for peakers are mostly batteries (hydro and pumped hydro where that's available but usually where available it's already done)
Depending on the country's situation, you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright. But the transition is non-negotiable at this point.
> you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright
The EU has north of €1 trillion into new gas infrastructure. That's €1 trillion of commercial interests with a vested interest in negotiating the non-negotiable.
Using fossil fuels for transition is fine, particularly if it's replacing coal with natural gas. But building LNG terminals and installing gas turbines because ding dongs in Dusseldorf got scared of nukes a quarter of a continent away is a great way to raise the continent's energy prices, volatility and carbon continent.
Compared to other countries I've lived in, Belgium doesn't do too bad of a job in promoting 'green energy'. Although I've not lived there for some years, they used to subsidize things like solar panels on roofs (at least when my parents installed them 20-ish years ago). And there are 'green energy' companies as far as I'm aware, so you don't have to stick with the larger energy providers.
That is about production. The story that you don't get from these graphs is that Belgium is highly dependent on imported energy because the production is just too low.
For years, even leading up to starting the decommission of the power plants, Engie has been saying it's literally impossible to reverse the decision. And now that we're 2 years into the decommission, suddenly it is possible after all.
How is that possible? And what are the consequences?
They said it was impossible for them to reverse the decision. Nothing has changed; they won’t be in charge of that. The state will.
A significant reason of the “impossibility” of reversing the decision is the regulations around nuclear. Take the problem of micro tears in the concrete. Engie could have maintained the concrete. Because the plant was scheduled for decommission, they did not. So there will be small tears in the concrete. The law does not allow those small tears. Repairing the concrete now is too expensive.
The plant will be owned by the state so now the state has two options: (1) invest a truckload of money to repair the concrete or (2) change the law to allow small tears which have virtually no security consequences anyway.
We all know that the state will choose option (2) but there would be far more opposition if they did so while the plant were owned by a private company that is making profit rather than owned by the state which is operating at a deficit.
Bad news: according to the discussions here on HN it appears that there is no consensus on what the good mix of renewable/nuclear is. Therefore us, citizens, will be manipulated by politics.
Decommissioning always seemed odd absent either specific dangers or higher costs of operating than renewables. For new construction of course the costs shift dramatically, but existing plants that can continue to run would seem to provide exactly the legroom that enables more rapid expansion of renewables. Less time spent backfilling and exposure to both market and geopolitical forces of other energy sources, eg when there are disruptions of the sort going on now.
I‘m very interested in the financials of this decision. Nuclear plants are designed for base loads but are way more expensive than solar and wind energy. The losses will increase the costs of energy.
It's cheap because we are offsetting the cost if its ultimate pollution onto future generations. We do this for everything else, and nuclear is our best chance for a liveable planet - if we don't want to make the slightest effort to give up on our comfort. But we have the belief that humanity will be able to manage nuclear waste for the next 100k years while we don't know how the pyramids were built... and it was only 3k years ago.
Nuclear energy is one of the few technologies that have big tent support. How many things can we get both the Rs and Ds to support? Build build build!!
Unfortunately that support doesn’t seem to extend to making the process take less than decades and cost less than gazillions due to overregulation so there’s no incentive to build.
Lip service support. Nukes are too expensive and too slow to build. in the 10 years it would take to get one producing power from today, they’ll be even more cost obsolete by the relentless progress of renewables and battery. When leaders see the bill, they baulk.
No Belgiums goverment is gonna investigate if it is worth to take them over for free from engie and run then for longer and maybe reopen some, but the study first needs to show if it is viable.
This doesn't seem like a terribly great idea, for several reasons. Belgium is nearly bankrupt, with a government deficit that the EU is already giving us grief for, in spite of some of the highest tax rates in the world. That same government hasn't exactly managed any of its semi-public companies particularly well: the national telco is for shit, postal service is nearly bankrupt, railways are mismanaged and underfunded, etc.
The reactors in question have been shut down by virtue of being too old (1974, 1975, 1982, 1985). Some of them have cracks in the reactor vessels. Maintenance has been lacking. There was also a case of sabotage which was never resolved.
Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
Belgium’s government might not be in its best shape. But still the logical conclusion in my humble opinion isn’t “let’s shutting down the one power source that actually works.”
Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.
At some point reality has to trump ideology.
Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.
If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.
>Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.
> That same government hasn't exactly managed any of its semi-public companies particularly well: the national telco is for shit, postal service is nearly bankrupt, railways are mismanaged and underfunded, etc.
In fairness, it's not the same gov that nuked the public service than the one in power now. But on the flip side, the selloff of public services to private sector was a success and achieved the stated goals: Destroy it from the inside and use that as an excuse for more liberalization.
Belgium is rated investment grade by all three agencies [1]. The cost to insure its debt implies a <2% chance of default in the next 5 years [2], lower than America [3]; the IMF assesses its "overall risk of sovereign stress...as moderate" [4].
Bankrupt is a politically loaded term, but they have very high debt and taxes, political gridlock (it is very divided among French and Flemish linguistic lines, plus all the other traditional left/right polarization), and it is all but impossible to make reforms. IIRC there was no sitting government for 500 days at some point. It's also got all the classic problems of an aging population.
Belgium is a curious country that was formed via historical quirks around religion (many Flemish/Dutch speaking catholics not wanting to be part of protestant Netherlands, but that is a gross oversimplification and the history is very complex - read up on wikipedia if curious). Historically the Flemish were the poorer part of the country, but after deindustrialization the story flipped as most of the industry was in the French parts. The result is bitterness that holds the whole country back.
They asked if it was bankrupt, not for a feel good or balanced essay.
That being said, Belgium can be and is wonderful. I'm a geopolitical nerd and I loved touring the WW1 battlefields.
Ghent is one of my favourite mid-sized cities in the world! It's got some of the best gothic architecture around, an amazing and creative beer scene, and is not overrun with tourists the way Bruges is. I was there for a conference (I'm Canadian) with a colleague who grew up in Paris. He literally said "If I knew Belgium had this, I would have visited far more often". Belgium gets a bad rap because it got so hammered in both world wars and if you just visit Brussels you're left with the impression that it has little history outside of one preserved tourist block.
Debt to GDP ratio of 107%, only Greece, Italy, and France are worse. Even Spain and Portugal are better! It is frightening how many member states are over 80% when they are supposed to be at 60% or better.
It's fine to shit on things but I have service almost everywhere and I take the train often with usually few issues aside from works on the tracks. Let's not blow up issues, it takes away from what we should focus on.
Well... there are worse places than Belgium for sure, and as a foreign citizen who has been living in Belgium for about a decade I think it's a reasonably well functioning country for west European standards, but I wouldn't use either SNCB/NMBS as an acceptable example as I'm not sure I have even had a single train be on time in the last few years (well I don't take the train much anymore for obvious reasons, but I still have to do it a few times a year) and cell service is absolutely not as good as it should be for such a small and dense country.
And my experience is only with Flanders which is basically one large city, I can only imagine how it is in the less populated areas of Wallonia or Limburg.
But I absolutely think that nuclear is a good option for such a small and dense country. Taking over the plants as they are nearly decommissioned is a stupid move though, but you can't expect anything sensible from this government.
That's fair, I have plenty of international coworkers and I think (and from what I hear from them), that Belgium is decently welcoming, at least in large cities.
I do take the train quite often as I said, anything on large axes is usually fine (Brussels - Charleroi, Brussels - Antwerp, etc) but yeah smaller lines are usually struggling some more.
I wish we had more ambitious governments in general, not only in terms of energy but also in the (bio)tech scene, which used to be touted as our great strength (we do have a lot of pharma companies though).
This is bad news because those are some of the most risky plants operating in Western Europe. Many, many safety issues over the years, quite a few of which were waved off from being properly fixed because they were going to be decommissioned anyway. Now whoever owns them will have to do all that back maintenance first. Or not...
Both Doel and Tihange have a long, long list of issues.
Oh, and good chance that in the summer months (when demand is pretty high, especially in the South of France) they may have to shut down again because of a lack of cooling capacity. France was ahead of the game in the 70's, but should have invested a lot more than they did since then. That they installed more than they needed also didn't help, especially not because the energy produced is sold on the open market at a net loss just to keep the reactors operating.
And last but not least: they have an ever growing waste problem.
The cost of which (besides the maintenance costs mentioned above) has not been accounted for in the electricity pricing. If they did, they'd be running at an even higher loss. Probably the next generation will be presented the bill for that.
Everytime this comes up, HN is becoming more and more an X-like echo chamber: Touting nukes as the solution to a spike-load problem in a densely populated area, and the waste disposal as a solved problem (by externalizing the cost).
Meanwhile the prices dropped further than ever, 20kW peak with 20kWh batteries for EUR 10k, which provides >95% self-sufficiency in a 2p Household and lets you sell more than 80% of the yield (though prices are already very low when the sun is shining). And this is without an EV yet. Please enlighten me: Why are we still having these discussions? I don't see why that wouldn't scale in the US as well, what's the status with flexible energy pricing?
If anything, we need to build fast, flexible power plants, but their lobby groups are well oiled already without our support.
No, it was a deliberate strategy from the green party that were very anti-nuclear. They replaced it with gas power plants. And if you think this is a joke, no it isn't.
> "This government chooses safe, affordable, and sustainable energy. With less dependence on fossil imports and more control over our own supply," he wrote on X.
Really? So nuclear power plants are suddenly the new "clean" hype? Because if Belgium is stating "more control over our own supply", can we mention a little something THAT BELGIUM HAS TO IMPORT URANIUM? So the "own supply" here is ... what exactly? Besides, I question the "nuclear is now clean" campaign that Leyen is doing. She is the ultimate lobbyist. It is also strange how the EU says "russian energy is bad", but then is silent when uranium is imported into the EU from Russia. We are here being lied to by these lobbyists/politicians. And a few make a lot of money, at the expense of the great majority. Why were renewables barely strategically expanded? China did so. Why are democracies so incompetent nowadays?
I found this source about Belgium imports of uranium [1]. The partner "World" is about 50% of the total. These data are from 2023.
Maybe something changed in 2024 because [2] "Belgian nuclear plants no longer run on uranium from Russia". It ends with "Engie does not disclose how many different contracts were concluded and with which suppliers, but does say it obtained a sufficient geographical spread of its supply, Belga News Agency reports." So who knows.
The most important question is: who the hell decided to do such a stupid thing and in the name of what. When we have an answer maybe we can look on other ideas the same people figured out and also rethink them.
Say, sorting thrash. EU new idea is to make Europeans to sort thrash into 12 separate beans. So what that all trash goes through sorting process before being dumped, and there are very modern and efficient sorting robots that use AI, etc. that can do sorting much better than any human.
So, maybe, just maybe it is better to invest more into new technologies, instead of turning Europeans into wastes sorting machines.
And this is only one more example where EU countries are doing something plain idiotic, nevertheless, like in the great Buñuel's movie "The Exterminating Angel", nobody is able to admit that there is something stupid going on and it is enough to open the doors and walk away.
> most important question is: who the hell decided to do such a stupid thing and in the name of what
Short answer: Russians and Germans. The former had influence in the latter. And the latter gained a measure of economic command over the continent. (With its export and energy model under shock, that influence is near its post-unification nadir right now.)
I'm glossing over anti-nuclear national politics, as well as the genuine fiscal pressure of capex-heavy power sources like nukes (versus opex-heavy ones like gas). But broadly speaking, take Russian influence in Germany out of the picture, or have one other large fiscally responsible economy going into the Eurozone crisis, and I doubt this would have happened.
Sorting machines are in fact used in these countries. But most of the trash separating efforts were introduced many decades ago, long before the capabilities of modern AI systems.
I would be more worried about the fact that a lot of the garbage that first gets separated ends up getting burned anyway because recycling is not even possible in a lot of cases.
Where I live (Belgium) waste collectors pick up "rest" waste in relatively expensive trash bags weekly, PMD (plastic/metal/drink cartons) weekly, compostable waste every two weeks, cardboard monthly, and glass also monthly. Certain things we have to bring ourselves to a collection point (batteries) or recycling park where everything gets sorted even more specifically. I tend to go to the recycling park once every two or three months, the rest gets collected at home.
So the stuff they collect doesn't need 12 different kinds of bags/bins, and the (financial) incentives are correctly aligned. I think it's a good system and pretty convenient, but I'd wish they recycle & process the waste even better afterwards. But the hardest part – getting the population on board – seems to be well-established.
Recycling is difficult, some materials are relatively easy (aluminium cans, steel), some not so much (plastics f.e. tend to degrade, some materials are energy intensive to recover). Contaminants are a major issue that still need more public awareness. But we're going in the right direction.
Lets hope we see less policy which is at a very small step back basically: "we're competing to punch ourselves in the face the hardest" in the international arena.
I am surprised that a community like HN where a large percentage consists of developers is so positive about a nuclear power plant.
One bug could lead to severe damage to everything and everyone around a nuclear power plant. We see those kind of bugs on the front page daily.
In my opinion it is absolutely irresponsible to start them up in the first. I have seen too much to actually trust in people always getting their shit right.
Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, and opposition to nuclear from environmentalist orgs should be viewed as a massive historical mistake as it set us back decades in moving the needle on carbon emissions.
The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.
The engineering side might be a theoretically solved problem, anybody looking at belgium's crumbling nuclear powerplants can help but feeling slightly nervous!
I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens.
On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.
All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.
> the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem.
Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.
- https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...
Nuclear waste is small and solid
That would depend on the category of the waste:
- High level waste - Transuranic waste - Low level waste
where high level waste comes in two classes: spent fuel and reprocessing waste, the latter being liquid (possibly not green).
https://ieer.org/resource/classroom/classifications-nuclear-...
You can just bury it deep in a mountain
Belgium is notably lacking in mountains, which is why they now start building a site for low level nucleat waste storage, adding to the cost. For high level nuclear waste they have to build deep underground, waterproof, bomb-proof facilities at high expense:
https://www.nirasondraf.be/
Just to highlight: in contrast with fossil fuels, at least nuclear waste is something we can capture, creating a storage problem.
Given the actual build times of nuclear plants in Europe, vs the renewables build out rate, we need solar and wind to tide us over for a decade or more before the nuclear plants come on line.
Solar and wind cannot do that. We'll need oil and gas to tide us over for that decade or more.
Solar and wind are scaling much faster than gas and oil right now. After the recent Iran war I think it would be insane to rely on new oil or gas. Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.
>Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.
Don't talk about Americans that way!
Some gas, but we can reduce it by an order of magnitude. Either way nuclear is not coming online quickly.
> and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.
More of a political problem, from what I hear. This is, if anything, worse: simply not knowing is a research problem, but knowing how to do it and yet having an influential group saying "no because reasons" could be genuinely insurmountable.
The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.
It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!
They have done. The Three Mile Island accident happened when it was being operated by Navy vets [1]. Simple training isn’t enough.
During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response:
> Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.
So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour.
[1] https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-lea...
How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents?
Vs. coal?
Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.)
-----
Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here:
> Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.
Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?
Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?
Per TWh, nuclear kills fewer people than solar, mostly because roofing is dangerous.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
That's almost certainly just an artifact of old data, and I typed that before realizing your URL has the year 2011 in it.
A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh.
Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't updated for 6 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Purity isn’t really important. We need to decarbonise as much of our energy grid as we can as quickly as possible since cumulative carbon emissions matter.
Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with new ones? Possibly, since the existing power generation is clean so there is less rush.
Does spending the effort on building new nuclear outweigh the opportunity costs for others? Given new nuclear plants in Europe are taking 20 years to build I have strong doubts. It seems absolutely clear that wind/solar + batteries can get most countries to 80-90% clean energy faster and at lower cost. And after that happens nuclear seems a very awkward addition to the mix since it is not cost effective to run when it’s power is only needed 10-20% of the time.
> Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?
Yes.
(I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)
If it was viable it would have happened already. We have a massive oversupply of solar and wind, particularly on the west coast. Generation is the easy part.
We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
> If it was viable it would have happened already.
It is happening, all over the world, with a persistent and rapid growth curve.
> We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
Better cut those tariffs on cheap Chinese batteries (and aluminium for the transmission).
Not that anyone would build one in the current political reality, but China produces enough aluminium that it would be viable to make a genuinely planet-spanning 1Ω power grid connecting your midwinter nights to someone else's midsummer days.
Would it be fair to say that because the US Navy is not running it as a for-profit power generation that would help. Like every accident seems to be a list of cost saving shortcuts being responsible
Chernobyl was a state owned and operated facility.
Chernobyl was supposed to be an economically viable means of generating electricity. Comparing a tiny billion-dollar submarine reactor to a power plant simply doesn't make any sense.
The reactors on aircraft carriers have a similar thermal output to many commercial power reactors. The ones on submarines are around a third of that size, about the size of SMRs like NuScale VOYGR or the Xe-100 reactors proposed to be built at Long Mott in Texas.
Chernobyl was supposed to turn low enrichment uranium into plutonium for Soviet bombs. They made design choices that compromised safety to make plutonium production more efficient.
> It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
But submarine/ship reactors are tiny compared with commercial reactors and 5+ times more expensive (although its hard to break out the true lifetime cost of the reactor from the submarine/ship).
Even modern commercial SMR designs (a few by companies that make Submarine reactors) are likely to cost a couple of times more per MW than large existing reactors
BTW - The US Navy has lost 2 nuclear submarines, which are still being periodically monitored - page 7 https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/NT-25-1%2...
> perfect nuclear safety record.
It’s a very semantic claim.
They have lost nuclear submarines (USS Thresher), lost nuclear missiles, depth charges, torpedos and bombs. They have crashed nuclear ships and submarines.
Yeah, they haven’t had a nuclear reactor leak (that we know of).
Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.
They're expensive because of, arguably, over regulation. The are not inherently expensive, we've just declared them so. The next response will be "all that regulation is needed" but it's arguably that the over regulation is killing people by the unintended consequences of keeping things like coal viable, etc...
I meant, the particular way the Navy does it might be too expensive for some reason. Do you know anything about that?
Right. There are countries that aren't particularly wealthy and rely on nuclear power just because they don't have reliable fossil fuel sources.
The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to.
Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development.
Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.
Thats the issue with those AGR reactors the brits have IIRC, perfect (or close enough) safety record, super complex and not economical to run.
There's a video of Alvin Weinberg explainng why. It's the smaller scale that allows those safety guarantees.
https://youtu.be/iW8yuyk3Ugw?si=MEJpGpX8LQuGn7iv
Powerprice in Germany today minus 500€/MWh. Nuclear power is economic madness in an environment where we see negative electricity prices practically every day.
What happens when there is wide bad weather for renewables? ( for a range of days from 1 - several) Where would the power needed come from?
If, it was to be from some kind of storage, Extra capacity would be needed to allow recharging of the storage
Wind and solar power are remarkably stable in Europe. Last year, the average weekly electricity output was 14.0TWh; not a single week fell below 10.5 TWh.
Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.
Bad weather often comes with wind or rain.
Obviously it’s possible for solar, hydro and wind farms to stop producing, but that’s what storage is for.
Not really. Storage is most used for short term stabilization and alleviating congestion in certain transmission nodes. In most markets its used to provide capacity under contract with utilities to meet resource adequacy requirements which don’t consider long term regional complete loss of renewables. Longer term storage that can provide power to, say, a whole region during a multi-day storm is basically an uneconomic fantasy that rational developers have no real incentive to build, because it would be a huge overbuild most of the time, and accordingly undercompensated for said overbuild. Developers are building batteries that are just the right size for a capacity contract & providing ancillary services (voltage support, frequency regulation, etc) plus price arbitrage, which are deployed for only minutes to a few hours. There are some 8 hour duration batteries out there, but they are not common.
If Germany power prices are so low, why are Germans power bills so high ? Maybe you are cherry picking spot/marginal price and not netting the subsides ?
higher prices means more incentives to be energy efficient
Fun fact, "friends of the earth" was originally funded by Robert Anderson, CEO of Atlantic Richfield oil, to oppose nuclear.
https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/
What about the opposition from the not exactly environmentalist orgs?
> "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible." — "Nuclear Follies". Forbes Magazine. 1985.
The fossil fuel industries and their shills? Probably not lamenting the delay in moving way from fossil fuels the same way the environmental groups ought to be.
Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
Russia gets blamed for funding every single dissenting voice in most major democracies. And I suspect it’s often true.
They also fund major parts of the establishment - just look at UK politics and House of Lords.
There are plenty that are anti nuclear and don’t get Russian funding.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions
I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infrequent and so we have very hard time estimating and thinking about probabilities of them happening.
Personally I think that keeping existing reactors running is better than the alternatives, but I'm not so sure about building up new reactors compared to building more predictable green energy sources.
Burning coal in coal power plants causes more deaths each year in Europe than the total deaths caused by Chernobyl accident (4000-8000).
"The health burden of European CPP emission-induced PM2.5, estimated with the Global Exposure Mortality Model, amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349938542_Disease_b...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...
But only nuclear accidents get the media attention, because they are big and infreqeunt. Similar to deaths caused by aircraft crashes vs deaths caused by car crashes.
I live in Germany and dead wild animals are still burned instead of eaten because of radioactive contamination
Serious question, when has there been a serious nuclear accident? Fukushima was caused by a natural disaster that killed far more people than the nuclear failure did. Chernobyl was pure communist stupidity. This level of incompetence would never happen in a well functioning country. So that leaves Three Mile island?
Meanwhile coal kills millions each year (mostly the old and children).
And what are these predictable green alternatives? Only hydro is reliable and is heavily restricted by geo. We’d need massive breakthroughs in battery technology to make solar and wind reliable in most of the world (by population).
Look up historical weather patterns days with no sun and no wind, you need massive, massive amounts of energy storage.
The category of "well functioning country" is unstable. It takes two elections to make it dysfunctional.
A country can go from well functioning to disasterous shit show in 8 years.
Renewable generation is not the hard part. Renewable transmission and storage is the hard part. Its so hard, in fact, that building very expensive nuke is still much cheaper and more attainable.
That’s not true. The true capture price of nuclear is much higher https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture...
That link is pretty silly:
> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).
The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?
It does the oppose of this:
> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)
Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.
And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
"carbon emissions" LOL. Just lookup what's happening In Tuapse, and in other war zones. And we are penalising some poor bugger burning wood to warm his house at winter ...
Funnily (or tragically?) enough, lots of environmentalists here in Italy are opposing solar and wind projects too. I find that crazy.
There is a lot of nuance to these situations.
Destroying a whole valley for hydro is something locals could easily oppose. Similar with huge solar farms. You can be a proponent of a technology but anti a particular project.
NIMBY != Nuance
Reducing every personal reason to oppose every specific project to "NIMBY" is not nuance.
It follows Europe's energy policies (declaring nuclear climate-friendly). France is ahead of the US when it comes to civil nuclear plants strategy.
Nonsense, the reluctance of governments to reduce carbon emissions has been driven by the reluctance for entrenched industries to give up their gravy train. There are many ways for power to be produced with lower carbon emissions, it's absolutely not a binary situation at all.
What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of the argument being forced into these positions, its artificial and contrary to the desires of people who want action on climate change who support nuclear and don't.
I would be very happy if people who oppose nuclear would abstain from supporting the fossil fuel industry. When EU voted on green technology, one side voted for nuclear to be defined as green, while the other side voted for natural gas to be given the green status.
Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or supporting a combination of renewables and fossil fueled power plants (which sometimes goes under the name of reserve energy and other times as thermal power plants). Usually it is combined with some future hope that green hydrogen will replace that natural gas at some time in the distant future.
We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Opposition to the fossil fuel industry should be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants, and a plan to phase out and decommission existing ones. It is difficult to respect people who claim to believing in a climate crisis but then stand there with a shovel when the next gas peaker plant is being built, then arguing how bad nuclear is to combat the climate crisis.
Yep, I have been saying for decades that I agree on almost everything wirh the local Green Party, _except_ the anti-nuclear stuff. Very emotional, very relatable but very dumb.
The anti-nuclear stuff seems to pair up quite well with "you need to start importing a lot of natural gas", which makes me think it is simply an agenda pushed by a certain rather large country to the east.
This is now. But the seeds were sown much earlier.
You don't have to wonder, because it is the agenda that you're thinking about and also the agenda of fossil fuel companies.
But we now have two lessons that teach us that being anti-nuclear was stupid: the Ukraine war and the current US administration's adventure in the Gulf.
The anti-nuclear area, at least in Western Europe, had historically a very high correlation with those who held sympathies for a certain very large nuclear power who would have strategically benefited from an anti-nuke sentiment that would avoid another nuclear power's weapon deployment in EU bases. But I'm sure it is a coincidence.
I live close to the Belgian border. Some time ago there was concern about Belgian reactors (they are old and their concrete was fracturing) and they were distributing iodine pills. Keeping them open even longer just sounds peak Belgium.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind
Not at all. Some people are depopulationists.
I've heard an opinion that having less people leads to a technological regression, because some things to create/research are so expensive that they become profitable and functioning only at the world's scale
E.g. China is too small to have an isolated closed market for a competitive and efficient semiconductors manufactoring
No it is just that capitalism is a cancer. Nobody has actually cracked the code on how capitalism can work without perpetual growth.
Leaders are looking at Japan and they are panicking. Fascists are demanding more white babies.
FYI, socialism also cannot work without infinite growth.
And yet somehow those people are never advocating for leading by example.
well, regardless of what you think, they are not
Here we go again ...
Did those plants suddenly became manageable? No.
Did those plants suddenly became cheap? No.
Do we suddenly have a solution for the waste? No.
Have new uranium deposits suddenly been discovered? No.
Why are they unmanageable?
They are only expensive because externalities of other solutions are not captures or are subsidised. Wind and solar are expensive if battery storage is included in most of the world.
Waste is mostly a solved problem. Much more solved that waste management for coal plants in any case (whom also produce a lot of radioactive waste in addition to producing tons and tons of co2)
We have more than enough uranium. Currently only a small fraction is economically mineable but we have played that game before with oil.
Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear is like being a firefighter and opposing the use of water to extinguish fires.
That seems to be deliberately obtuse.
It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires.
Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river right next to the house fire we are fighting?
so only do things that yield results fast.
The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.
> Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.
So this myth is what you need to tell yourself we need nuclear?
Even with Danish insolation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
This paper is very heavily biased against nuclear power and is only valid for Denmark
It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE
It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW
80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors.
It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of... "Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases"
They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed.
It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain.
The authors are editors of the journal this was published in.
Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot.
This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.
Hinkley Point C and EDF just got a 7% interest rate to finish the project. That is after nearly 20 years of project work and 10 years of construction, so about all risk should already have been found.
Like I said. The costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C.
Imaginary cheap and fast to build nuclear power is amazing. It also does not exist. In South Korea those costs are from before the corruption scandal.
In China they are barely building nuclear power. It peaked at 4.7% of their grid mix in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. For every plan they release the nuclear portion shrinks and is pushed further into the future.
Then I just see you trying to handwave the study away. The entire point is literally to prove that Denmark does not need to rely on its neighbors, and still get a cheaper result.
And like I said. Denmark is the hard case due to the winter sun being awful. As soon as you go south in latitude the problem becomes vastly easier. We’re talking like 99% of the worlds population having more sunlight than Denmark.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind,
I wonder how many people actually believe that we are in good shape so mankind should have no development whatsoever. Just stay as is or even go back decades just to preserve the environment. The first world need more energy because we're greedy and etc.
>Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind
Yes hello, these are both my opinions, do I exist for you or not ;)? You can say that we are in a climate crisis AND be anti-nuclear.
Sure, someone can be both concerned about climate change and oppose nuclear power. But it's a largely self-defeating stance: nuclear is the only non-intermittent geographically independent form of clean energy. Dams and geothermal are geographically constrained. Solar and wind are intermittent, as well as varying in output depending on location.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions.
But they're not entitled to their own facts.
There's not much trust in anyone who says nuclear is completely safe, "we fixed it now," etc. That shouldn't be the motto. But fossil fuel is already killing more people, coal puts more radioactive uranium dust into the air even, and that's before getting into climate change.
I think people who are anti-nuclear and environmentalist are wrong, but it's not an insane opinion to have. There's no fact you can point to that says nuclear is safer than renewables. I just don't see how the world is realistically going to switch to renewables. We've already seen oil companies use those as distractions from nuclear.
Nothing man-made is "completely safe". No such thing.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production we have.
By far.
And that includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.
People overestimate the danger from nuclear energy by incredible amounts.
That doesn't mean that close exposure to a running nuclear reactor won't kill you in short order. That's why we build these things with shielding. A lot of other things will kill you in short order if exposed to them: cars/trains in motion, for example.
The facts are that all large nuclear plants require a stable water supply, and climate change directly threatens that.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...
To be clear, all thermal plants - be they nuclear, fossil fuel, biofuel, etc. - require water for cooling. But this doesn't need to be freshwater, many nuclear plants are cooled with seawater. In non-costal arid areas, nuclear plants can be cooled with sewer water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.
Small thing, dams are not carbon neutral. Depending on location, the plant life they inundate no longer absorbs carbon and, worse yet, the rotting plant life emits methane and other not-good gasses.
Yes, and pouring concrete also emits carbon dioxide. And building wind turbines requires fossil fuel emissions. And the truck driving solar panels out to the solar farm emits CO2, etc. But at the end of the day, the carbon intensity of dams, nuclear, wind, etc. relative to fossil fuels is near zero: https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electricity-emissions-around...
Nuclear is also in practice significantly geographically dependent.
Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power station named "Bankside". They burned tonnes of oil right in the heart of London until the 1980s to make electricity. People weren't happy about it, but they designed, built, and operated the station because although any fool can see there's toxic smoke pouring out of it into your city, electricity is pretty useful.
In practice nuclear power stations get built somewhere with abundant cheap water, far from population centres yet easily connected to the grid. England has more places to put a Nuke than say, a Hydro dam, but they are not, as you've suggested, "geographically independent", unlike say solar PV which doesn't even stop you grazing animals on the land or parking vehicles or whatever else you might want to do.
What you're describing is substantially different than, say, attempting to build a dam in a flat place with no rivers.
"It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here"
Nuclear power is definitely more geographically independent than solar. There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe: https://www.altestore.com/pages/solar-insolation-map-for-the...
The only thing a nuclear plant - any thermal plant for that matter - requires is cooling. But that doesn't need to be freshwater. It can be seawater or waste-water, like the Palo Verde plant.
> There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe
That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.
No, you cannot just build a larger array.
That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.
I do not think anyone is suggesting a pure solar solution.
Your reply to me quite explicitly suggested that countries in far northern latitudes just build a proportionally larger array:
> That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.
I was replying to the assertion that the difference in power density at different latitudes was a deal breaker.
Why do so many nuclear fans try to suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear? It's very odd.
Compare:
If you believe COVID exists you need to use hydroxychloroquine.
It makes you sound like you don't even believe in the problem you are proposing an (unpopular with experts) solution for.
> suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear
That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying.
What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.
> unpopular with experts
How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
> How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
Fundamentally, unless you know the Navy's answer and can apply it to override those lawsuits, it doesn't matter: politics can't be wished away just because the wrong people have power.
> The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.
Increasingly not; as with all things, you have to aim for where the ball will be rather than where it is, and for this topic that implies that for any given proposed new gas (or nuclear) plant you have to ask about the alternatives, which also include "how fast you we build energy storage, and what would it cost?"
That's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Naval reactors look cheap, because the cost is for the reactor in the narrow sense. Other major costs, such as the containment building and countermeasures against natural disasters and terrorist attacks, are included in the costs for the rest of the ship.
You are accusing environmental organizations of not believing in climate change as a debating tactic. That is uncharitable! But also just weird.
Just leave that part out, it only detracts from your message.
"I think environmental orgs should support nuclear as it is low carbon and generally aligned with their goals. I'm disappointed that many of their members seem to be unaware of the true record on plant safety, particularly compared with coal"
Adding anything about them not believing in climate change makes it sound like you are repeating talking points you picked up from fossil fuel funded propagandists, who to this day are pushing that message.
(Your opinions on nuclear also reveal that media diet, but in a much more subtle way).
> How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
Pretending it's all the fault of the bad environmentalists is a bit ridiculous. A nuclear powerplant is a tricky thing to create. A lot of projects had delay, often not due to any environmentalists or anti-nuclear people, but because the parts failed their internal control, which demonstrates that it is tricky to build. A nuclear powerplant is a huge provider that cannot be turned online for usually ~10 years, so you can also understand the complexity and the uncertainty: we are not able to predict the price of electricity or what will the electricity grid will look like in 2-3 years, and yet they need to predict it for a given region in 10 years.
And some environmental laws are frivolous or turned out the be incorrect (the same way some people who at the time were against some environmental laws turned out to be incorrect years later), but some laws are just legitimate and it is simply not fair to pretend that the opinions of some people should just be discarded because you have a different opinion. I myself don't always agree with some law, sometimes anti-nuclear, sometimes pro-nuclear, but a given fraction of these laws will exist, it is just the reality. It's like saying "communism would work if it was not for people who don't like communism": people who don't like communism will always exist and if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic.
> if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic
And yet, our world contains multiple cases where it is the case that nuclear is being built today, at reasonable costs, and with great success. The two examples I've given in this thread are China and the US Navy. Some others include Japan and South Korea, both of which are notably not dictatorships.
What's frustrating in this discussion is policy and management decisions made 50 years ago are assumed to be the steady-state immutable reality in western countries.
My argument is not that nuclear is the best economic play. It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.
What? Who is saying that nuclear cannot be successful, this has nothing to do with my comment. Did you read one sentence without understanding the meaning?
It is simple: some environmental laws are a legitimate ask from some people, whether you or I agree with the ask itself. It has nothing to do with the nuclear, it is about your argument framing the existence of environmental laws as the reason it does not work. If nuclear cannot work well in some countries because in some countries there are people who ask legitimate things, the problem is not these people, the problem is that the nuclear model is not adapted to the reality of these countries.
But again, as I've said, it is not even the case: the difficulties with nuclear are not limited to "some environmentalist".
> It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.
That does not make sense. If you want to write a software that does something, you don't just spinning up Linux, Windows, Mac, and start writing code in Java, C++, python, typescript, erlang, ... at the same time. What you do is: you write a decision matrix, score it, and _choose one strategy_.
In the context of the climate crisis, the strategy can mix different technologies ... or not. The fact that it does not does not mean that this particular strategy is worse than another. In particular, budgets are obviously limited, so spending X$ on project A may lead to a successful project A while spending X/2$ on project A and X/2$ project B may lead to both projects A and B failing. (and if you don't think it's true, just increase the number N of projects until X/N$ is ridiculously too small to do anything. According to your sentence, you said you should be spinning up every options all at once as aggressively as you can, so you cannot do only N-1 projects, you need to split your money amongst the N projects).
When it comes to climate change, I was 100% pro-nuclear 20 years ago. Now, in some countries, it is too often a money pit (not because of regulation or the bad environmentalists) that is wasting money that could have helped the climate. If you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should spend your time, money and energy to real solutions instead of achieving nothing by trying to do everything all at once without a plan.
And yet...
https://www.ajupress.com/view/20250819103850607
The analogy breaks down because hydroxychloroquine does not effectively treat Covid. Whereas nuclear power is carbon free (to be pedantic, it's carbon intensity is on par with that of most renewables).
Renewables can give us large amounts of energy but when you need reliable output 24/7/356 you can choose thermal, gas, coal or nuclear. Not all countries have access to thermal energy so if you want to become carbon neutral nuclear is the only valid choice for that aspect.
Or just batteries? Throw on a gas turbine emergency reserve running your favorite fossil or green fuel for well, the emergencies. We’re talking irrelevant emissions.
I truly can’t comprehend where this massive boner for new built nuclear power comes from. Sci-fi?
> Why do so many nuclear fans try to suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear? It's very odd.
You’re putting the answer you want to hear (“because they are nuclear fans”) in the question, making it extremely obvious but then stating it is “odd”, as if the answer wasn’t straight forward.
Disingenuous – is the word describing this, I believe.
Also you need to check your concepts. “Climate change” is what we want to prevent (more like catastrophe, really, by now).
There's two very different types of reactors: the already-paid-for long-run reactor that's still going, and then on-paper-not-yet-constructed reactor in a high cost of living nation.
Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables, only makes sense in a few geographic locations. Not all, or even most!
Even keeping old reactors running gets super expensive as they get past their designed lifetimes, and very often doesn't make sense.
The engineering is indeed already done for electricity, and storage and renewables are cheap and getting cheaper. Nuclear is at best staying the same high cost, and getting more expensive is these large construction projects rise due to Baumol's cost disease.
Opposing more nuclear in the US in the 1980s wasn't fully irrational, the US managerial class have way overbuilt nuclear and we didn't need all the electricity. Then we didn't have much growth in
The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living, it's the anti-EV and anti-battery advocates, and to some degree it's retrofitting the wide variety of highly-cost-sensitive industries, such as steel or fertilizer or concrete, to use carbon neutral methods. Or maybe sustainable aviation fuel.
Nuclear had it's chance to be a big contributor to climate action back in the mid 2000s and 2010s, it failed that challenge in Georgia at Vogtle, in South Carolnia at Summer, in the UK at Hinkley Point C, in France in Flamanville, and in Finland an Olkiluoto. Every one of those failures is a very good reason for a climate activist to oppose nuclear.
> The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living
All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle.
Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more.
If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon.
If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.
what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.
We should do both, aggressively! That's exactly the point I'm making. It's always been shocking to me how this discussion immediately goes to a fixed-pie "solar OR nuclear" discussion. You build both! They solve different problems very well.
I guess I agree with your “should” in a world where we have infinite dollars to spend. Sadly we refuse to treat it as existential, so the dollars we have to spend are roughly fixed. In that world we live today any dollar spent on nuclear for 10 years from now isn’t spent on renewables today, so it costs us more emissions.
When we can't even get offshore wind to be built because the current Trump administration is setting the precedent of paying hundreds of million dollars to cancel good, money saving projects, while funneling reactor approval to corrupt companies that don't have the engineering chops to deliver on their promises, an "all of the above strategy" doesn't really work.
Sticking with well proven technologies, such as batteries and solar which are deployed at massive scale by profit oriented investors on the Texas grid, makes far more sense than wasting precious few dollars and approvals on pie-in-the-sky nuclear projects that never meet their promises and might not even finish construction.
Building nuclear is hard, risky, expensive, and slow, in the very best cases. It's a shitty technology unless you have zero renewable resources in your country.
If you place the climate crisis into the context of every other potential crisis then yeah, the world is weighing up nuclear proliferation against climate change, both of which are potential extinction risks but not all that likely in the short term.
I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.
>Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables
This is not the cheaper option.
You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
> You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power.
This is a complete myth, somebody pulled "a week" out of their butt a decade ago, it gets repeated a ton, but it's not based on reality or studies or numbers. This is a consistent problem with online nuclear advocacy: there's no basis for the numbers, nobody calculates anything, and if they bother to do a calculation they only calculate the upper bound and then assert "see look a big number" and say that's a proof of impossibility.
What event requires a week of storage? Nobody can name one! When has there been a week with zero generation? No one can name it! The assumptions that one has to make up in order to make a "week" even sound plausible are in turn themselves so implausible.
> There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
Imagining there's a fixed battery capacity is a very short sighted view, it's growing by 10x every year.
So let's take your "week" as the measure, even though it's wrong. If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.
> If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.
The 2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025 amounts to a bit under 3 days of California's average 750GWh daily electricity consumption, not 4 days. And more broadly, I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible.
To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs.
Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves.
Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
> I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible.
It was pointing out that the comment making off-the-wall requirements of battery storage was already not aware of the order of magnitude of existing batteries.
You don't know the exact
> To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs.
What's your implication here? If you are trying to say this means that batteries can never scale, it's certainly not making that point. Even the distinction between grid and EVs is immaterial, because where do EVs get their power? The grid. That's all flexible demand, that can be shifted a huge amount.
> Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves.
The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries.
Unlike oil, we are in the early days of discovery for battery materials, because we never looked for them before. Just recently fracking in the southeast quarter of the US turned out to be producing a fair amount of lithium, which nobody had bothered to even investigate before.
Batteries are a new technology, not an old technology like oil, and the dynamics are far different. One can't simply recycle reasoning that applies in oil without examining the first princiles.
> Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
"Even if" is a preposterous thing to say, of course it will!
EVs are higher value destination for grid batteries, so more batteries will go towards that right now. And as long as there might be "diversion" as you say, there is need for more production capacity, and production capacity will expand.
> The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries.
Such as? Is your proposal that we use lead acid batteries instead of lithium based batteries? Those have much shorter lifespans, which drives up cost. Sodium batteries? 9 GWh of sodium batteries were shipped in 2025.
To be blunt, you're just hand waving away the massive disparity in scale between battery production and the storage demands of a predominantly wind and solar grid.
Or an iron air. Or flow battery. Or sodium. Or all manner of different lithium chemistries across NCA, NMC, LFP and so on.
We’re seeing the Cambrian explosion of battery technology. From early BEVs utilizing the highest performance to even deliver a viable product to a plethora of options depending on your use case.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/25/google-to-deploy-worl...
Wasting trillions of tax money and decades of opportunity cost on new built nuclear handouts is extremely shortsighted.
How about we don't bother with either fission or wind and solar? Just build fusion plants and be done with it. If we're comfortable betting trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects on the hopes that a heretofore unproven technology will pan out, let's be more ambitious than batteries!
Of course, there's no guarantee that any of those fission ideas will actually pan out. Likewise with these battery chemistries. Investing loads of money into intermittent sources with just the hope that some future battery chemistry will solve storage at grid scale is not what I'd call a wise plan.
You don't seem to understand that batteries are a well proven technology being deployed on a massive scale today. This is not news, this is old:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
Anybody who over the past few decades has been saying that we could not deploy batteries on a massive scale needs to reevaluate their bad assumptions, because they are wrong, and moreover we should not trust any of their current assessments until they can reconcile what they got wrong. The tech curves of batteries have been clear for decades, this tech development should not have been unexpected.
Your link reports that the USA added 15 GW of battery storage in 2025. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of battery storage at grid scale. Let's actually express the scale in terms of numbers relative to our electricity demand:
* The USA uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day
* The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day.
* Global battery production in 2025 was ~1,600 GWh, of which 300 GWh was used for grid storage [1].
At our present production rates, it'll take 100 years to provision 12 hours worth of storage at 300 GWh per year. Batter production is set to increase to 6.8 TWh per year [2], but only 12% of that is predicted to go to grid storage, or about 800 GWh per year. Even at 2035 rates, we're looking at 37 years of production to fill 12 hours of storage (12 hour of electricity storage for 2025 electricity demand rates, which will be higher in 2035).
Yes, batteries are being deployed at a massive scale today. But electricity generation is on an even more massive scale that dwarfs battery production rates.
1. https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/global-lithium-...
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...
> Your link reports that the USA added 15 GW of battery storage in 2025. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of battery storage at grid scale.
Mmmhmm, grid scale deployment is not grid scale now? You are redefining terms, which means you don't work in the field and are not at all familiar with the field, yet you make broad and sweep proclamations of incredulity that have no factual backing, and we are supposed to trust you purely on judgement?
You cite last year's deployment rate, without noting a massive increase in planned deployments for this year. You neglect to cite the year before it, which was much smaller. You looking at a puck headed to the goal, under a continuous accelerant force, and saying, "the puck is here, therefore it will never hit the goal." That's a ridiculous thing to assert, because you don't hold that afactual standard for any other technology, just batteries, yet seem to understand that all other technologies have continually changing amounts of producition.
BTW, your link is "demand" and disagrees with most other sources.
> At our present production rates
That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.
If nuclear has 0 GW new this year, how do you think it could ever get to 2GW/year, right?
You have no reasons for these strange beliefs that defy data and trends, you just assert incredulity. It's completely irrational.
Again, you have to put the scale of battery production in the context of electricity demand. 300 GWh of battery storage being provisioned sounds like a lot until you put it in the context of 60,000 GWh of electricity consumed daily. There's a reason why proponents of battery grid storage never actually put their numbers in the context of electricity consumption.
I'm not expecting readers to trust me purely on judgement, I'm expecting them to do the math and realize that battery storage deployment and electricity demand are multiple orders of magnitude off, even with the projected increases in battery projection.
> That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.
Again, I did cite the projected production figures for 2035. Did you miss that part?
> heretofore unproven technology
Battery technology seems like a proven technology to me?
We've also performed fusion in a lab. That doesn't mean it'll be viable in production at scale.
What's the annual production figures for iron air batteries, flow batteries, etc.? Sodium batteries are at 9 GWh delivered in 2025. Google tells me that flow battery capacity is 500 MWh to 1 GWh, but doesn't provide any figures on actual production deliveries (production capacity is not the same as actual delivered production). There are no iron air battery facilities currently in production, with the earliest plant trying to open in 2028 with 500 MWh per year annual production.
None of your suggestions are remotely close to operating at grid scale, and there is zero guarantee that any of them will prove more feasible than lithium based battery chemistry.
This sort of moving the goal posts is not convincing at all. First it was "batteries will never scale to grid usage" now it's "early days of production of a brand new chemistry are only at 9GWh". You seem to think that is somehow an indictment of the technology rather than a statement of an amazingly quick scale up, with no signs of stopping. That's just bad judgement to say "a rapidly scaling tech is at GWh scale even without much demand therefore it's useless".
Meanwhile, the statement that "fusion has been achieved in a lab" is optimism and wishful thinking beyond words. What energy return did that get? What was the cost? When will there be GE of generation, mic less basic safety engineering?
Those who advocate against the shipping reality of batteries, and moreover assume that they will get more expensive, are not using numerical thinking and are not thinking like scientists, engineers, or technologists. They are merely rooting for a tech like a sports team. Nuclear does not need any more fans, it needs engineers and scientists that can achieve some sort of radical breakthrough that makes it a desirable tech.
> First it was "batteries will never scale to grid usage"
You're inventing a straw man that's easier for you to attack.
No goalposts are being moved. My point was, and still is, that batteries do not presently scale sufficiently to make a predominantly wind and solar grid feasible, and our current projections even a decade out do not see them scale to that point either.
We don't know if some breakthrough in battery chemistry will make it scale. Could such a breakthrough transpire? Sure. But will it happen? We don't know. And thus we should not gamble massive infrastructure spending on the assumption that this breakthrough will happen.
At this point, nuclear fusion is a safer bet than grid scale battery backup.
> By 2031 or 2032, we’re going to have 20-30TWh of battery production
What’s the source on this? I just googled it, and the sources I see are saying 5TWh by 2036, with increasing supply chain risks over time…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-ca...
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
Projection from past performance. There are two types of predictions when it comes to solar and storage: 1) naive, exponential, and correct, or 2) expert, with unexplained fudge factors, and wrong. What you'll see published in PR releases will be from "experts". Even Jenny Chase at Bloomberg NEF points out how "experts" always underestimate performance, and then goes and does it herself with her own projections.
I heard the projection on a podcast from a battery builder (maybe Form Energy's CEO?) in 2021 that we were at 200-300 GWh in 2021, and would have 2-3 TWh 2026, and 20-30 TWh in 2031. His "naive" prediction was correct, all the other projections have been flat wrong.
Another example, sci fi author Ramez Naam in 2020 reviewed his prior projections from 2011 and 2015 here:
https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-...
naw, we'll just build enough battery to cover the nights and then use gas as emergency backup for any rare wonky weather events. that could easily get us to 90+% clean, which would be absolutely amazing. Constant base load only supply like nukes are economically obsolete. On a modern grid you need a rapid response backup. Which is gas for now, and hopefully we'll come up with something to replace that later.
Building enough battery to cover the night is still 20,000 to 30,000 GWh. For comparison, global annual battery output in 2025 was 2,200 GWh. Of which only ~ 300GWh went to grid storage.
Even just diurnal storage for a completely renewable grid is a truly enormous amount of storage.
Given a 10-15 year lifetime of the batteries, with BEVs being flexible storage consumers that seems well within reach in a couple of years?
We’re seeing the reshaping of the entire global energy system. Either we jump on the train or get run over.
More like a few decades, if ever. Battery production is estimated to reach 6.8 TWh per year in 2035 [1]. But only 12% of this is expected to go to battery storage systems, yielding just 800 GWh. 12 hours of storage worldwide at current electricity demand is 30,000 GWh. And by 2035, electricity demand is going to be more than that, as transportation and industry is increasingly electrified and migrated off of fossil fuels.
To reiterate, this is just for 12 hours of storage. Seasonal fluctuations can depress renewable generation for days or even weeks.
1. https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...
wind runs through the night, and so does hydro and existing nuclear. So lets say, 15,000gwh that needs shifting? Still a big number, but...
BESS increased 45% y/y in 2025, and is looking like higher growth than that in 2026 already ~60% (1). Im optimistic that the mckinsey conservative linear estimates of growth are missing the s-curve of scaling new tech, just like they did for solar. They only have to be wrong by a little y/y and we get to 1000ghw a year by 2030 (note, they released a more recent study that pulled 800gwh/year in to closer to 2030 [2], the previous study was already too conservative) . At 1twh a year we're seriously chipping away at emissions, we're done in 15 years if nothing else changes (which of course it will, both on the demand and supply side). Still, thats actually incredible!
1 https://www.energy-storage.news/over-17gwh-of-bess-deployed-... 2 https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/week-in-charts/ba...
Wind doesn't cut out at night, but it also experiences long periods of low production: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46617 It is unquestionably an intermittent source that would require overprovisioning and large amounts of storage to even out periods of underproduction.
The projections for battery growth might be off, sure. But it's also possible the growth is a little bit under the projections year over year, and then we're looking at much less battery production five years. You're invoking uncertainty, but only considering it in one direction.
Large geographic networks like the EU really help to smooth that variance out. Anyway, on average is all that really matters here. Remember, I’m not saying we can only have batteries and if they run out we’re in the dark. We’ll use gas to fill the gaps, and emit emissions for it. All that matters is the total emissions for the year.
Yes, im explicitly considering it only in one direction, as I said I’m optimistic. I have seen plenty of data, my own & others reasoning that leads me to believe in the optimistic case here.
EDIT: look at the graph in that second McKinsey link. Look at the step for 2024, and then the massive step for 2025. And then they project much tinier steps for 26 and beyond? That’s obviously nonsense. And we can tell it’s nonsense as the number for 26 are coming in at another 60% increase y/y, and all reports point to huge increases in deployed capacity this year. And they have it at like 20%. Cmon, that’s nonsense.
That link is a graph of battery electric storage, specifically. Mckinsey's projections have battery production continuing to accelerate, but the lion's share of the output dedicated to electric vehicles rather than grid storage: https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...
Rather than just proclaiming the projection as "nonsense" it'd be a lot more productive if you shared an alternate projection and explained why it's methods are superior.
We of course can’t scale the grid portion of battery production as fast, or even faster than what we’ve done for BEVs?
And this also disregards that second life automotive batteries are incredibly hot on the market. All those TWh of batteries will become available for stationary use when the cars are scrapped.
Maybe not in western markets due to labor costs, but definitely in developing economies.
As you have been reminded of in other comments, there is no "enough battery backup". These weather events aren't exactly rare either. Germany for example has on average multiple episodes of both subnormal wind and sun energy production in high-pressure systems.
Did you read my comment? 10% budget for gas backup buys you 35 days, if on those days there is 0% other production (extremely unlikely). Seems pretty conservative to me?
Even with Danish insulation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
This article conveniently doesn't include flexible demands and energy storage, both of which are a solved problem with nuclear but completely unrealistic with renewables.
Nuclear does neither flexible demand nor energy storage, those are in fact the things that nuclear does not solve! There are a few flexible nuclear plants in France but they push up costs. Some of the new modular nuclear rector designs are considering storage/flexibility, but cost there is also expected to be far higher than an AP1000.
Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization.
Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.
Nuclear can deliver flexible demand if required, it just involves either lowering the reactivity in the core, or if the drop in demand is sudden, bypassing steam from the turbine and running it directly to the condenser. But since their operating costs are so much lower than their construction costs operators run them at 100% capacity as long as they can.
The only situation where deliberately operating a nuclear plant at under 100% output is when nuclear makes up a very large chunk of a country's generation capacity. It's not that only French nuclear plants can reduce output it's that only the French have ever been in the situation where their nuclear capacity exceeds their minimum electricity demand.
Not economically. EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
It's never economical to operate an asset at under 100% capacity. Intermittent sources of energy like solar and wind encounter the same problem when they start to saturate demand during peak periods of generation. Install a new solar panel in California, and chances are you won't actually be able to sell any electricity around midday since demand is saturated.
The difference is that nuclear will keep running at night, in the winter, regardless of how strong the wind is blowing. A cheap, but intermittent source of carbon-free energy is not comparable on a dollar-by-dollar basis to a non-intermittent source of carbon-free energy.
The common retort is to use batteries, but let's put this in perspective: France uses 1,219 GWh of electricity daily (note that this is just electricity and doesn't include things like transportation, fuels in smelters, chemical feedstock etc.). 12 hours of storage would be 600 GWh. Seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar are even more extreme, and might need days worth of stored energy. But let's be humble and just see what it'll take to provision 12 hours:
At $150/kWh that'll be 90 billion dollars. These batteries will be good for 2,000 to 5,000 cycles. Let's say 4,000, so it has an 11 year life span. Over the course of 55 years that'd cost $450 billion. Just for the storage, mind you, France has to build the renewable generation on top of the storage.
On the flip side, the Flamanville Nuclear plant has a lifespan of 60 years. You could build 12 Flamanville nuclear plants and satisfy 100% of France's electricity demand. At €19 billion euros, or about $22 billion USD building 12 Flamanville plants would work out to $264 billion. The cost of storage to even out intermittent sources is much more expensive than just building the nuclear plants.
That ignores operating costs and battery costs are falling fast and your assumptions seem overly pessimistic. A 2025 project in Italy came out at $120/kWh made up of $70/kWh in equipment and $50/kWh in engineering and grid connection costs. (The grid connection will still be good and concrete pads can be reused so replacing after 20 years will cost less even before price drops in equipment.)
Even with a 7% cost of capital that gives a levelized cost of storage of $65/MWh or an additional $33/MWh on top of the levelized cost of electricity of solar to spread it across day and night [1].
With a 4% cost of capital the still being designed EPR2 with 30% savings over Flamanville 3 comes in at €93/MWh or $110/MWh [2].
So solar costing less than $77/MWh or €66/MWh + storage should be cheaper than EPR2.
[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
[2] https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/02/lessons-from-france...
The same applies to nuclear power, though: when France built multiple copies of the same plant design, the first few builds were expensive but costs declined for subsequent models. It's fine to include projected costs reductions into your cost estimate, but you have to apply the same logic to competing systems.
These numbers already include a projected 30% drop in costs for EPR2 across building six reactors with the first coming online in 2038.
Building a series of nuclear reactors with overlapping schedules (about one completion every year or two) in one country should help. But it’s simply far easier to find cost reductions for wind turbines which are manufactured in the thousands per year or solar panels and batteries which are manufactured in the millions.
They didn’t. The French nuclear buildout famously experienced negative learning by doing.
Within a generation costs lowered, but between generations they exploded.
And the reductions were to small to make a dent in how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is in 2026.
Thanks pv magazine.
I'll be sure to read oil daily about the benefits of LNG plants too.
Read the scientific article the entire post is about if you want the cut and dry version?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Back in the 1980s if the US had followed France's lead, then we'd be in the position they're in now: 70% nuclear with much lower per-capita emissions.
That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s. Technology has changed over 50 years. France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear.
It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects.
The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster.
People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work.
The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.
> France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear.
As always this is a political problem, not a technical or economic one.
The Hollande government put a law on the books that made it illegal to increase nuclear generating capacity beyond the then-installed 63.2 GW
The only way they were even allowed to build/operate the single EPR in Flamanville was to shut down two old reactors in Fessenheim. Even that was questionable, but shutting down more perfectly fine reactors would be economically suicidal.
That law was only rescinded in 2023 (by 2/3 majority), and so after that they began plans for the 14 EPR2s, six now, eight later.
Now that that is in place (and France currently has more electricity than they need), the newest energy strategy calls for massive reductions in solar and wind build outs.
https://www.consultations-publiques.developpement-durable.go...
https://ratedpower.com/blog/france-energy-shift-solar/
> Technology has changed over 50 years
Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example of this: the plants are so much more expensive per megawatt than what the navy builds day-in-day-out because of 1) lawsuits every step of the way 2) regulatory paralysis and 3) we haven't been doing it for 50 years so the talent and patterns aren't there.
Which directly contributes to your later point:
> We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi
I wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi. Nor would I consider the ongoing rollout of reactors in China, which haven't seen the cost overruns of western nations, scifi. I'd consider those things consequences of the systems they were developed in. China's power plants have come in at about $2M/megawatt, which is coincidentally almost exactly what the US navy spends on their reactors and appears to be the cost of doing business in a well functioning environment. Solar is cheaper in the buildout (~$1M/megawatt), but not nearly to the extent that opponents of nuclear have made it out to be. It turns out when you make it almost impossible to do something, it gets really expensive!
These are problems we could solve through policy, but the lasting gift of the Boomer generation's rise to power and refusal to relinquish it is that US policy, industry, regulatory structure, and infrastructure were largely frozen-in-time 50 years ago and have been trying to cope with the crumbling shell of that ever since.
> wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi.
Military small reactor designs use fuel enriched to levels higher than what we want to be standard in civillian reactors. Second, military nuclear reactors are expensive as hell, and we wouldn't want to power our society with them.
We build nuclear submarines because operationally they are unsurpassed, there's no alternative, and the operational benefits are worth sky-high costs. When it comes to the grid, we have cheaper, more flexible, and faster to deploy options.
> Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China
That's quite a comparison given China's governance and environmental record. China will take your land, poison you, imprison you if you protest and suppress any mention of it on social media or in the press. Of course a business can get a lot done in that environment, is that really something to aspire to?
Some level of permitting reform is warranted but I would think hard about whether you want to adopt China's policies.
>Some level of permitting reform is warranted but I would think hard about whether you want to adopt China's policies.
Given the current geopolitical trajectories we are going to be adopting their policies one way or another.
china is a single party state. they can order whatever plants they want and they'll get built - regardless of how much they cost, regardless of if the power is economically competitive, with no need for insurance (the state will clean anything up if it comes to that), and with no need to factor in disposal or decommissioning costs. They can do all this and need not worry if the math pencils out long term, or if the bet was wrong vs renewables. They cant get voted out. Yes their buildout is impressive, but its just not a comparable situation in any way to the mostly free market driven west.
Similarly the US navy does not have to produce commercially viable nuclear power on an all in cost basis. Different goals, different situation.
South Korea produces power plants at almost exactly the same cost and is not a single party command economy as far as I know.
>That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s.
I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s.
>But this time it's different!
Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
> I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s
What you haven't heard every decade since the 90s is that storage, solar, and wind are cheaper than nuclear. Technology has changed. We're no longer running 486dx or pentiums, we have something better.
>> But this time it's different!
I didn't say that, and I'm not sure what you're referring to. Do you think energy technology is not going through a massive disruption, completely different than the 1990s, or 2000s?
> Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
This is very cryptic. Climate change doesn't threaten the industrial supply chains for nuclear, it does threaten the standard cooling sources though, such as rivers and other aquatic ecosystems. "If we don't do it" not sure what the "it" is bet no path leads to cannibalism.
Seawater is the most common form of cooling used by nuclear plants.
A bit unrelated to the Belgium story but I recently visited Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, CA and learned a ton about the technical details, safety systems, and policy decisions that go into operating a nuclear power plant. When operating at full capacity, it provides up to 10% of California power! While there is certainly always more such facilities can do for safety and efficiency, my impression is that smart people are working hard to ensure the lessons of previous disasters and potential future ones are mitigated, and that nuclear energy, whether through next-gen small module reactors or legacy systems, will be an important aspect of our future energy grid, especially with the rapidly rising energy demand predicted over the next two decades. If you are interested in a tour, the form can be found here: https://www.pge.com/en/about/pge-systems/nuclear-power.html
I did some research about that nuclear power plant. In 1985 dollars, the total construction cost was 5.6B USD. That is an astonishing amount of money. That is at least 16B USD in 2026 money. If you also include decomissioning costs of about 4-5B USD... how the fuck does nuclear power make any economic sense? PV solar plus batteries: ALL THE WAY. To be clear, I am not anti-nuclear power by any means. I think it is a terrific way to power our countries, but the ship has sailed. PV solar has won, and now we can add batteries (and some wind) to get reliability.
$5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power. While solar is definitely cheaper for 2GW of power, you still need batteries for when the sun is down. So you probably need approximately 30GWh of batteries to just replace this one power plant. The batteries alone would cost nearly $7B of grid-scale batteries that must be replaced every 20 years.
Ignoring the fact that the nuclear plant already exists, this still seems like the right way to go mostly because it's impossible to build this nuclear power plant for $16B in the US anymore (or so it seems).
Due to increased regulation etc you cannot just translate 1985 $, £ or Euro to a 2026 one. There is an actual example in the UK Hinkley Point C current estimate $43b, (£35b) where as sizewell B commissioned in 1987 was $3.2b billion (£2b) or about $7b in todays $. This is probably the worst example but makes the point.
After some research, I learned that thermal powerplants (coal/gas/oil) completed in 1985 cost about 0.8B to 1.2B USD per GW. 5.6B USD in 1985 for 2GW sounds like a terrible price -- at least twice the cost.
Nuclear is high capex low opex. It needs such a miniscule amount of fissile material per year, whereas purchasing coal is an eternal ongoing cost.
Just to put some numbers on it, a 1GW conventional reactor consumes about 25 tonnes of enriched uranium per year, while a 1GW coal plant goes through 3.3 million tonnes of coal.
Price is not the only factor, paying double for energy that does not contribute to global warming and other health issues seems more reasonable.
> a terrible price -- at least twice the cost
I'd double my electricity bill if that means saving somewhere between 3 and 9 million lives per year[1], better health for myself and the people around me, and that's completely ignoring climate change benefits where prevention both saves money and reduces deaths/displacement/poverty in the long term
Either short-term solution is fine (nuclear or full renewable), but we're currently doing everything piecemeal. Plopping down a few big reactors in 20 years while people (in countries without salt planes, at least) are still trying to get permits for the remaining reasonable wind turbine and pumped hydro locations... it just feels like seven-mile boots for the energy transition
If we can make seven-mile steps by plopping down wind/solar plus the required storage in gigawatt quantities, all the better, but that hasn't been happening. We'll run out of uranium eventually but, for now, such reactors buy time. Of course, this discussion has been happening for so long that the "it takes too long to build" naysayers will get their way soon, even at the slow pace we're currently going full renewable at. It's now or never, we need to commit to an option, no matter which one
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-...
assuming 300 days/year, 1c/kwh and ignoring opex that's $150m worth of electricity per year.
7B for the first set of batts.
Then 7B in 2046 money which is probably $15 today.
It makes economic sense because they require a large initial investment (CAPEX), but low cost per year to keep functioning for many decades (OPEX). In contrast to say wind or solar, which are smaller CAPEX but higher OPEX.
So when you compare average cost per year over the complete expected lifetime of the plants, nuclear is good, but when you compare the up-front cost to build it, yeah it looks bad.
Another thing is that nuclear in the US is far more costly than in e.g. France. The key is that France standardized a few reactor designs that they kept building again and again, which made both construction and maintenance cheaper over time. While in the US, each nuclear plant is a unicorn, which can perhaps result in better individual designs but ends up more expensive.
Unfortunately France can no longer build nuclear plants cheaply either. All of the recent nuclear plants built by the French state owned company EDF in France, Finland, and the UK have seen enormous cost and time overruns.
Cumulative emissions matter. We simply don’t have the time to wait the 20 years it takes to build new nuclear plants.
Source please? The numbers I have seen of real opex paint a different picture. In general, nuclear plants close because of cost.
Googling I see numbers like $11/MWh for onshore wind [1] and $5-$10/MWh for solar [2] while nuclear is around $25/MWh [3].
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-wind-power-ope...
[2] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-utility-scale-...
[3] https://www.nei.org/getContentAsset/47fa8caa-9b0d-4029-932c-...
Also wow, for Solar the property taxes are OpEx. So if there's more sunlight because of good weather these "Operating expenses" decrease because they're based on taking fixed costs like property taxes and just dividing them by power output that's unrelated.
I assume property taxes for a gas turbine are likewise OpEx but they just disappear in the noise of buying enormous amounts of methane as fuel.
It doesn't generate power by burning carbon and is a grid replacement for carbon sources. Grid cost rise sharply on 100% solar.
Taking china as an example they currently build solar, coal and nuclear. No country is building only solar/batteries.
Further if we build more nuclear we'd be better at it and it would be cheaper.
> 100% solar
100% solar is a straw man though, as much as the simplicity of it sounds nice.
> Further if we build more nuclear we'd be better at it and it would be cheaper.
This is far from being clear, nuclear is one technology that tends to have increased costs the more we do of it. Even in France!
The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Human labor is very expensive, and every time we make humans more productive, that makes human labor more expensive, because their time becomes more valuable. Technological growth does that.
The cost of nuclear is primarily in labor and long-term financing, due to the very long lifetime and upfront labor cost. Until somebody has some sort of technological breathrough to decrease the labor cost of nuclear, it's not going to be able to compete. Even decades ago it had trouble, and now it's far worse.
You are talking only about the operations of the nuclear, and ignoring all the high energy process required to mine and process uranium before it can be used as a fuel, and after as waste. But let’s pass this problem to the next generation, they will know what to do :)
You underetimate the energy density of nuclear power. Yes. Uranium needs to be mined - slightly more 3xpensive if you extract it from sea water or recycle the fuel - but you need just one bathtub of fuel pellets to power a plant for 2 years. Solar and wind require more mining. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Nuclear GHG are lowest per UNECE and NREL which do account a lot of factors. Nuclear requires least amount of mining vs any alternative so this argument makes little sense. Nuclear waste can be stored in facilities like onkalo or recycled like at la Hague(now) or Superphenix(in past)
The energy density of uranium is such that the amount of energy required to mine and process uranium is trivial relative to the amount of power produced. The carbon intensity of nuclear power is lower than solar: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/kountz1/
That's still essentially zero relative to the amount of energy we can get out of the uranium.
Surely you include the rare earths needed for solar panels as well in all of your comparisons. Nuclear fuel is incredibly energy dense.
It's a large amount of money, but the plants have a long service life. And once a nuclear plant is built, it's operational costs are much lower than other forms of electricity generation.
Simply saying "use PV plus batteries" really does not engage with the scale of storage required. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Annual global battery production is around 1,500 GWh, and only ~300 GWh of that production is used for grid storage.
Even just provisioning enough batteries to satisfy the requirements for diurnal fluctuations of solar is far beyond the scale of what battery production can provide. Let alone fluctuations due to weather and seasonal output changes.
It’s not a choice between nuclear and PV. It’s a choice between nuclear and the other things that provide base load: gas and coal.
Or solar / wind (which mostly anticorrelate) + biomass + storage + interconnectors + smart demand.
The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.
Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.
Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.
Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.
With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.
With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.
And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.
And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.
Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.
Lot of the biomass used in Denmark to form baseload power generation is imported.
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark
https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...
So Denmark replaced lot of imported fossil fuels with imported wood.
Could we scale this form of energy generation to energy requirements of China, India?
No but every region has their own pros and cons. The idea Belgium has no other option than coal gas or nuclear is refuted, and biomass is just one of the reasons.
So why are the Danish and the Swiss working on Thorium?
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/danish-firm-molten...
> "just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years."
One problem I've heard about this idea in the past is that cars and their batteries are expensive, and people won't want to run down the lifetime of their car battery more quickly by also using it as a home battery rather than just for driving.
Obviously this can be solved either by making it so cheap to replace car batteries that nobody cares, or by legislating that people have to use their cars this way. But is either of these solutions easy to happen any time soon?
I don’t think its a long term issue. The cost of battery storage is below 10c per kWh, whereas a peaker plant costs above 20c per kWh and runs 10% of the time.
So if you get paid double the value of your battery the incentives are there for an economic model to work. Today.
And batteries are only getting cheaper, gas is the opposite.
Plus batteries take surplus solar/wind, at these times they have a negative value. Add that and the economics are a no brainer. It’s a matter of time.
The issue with "base load" is that people usually omit to mention how much GW they are talking about and for how long. Which makes it a bit of a bull shit argument.
As an insurance against unspecified lack (how much for how long?) of wind and solar (and batteries, cable capacity, hydro, etc.) base load is supposed to swoop in and save the day when those temporarily fail locally. So, it's a valid question to ask how much insurance we need against that. Nobody seems to really know. There are loose estimates of course. And people seem to assume it's months and that renewables are going to 100% be offline throughout that very very long period. In reality in most connected energy markets, we have a short gap of a few weeks or so in winter at higher latitudes of reduced output that we already manage to cover with flexible generation.
It's more constructive to think in terms of dispatchable power rather than base load. When the sun doesn't shine or there is no wind, it's nice if you can quickly bring online additional generation, tap into battery reserves, or bring in power from elsewhere (via cables). That favors flexible power, not inflexible power. Nuclear and older coal plants are a bit inflexible. Shutting down and starting up a nuclear plant is really slow and expensive and requires a lot of planning. And especially older coal plants need quite a bit of time to bring their boilers up to temperature such that they build up enough steam pressure to generate power. Until then, they are just blowing smoke out of the chimney. Modern coal plants are a bit better on that front. Same with gas plants.
The modern ones only need about 10-20 minutes or so. Still quite slow but something you can plan to do. Slow here means expensive as well. Because shutting them down when there is a surplus of renewables (which is a very common thing now) is really inconvenient. Which means consumers have to pay extra for perfectly good electricity from renewables to be curtailed. That happens by the GW in some markets and keeps consumer prices higher than they should be because they have to pay for gas/coal that is technically not actually needed.
Batteries have a much lower LCOE than gas or coal plants (never mind nuclear) and it's being produced by the TWH per year now. A lot of markets are serving much of their peak demand using batteries now. Australia and China are good examples. Even in the US, you see batteries being deployed at a large scale now. That's starting to push gas and coal out of the market. A gas peaker plant that rarely runs is just really expensive.
A requirement for base load is a fallacy promulgated by fossil fuel preservation lobbying
When it comes to residential/consumer use base load is irrelevant - but when it comes to business (especially industrial) use base load is a strict necessity. The proportional requirements of base load are fading but it is still something that needs to be considered carefully.
Do fossil fuel companies overstate the importance and scale of base load to justify additional fuel subsidies? Indubitably - but don't let their bullshit hide the truth within it that actually is a critical requirement for our power grid.
No, you need to match the demand curve at all times.
This is a confusing thing to say, can you explain?
What you need - the only thing you need - is dispatchable power. That is power supply that can rise and fall to meet demand. That is not what baseload is. It's also not what wind/solar provide.
What baseload is is electricity supply which is only economical if you use it all the time. Nuclear falls into this category because of its very high capital cost and low op-ex. If it's cheaper than dispatchable power (nuclear isn't) it's nice to have as much of it as the minimum demand that you see on the grid, to lower costs. If it's as expensive, or more expensive, than dispatchable power, that's fine, you just don't need it at all and can replace it entirely with dispatchable power.
It's similar to wind and solar in this, which also aren't dispatchable (though there supply curve looks different than the constant supply curve which "base load" is used to mean). Except wind and solar actually are cheaper than dispatchable power so they make economic sense.
The term is half marketing term and half a theory that constant supply non-dispatchable power would be significantly cheaper than dispatchable power so we should organize the grid around it. That theory didn't really pan out (apart from some places with non-storable hydro, and a few with geothermal).
have a read through this: https://cleanenergyreview.io/p/baseload-is-a-myth
basically, base load means the lowest point of demand on the grid. And you matched that with slow-to-respond thermal power plants (coal mainly, also nukes). Because those are slow to respond and are most profitable running at 100%, so you tried to keep them there. So called base load generation.
But note there is no rule of the universe that says you have to meet the base load demand with some static constant power source, you can get it from anywhere. And now, since renewables and batteries are cheaper than this base load generation, it knocks them off the grid rendering it unprofitable. So the whole concept of base load supply is obsolete. Anyway, the linked blog explains it better.
You don't need to run coal power plant close to 100% to be profitable. You want to run nuclear power plant close to 100% because fuel is cheap and you want pay back CAPEX as early as possible.
The article you send is perfect example why it's not economic to build new coal or nuclear power plants in US. The reasons are: very cheap natural gas and no CO2 tax. In US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity.
In Europe the situation is very different.
"Europe is in the opposite spot. The continent's main gas point, the TTF benchmark, nearly doubled to over €60/MWh by mid-March."
https://www.briefs.co/news/u-s-natural-gas-just-hit-a-record...
so what should europe do? gas being expensive doesnt make nuclear economics better for the role of variable backstop of an increasingly renewable grid. Its still a fatal economic equation for nuclear.
Btw battery is rapidly changing the math on > US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity
california went from 45% gas in 2022 to 25% gas in 2025 almost entirely because of batteries (and more solar), and they're just getting started. I know its not generally true across the US, but very soon batteries are going to be pushing a huge amount of gas off the grid.
I suggest you read a power system engineering textbook.
it actually is a choice between nuclear and PV, because base load supply is an obsolete concept. Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear. You cannot make them work without massive state subsidies.
Gas is far better suited economically to backstop a variable grid. I wish it werent true, because i dont hate nukes, but it is just economics.
I will also point out that california is down to 25% fossil sourced power in 2025, from 45% in 2022. Due to renewables and batteries, and there's far more coming. The amount left to backstop on gas in a few years could plausibly be 10%! which is amazing.
No country in the world has 100% solar+wind power supply. Even tiny island countries have to use expensive diesel to supply guaranteed power.
And once you have diesel generators, it turns out that batteries are more expensive than just buying a bit more fuel.
In the long term nations will likely end up with whatever renewables work for them (hydro/solar/wind/thermal) plus the appropriate amount of batteries and expensive, low use (stored) gas/oil plants for "emergencies" where the renewables do not deliver and the batteries might be exhausted. Some nukes will be in the mix obviously but they will not be widespread globally.
The future is all about sovereign power generation and distributed reliability.
Maybe there is a discussion to be had about WHY it needs to make economic sense? Power is a natural monopoly, maybe it doesn't need to be a part of the economy?
It was not a good idea for Germany (and certain other parts of the EU) to be so dependent on Russian gas. It was also not a good idea to become dependent on LNG from Qatar or the US. Spain uses natural gas from Algeria (via Morocco), also not great. Italy also gets some from Algeria/Tunesia, still not great. Inside of Europe, we are far too dependent on Norway. Not because Norway is likely to turn on us (or we on them), but because the pipelines are relatively easy to disrupt.
The transition from coal to gas gave us cleaner air (and less CO2) but it definitely also had costs, some of them in the form of many thousands of dead Ukrainians, some of them in the form of concessions to the US.
And $ cost is a poor metric to chase when what you really care about includes a lot more-- exposure to the whims of geopolitical forces you can't foresee or control, which have both $ cost and more.
I agree to an extent… but a state forcing a nuclear share and locking the populace into higher power prices for 30+ years is going to politically very unpopular. Short term economic concerns dominate today.
Tough luck. That's the point of representative government: look out for the interests of the nation and sell it to your populace. If you can't sell it, be prepared to be voted out, but do the right thing.
you're talking about "should". Im talking about the world we live in. They are unfortunately not the same.
Higher energy prices is something the population notices when they come.
But when higher prices stick around industries close or never opened.
Yes, and pursing state sponsored nuclear means higher prices are guaranteed to stick around
Power distribution is a natural monopoly, power production is commodified/competitive business.
Because if a thing is valued by thing-consumers at x and you set the price to <x, then you are incentivizing people to use more of the thing than they need, even to waste the thing. This thus requires more infra than is actually needed or wanted.
This doesn't go away under socialism/communism/collectivism. If you set the price too low, you either have to build far more production capacity at public expense than needed, or you cope with regular blackouts.
Wow - nearly 20% of the California bullet train! Almost double the wildlife crossing!
decomissioning is embedded in opex cost and fairly cheap www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html
The complexity now is doing it without delays. China shows that it can be built very cheap and fast with good supply chain
> China shows that it can be built very cheap and fast with good supply chain
I mean, thank you, the USSR already showed this, no more is needed.
it's not about ussr, what a nonsense. It's about having good supply chain. Like France had during messmer or Korea now (albeit far from china). China is building the same ap1000 copycat much faster and cheaper
> how the fuck does nuclear power make any economic sense
Because these plants run for 80+ years (some countries are now considering 100) while most renewables run for 25 at most. And also because `plus batteries` doesn't exist. The world battery capacity isn't enough to power California for a single week. Large scale battery technology isn't even in its infancy, it just doesn't exist.
Don't forget, you've paid for the nuclear power plant once. You will pay for a new set of renewable capabilities every 25 years in <current-year + 25> dollars.
25 year replacement for solar is a myth. [1] . They may degrade to ~80% but they keep on working and producing, so far it seems almost indefinitely.
[1] https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...
So in essence they studied all of six (6) panels in a non-dusty region with a mild climate and without notable saline corrosion AND the article even mentions that most other studies are well in the 25-30 year range. Also the study clearly outlines that older silicone panels can't be compared against modern mass produced variants. Finally the study only examines modules that are still working, failed or removed systems are not in the dataset so you have heavy hidden distortion.
The sample size is extremely limited. Six systems are not at all robust enough for global conclusions. This popsci article of yours doesn't hold up to scrutiny and neither it nor the study are enough to make sweeping generalizations like declaring the common 25 year lifecycle a myth.
The “common 25 year lifecycle” was never a drop dead expectation. That’s usually just what they’re warrantied for. It’s always been a common misunderstanding
Edit: If you don’t trust my source , please show one of your own that proves they need to be replaced at 25yrs
> PV solar plus batteries: ALL THE WAY.
how much this would cost for the same guaranteed power output?
would it be more or less than 21B?
how it would look like in areas that have winter with snow?
I'm so glad we saved Diablo. It was VERY close to being shut down the same year we were having rolling blackouts.
So close - big save indeed.
The problem has never been the lack of smart people for Chernobyl or Fukushima. Rather the fact that dumb, short sighted people were in power and drove the smart people away.
And unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this is going to stop any time soon.
I really wish the same could be said for San Onofre. To say nothing of its value as a landmark -- it will live on in our memories as the great San Onofre boobies
One upside -- is that SONGS being decommissioned gave the energy storage market the ability to level up in a big way back then. They filled part of the gap with some large MW procurements. Allowed BESS to be part of the collective energy solution. Nuclear + Solar + BESS + some small amounts of NG is a dream team.
"Ironically, what originally motivated pumped storage installations was the inflexibility of nuclear power. Nuclear plants’ large steam turbines run best at full power. Pumped storage can defer surplus nuclear power generated overnight (when consumption is low) to help meet the next day’s demand peak."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-pumped-hydro-energystorage-renai...
Main challenge with pumped storage is its geographically limited, always a custom project, and large scale deployment.
Yeah, nuclear provides a steady base load, so the percentage goes up or down depending on overall grid utilization. Right now its doing 2.28 MW [0], which is more than what Wikipedia claims as its "Nameplace capacity" of 2.256 MW [1].
0. https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
The correct unit is GW.
To use the strongest plausible interpretation, the writer could be from Belgium, where the meaning of 2.256 depends on whether they wrote the number in French, Dutch or German.
The Belgians apparently typically invert the meaning of . and , in numbers (from how they are used in the US).
I would guess Europeans tend to be better at SI units than people from the US. And let's not mention the the cancer of changing the value of G depending on context.diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously. about 2.2MW/hr they both aren’t always on but that’s the goal. It’s closer to 2MW/hr actual
the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
The math in this comment is all over the place.
Ivanpah is solar thermal. Nobody is advocating for solar thermal, photovoltaic has decisively won.
mount signal, the largest PV plant in california makes 1,200GW/hrs per year. it would still take ~15 copies of mount signal for a single diablo canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar
my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of humanities energy needs because it’s not efficient enough. we should still keep building solar. but if we aren’t building nuclear too its not enough growth
Did you ever calculate the cost for a hypothetical battery that could keep solar power available whenever the sun does not shine? This is where nuclear, well, shines
The other day I calculated what it would take to run my entire country on pure solar, assuming magical infinite storage capacity. Even here in Central Europe, the required area for all the panels was a pretty insignificant number that, even if built as a single huge circle, would easily fit in many different places.
What truly are humanity’s energy needs, though?
Do we need Facebook? Do we need Instagram? Do we need deepfakes and AI music?
> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously
MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)
> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.
Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).
There is so much misinformation in here, so densely packed.
Ivanpah is is not the largest solar power plant in California. It's an experimental solar-thermal plant. Talking about megawatts per year is not a meaningful term (megawatt-years would be). Ivanpah despite its much talked about failures delivers between 350 and 850GWh per year.
The largest solar plant in California is Edwards Sandborn, producing somewhere around 2500GWh per year (it's newer so numbers are less published).
Diablo Canyon produces around 18000GWh/year, which is huge.
But with all costs combined, Diablo's price per MWh is close to ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS off of a massive initial capex. Modern solar battery installs trend towards $30-60 for the same output.
So I'm sure your tour guide had some neat numbers but you should be careful not to repeat them verbatim (or unremembered).
Watt contains time already so watt per hour does not make sense. You might mean MWhr/hr which is the same as MW
What does 2.2 MW/hour mean?
It doesn't. Watts were a mistake by whatever committee it was that standardized unit names. Power should not have been given a unit; it should have been left as ∆energy/time just as velocity is distance/time.
Joule is a derived unit, it is kg*m^2/s^2. There are lots of derived units, like hertz and newton, because they useful than writing out the whole thing. Electronics would be really annoying if had to write out volt, ohm, and watts (ampere is base unit, coulomb is derived).
Don’t put words in my mouth. I only said that power should be J/s instead of watts. The “per second” part of that is what is most important thing about power. It’s the rate at which energy is accumulating or being used up.
It's shorthand for a Joule (unit of energy) per second (unit of time). Watt is the problem with that?
Using watts is fine for anyone who deals with energy and power all the time. The problem comes when the lay person tries to reason about power. If power were written as J/s then they could use the same reasoning that they are already familiar with from dealing with speed and position, or with flow rate and volume.
The real problem is the widespread usage of Wh as a unit of energy
It would make way more sense to use J and J/h instead
I regard that as a downstream effect of giving power a unit in the first place, but yes. We should have just stuck to J and J/s. It would have prevented the kWh and also abominations like the mAh “capacity” ratings you see on batteries.
Diablo Canyon can output 2.2 GW, if you assume 50% (1.1 GW) for the sustained output, I come up with 9636 GWh per year, or ~19,200 GWh per year if it was able to run at 100%
Strictly: France will no longer decommission Belgium's nuclear power plants, as Belgium will buy them. The current owner Engie are majority-owned by the French government.
Apparently there also used to be a phaseout policy which is being rescinded: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/belgium-and-czechia-ram...
I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
Further background: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fifth-belgian-re... (2025)
> "Belgium's federal law of 31 January 2003 required the phase-out of all seven nuclear power reactors in the country. Under that policy, Doel 1 and 2 were originally set to be taken out of service on their 40th anniversaries, in 2015. However, the law was amended in 2013 and 2015 to provide for Doel 1 and 2 to remain operational for an additional 10 years. Doel 1 was retired in February this year. Duel 3 was closed in September 2022 and Tihange 2 at the end of January 2023. Tihange 1 was disconnected from the grid on 30 September this year."
> "Belgium's last two reactors - Doel 4 and Tihange 3 - had also been scheduled to close last month. However, following the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February 2022 the government and Electrabel began negotiating the feasibility and terms for the operation of the reactors for a further ten years, to 2035, with a final agreement reached in December, with a balanced risk allocation."
It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.
> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
Funnily, I have almost the opposite view. I'm terrified of old nuclear because those first gen power plants are all missing a lot of safety lessons. Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.
I want old nuclear plants to be either upgraded or decommissioned. I have much less concern about new nuclear (other than it taking a very long time and an a lot of money to deploy).
A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.
Nuclear reactors are regularly maintained, tested and checked. When possible, old plants are upgraded to new safety standards.
You can upgrade certain components, and safety systems. However things like the containment structure or pressure vessel can't be changed. You for example can't retrofit a core catcher, but you could improve the turbines, I think Steam Generators as well, replace PLC's, Tsunami proof your site by building a larger tsunami wall / making your backup generators flood proof...
Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues. They have been dragging their feet for decades on the subject and instead of building new reactors 10-20 years ago, they are now un-decomissioning older reactors..
old!= bad. You fix stuff and you operate it safely. Running existing units for as long as possible is sensible.
Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission.
These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
On the contrary, Japan is changing it's energy policy and restarting it's nuclear reactors.
"Japan’s Energy Plan: New Policy Shifts Nuclear Power Stance from Reduction to Maximization"
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01195/
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Hmm, I may have been too vague. When I stated "these" I was talking specifically about the Fukushima plants and not Japan's policy for reactors nationally.
Are they planning on restarting the Fukushima plants? I didn't think they were.
The Fukushima plants were completely destroyed by the meltdowns and subsequent Hydrogen explosions that were caused by the Tsunami.
There was never any chance of "restarting" them, so not sure why you brought that up.
Because I'm confused at to what the
> On the contrary
was about. Contrary to what?
Contrary to your claim Japan is not shutting down its nuclear reactors. It is restarting them.
Not a claim I made.
> These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
This was about the Fukushima reactors that were completely destroyed? In response to a discussion of Belgian reactors that are completely different?
Fukushima units were dismantled more from fear of public opinion. They could have operated unaffected units further safely with proper fixes
All nuclear reactors are massively safer than coal power plants though. If you excluded climate change and Co2 emissions entirely and measured harm/deaths adjusted by the amount of power generated the difference would be astronomical.
Or you know, just build renewables and storage. Displace vastly more coal faster with a death per kWh where the only injuries comes from traditional construction and mechanical industry work.
No need for any special casing.
> where the only injuries comes from traditional construction and mechanical industry work.
Still count.
They do count, but look at it from a societal perspective.
For the general public no harm can come their way.
Unless they through some mechanical failure manage to walk underneath a wind turbine shedding or collapsing.
Same with solar. Which is even less risky.
For nuclear power the about all effects from a large scale failure will impact society through either radiation or life changing evacuations.
And then society is on the hook to pay for the entire cleanup work.
For renewables the only people who get harmed are those who work in the industry. The risk for the general public is zero.
> measured harm/deaths adjusted by the amount of power generated
In this case, we find that nuclear nuclear reactors are 2 orders of magnitude more dangerous than gas and coal power plants.
do you account for all the air pollution and downstream health effects coal power plants cause?
... and add a pipe to vent the hydrogen gases outside instead of accumulating it inside the reactor building!
Those old reactors in Belgium have already had several issues.
What nuclear disasters? Exactly? Name one nuclear disaster at an old nuclear plant whose lessons weren’t applied to the whole fleet.
theres the well known inherent problem with the graphite at UK AGR reactors which could be very bad (can crack or misshape in such a way that the control rods or fuel rods cant be moved), not to mention the boiler cracking at the weldseams, they only mitigated this at some sites because they all are slightly different in design, they basically ignored it in the ones which didnt yet have it for decades ,the regulator ended up finding exactly that lessons learnt on older reactors were not being applied to newer ones which had the same problems inherent to them
Chernobyl lacked a containment and there are still reactors of the same type running without containment in Russia.
Well yes, Russia is Russia. The RBMK with its well-known design flaws could never have been certified/built in the West. Yes, these design flaws were well-known long before the Chernobyl accident.
In his posthumously published memoirs, Valery Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK had significant design flaws. Legasov's suicide in 1988, following frustrated attempts to promote nuclear and industrial safety reform, caused shockwaves throughout the scientific community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Improvements_since_the_Ch...
A list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Design_flaws_and_safety_i...
However, the units that are still operating were modified after the accident to remove at least a few of the elements of the accident chain that made the reactor inherently unsafe.
Still no containment, and still not anywhere close to the requirements for Western reactors, but they seem to be operating reasonably safely.
There’s still 7 RMBK reactors running, I believe.
And other than Chernobyl no melt downs.
So they seem to be fairly reliable if they aren’t run by clowns.
I think the issue comes with unknown unknowns. Before Fukushima someone might have said the same thing you just have, but a new disaster still came along and caused a lot of issues. I am still bullish on nuclear, but I think waving away concerns might do more harm than good.
Fukushima was a known risk though, they just never bothered to fix the problem. Plus just being planned in the 60s meant the initial design was born only about 15 years after nuclear power was invented. Fukishima was like driving around in a Model T, being told original brakes and tires and lack of seatbelts were unsafe, but still being regularly driven down busy roads without bothering to upgrade those features.
You reckon during the 44 years Fukushima Daiitchi operated there were no systems control and data acquisition upgrades?
And you reckon that the site operated for 44 years on a Gen II design without melting down is somehow an insisted or how unsafe those reactors were.
If that earthquake and tsunami had been only a bit different in either magnitude or location, those reactors could be operating still now.
Or if the plant operated had hardened those backup generators and water pumps a bit more.
There are 70 AP1000 reactors in operation, construction or planned.
Look at this:
Because of its simplified design compared to a Westinghouse generation II PWR, the AP1000 has:
50% fewer safety-related valves 35% fewer pumps 80% less safety-related piping 85% less control cable 45% less seismic building volume
Isn’t this the kind of thing hackers and tech advocates should be getting a raging hardon over.
This reactor does nearly twice as much as its predecessor using half the materials to build, at least for some systems.
Fukushima failed because of the aftermath of a 9.1 earthquake.
Huh! News to me. I thought it was a CIA false flag Mossad MKUltra LSD Lizard people remote viewing black ops program.
And your telling me it just a regular commercial off the shelf run if the mill garden variety earthquake.
Man to I need to touch grass.
Unknown design flaws in old nuclear power plants wouldn't be fixed in new nuclear power plants, unless if by chance.
The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.
The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.
Even in case of RBMK where were many lessons learned. There are still to this day 7 operational RBMKs in Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
RMBKs are irrelevant to nuclear reactor safety.
You had a good argument up until you went there.
Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal
I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'
Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
Happy to be proven wrong, but https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
> I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'
Yep. It's called radiophobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
And it is far, far deadlier than nuclear energy itself.
>How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
When did a dam failure in the Ukraine affect wildlife in Sweden for 30+ years? It's kind of a several-orders-of-magnitude larger area being affected for orders-of-magniture longer timespans.
Exxon valdez and even deepwater horizon is ancient history, Chernobyl is not, in fact it's current events. And will be, for the foreseeable future, as will Fukushima.
No Japanese alive today will stop paying for Fukushima for as long as they live. Are any other costs from the tsunami still ongoing?
>Happy to be proven wrong, but
Won't prove you wrong but maybe it will make you reconsider the link as a support of your argument:
Danger is what could happen, not what has actually happened.
A loaded gun is dangerous even if it hasn't been fired yet, nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam.
This is exactly my point. You are looking at a single fantastic instance: you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction, illness, and death per TWh. To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim
> nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam
Banqiao dam was a single hydroelectric installation, for which the estimated death toll of its failure is in the ballpark of every nuclear death combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
>you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction
Sorry but this isn't true. You base this claim on what has happened but not what could have happened, which is a mistake.
The actual truth is that 1 Chernobyl almost ruined Europe. If the heroic individuals who managed to stop the graphite fire had said "f it I'm outta here" instead of sacrificing their lives, it would have made large areas in far corners of Europe uninhabitable, and even larger areas unsuitable for farming, for decades.
This is not hyperbole, it is a likely outcome based on the amount of material that would have been released and prevailing weather patterns.
It didn't actually happen, but it could have. We were spared the worst case scenarios from Chernobyl.
100 Chernobyls would not have been 100 Chernobyls that lasted for a week, most of them would have pumped out sterilizing levels of radiation for months. Nothing humans have done to date would be comparable to such a scenario.
Danger is not related to what has happened, but what could happen. This is important to keep in mind when discussing things that will have consequences for centuries. Many things happen over centuries, we're not even a century from WW2 yet.
>To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim
Figuratively, of course. I meant that the deepwater event is handled and done. We don't actively need to consider how to handle it today. Nature is still recovering but you can eat any fish you catch in the gulf without worrying about the oil spill and you don't need to clean any birds.
Chernobyl is not over, and won't be for the foreseeable future. It could cause new fallout 100 years from now, our grandchildren might have to pay for a new sarcophagus, at the very least pay for maintenance of the existing one. It is an ongoing cost on several national budgets.
Only a very few things that humans do really compares to the the consequences from nuclear power. It's troubling to see it being so severely misunderstood and belittled even on a forum like this. If we decide to do it it should at the very least be with a good understanding of the actual risks.
> it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable
The big fear for me would be that this happens to a nuclear power plant that is located in a densely populated area (of which there are many). Chernobyl was bad, but imagine the impact if the exclusion zone contained a major city.
Two new AP1000 reactors are being built in Ukraine. During a hot war.
That’s how safe and important these things are.
> That’s how safe and important these things are.
I don't think something being done in war time is evidence of it's safety! If anything, way tends to encourage more risk taking.
The only real problem with the Fukushima incident was the (unnecessary) evacuation. It really would be best if they weren't built too close to where people live.
> it occasionally irradiates a swath
That has happened exactly once.
>That has happened exactly once.
And affected an area about the size of half the continental US, causing expensive countermeasures to be taken for 40 years and counting.
Maybe once was enough?
Care to document what expensive countermeasures are nowadays being taken in the area the size of half the continental US?
I can give some scattered examples:
Norway 2025: https://www.dsa.no/en/radioactivity-in-food-and-environment/...
"Every year, sheep herds in selected municipalities must be brought down onto cultivated land and given clean feed for a certain number of weeks before they can be slaughtered, in order to bring the levels in the meat down below the maximum permitted level."
Germany 2026, 3000 boar at 100-200 euros compensation each:
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fast-3000-verstrahlte-wildsch...
Scotland was done after "only" 25 years:
https://robedwards53.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/25-years-on-ch...
“It has taken nearly 25 years for the contamination of Scottish soils to decay to officially safe levels – and we're 1,400 miles away,”
Northern norway - scotland - bavaria - ukraine, that's about half the continental US affected for decades, so it's a fair comparison wouldn't you agree?
> disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common and more importantly don't allow Soviet engineers to design and operate your nuclear power plants.
> Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though
I mean, when we get Chernobyl 2.0 with hundreds of millions of victims, will the fact that it was caused by "variables that can be easily controlled" somehow make the situation any better?
Fukushima. It was a Gen 1 plant which already has the issue that a thermal runaway is possible. There were other examples of this happening like TMI. The backup for Fukushima was onsite generators which were flooded and ultimately failed causing the meltdown.
The safety lessons we learned from all gen 1 reactors was to apply passive shutdown mechanism where if input power fails fission ultimately stops. That's not something that can be applied across the fleet because it requires more infrastructure and an almost complete redesign of the reactor's setup. Which is why these early reactors all have a potential risk of thermal runaway.
Edit: It looks like all gen Is have been decommissioned as of 2015, which is great. But we really should now be talking about decommissioning gen IIs and leaping forward to Gen IVs.
It's worth noting that the Fukoshima disaster
1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths
2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
> Lead to basically zero direct deaths
Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done by a power generation mechanism.
> Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Yeah, crazy stuff happens and radioactive spills have longterm effects on the environment that are hard to address.
> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
That's a non-sequitur.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Japan has spent the equivalent of $180B cleaning up the mess Fukoshima left behind. [1] Decomissioning the old reactors and replacing them with the safer to avoid unexpected disasters which cost hundreds of billions does seem like a good use of money. Far better than just hoping something unexpected doesn't happen.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38131248
It's always hard count indirect deaths.
We could for example argue that Japan, by stopping it's nuclear power plants for long time and replacing it's cheap nuclear electricity with expensive imported gas electricity caused more deaths than by direct radiological impact of Fukoshima accident.
"Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident"
https://docs.iza.org/dp12687.pdf
"In an effort to meet the energy demands, nuclear power was replaced by imported fossil fuels, which led to increases in electricity prices. The price increases led to a reduction in electricity consumption but only during the coldest times of the year. Given its protective effects from extreme weather, the reduced electricity consumption led to an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that the increased mortality resulting from the higher energy prices outnumbered the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting that applying the precautionary principle caused more harm than good."
In term of money, you have look at the sums that Japan has been pouring into importing gas, which was needed to replace the missing nuclear power generation.
"With the Japanese government’s blessing, these companies are encouraging other countries to use more gas and LNG by investing US$93 billion from March 2013 to March 2024 in midstream and downstream oil and gas infrastructure globally."
https://energyexplained.substack.com/p/japan-1-how-fukushima...
I pretty much fully agree.
I'm not actually arguing that Gen II plants need to be decommissioned immediately. I'm arguing that they need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
The process that takes can look like running the Gen II reactor while a replacement Gen IV reactor is being built and then decommissioning after the IV reactor is up and running.
I'm not against using nuclear, far from it. But I do think we need to actually have a plan about how we evolve the current nuclear fleet.
> Gen II … need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
Why? The overwhelming majority of Gen II reactors aren’t on the east coast of Japan.
And the lessons learned from Fukushima Daiitchi can be applied elsewhere to mitigate similar risks.
My opinion is it’s more prudent to run the existing fleet for its economically useful life, remembering that reliable base load can have more value than intermittent wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
You also don’t get process heat not district heating from wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
Gen II reactors everywhere are subject to war and sabotage. Places that are currently safe aren't always safe.
Fukushima was a demonstration that these reactors can still melt down. It doesn't take exactly fukushima to cause a meltdown.
The reason to prioritize decommissioning is because the new generations of reactors are completely safe. There can be no meltdown, even if they are explicitly sabotaged. Then the bigger risk becomes not the reactor but the management of waste.
What Gen II reactors are is effectively a landmine in a box. The proposed solution to avoid detonating the landmine is adding more pillows, buffers, and padding, but still keeping the landmine because it'd be expensive to replace.
I think that's just a bad idea. Unexpected things happen. They don't have to (and probably won't) look exactly like a Tsunami hitting the facility. So why not replace the box with a landmine with one that doesn't have the landmine. Yes it cost money to do, but it's simply safer and completely eliminates a whole class of risks.
There are many kinds of Gen IV reactors. Which of the Gen IV reactors would you prefer? Which Gen IV reactor can not melt down, even if explicitly sabotaged?
> Which of the Gen IV reactors would you prefer?
TBH, probably the SCWR. They seem like the easiest to build without a lot of new surprises.
> Which Gen IV reactor can not melt down, even if explicitly sabotaged?
One like the BREST. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor) . Funnily my preferred reactor, the SCWR, would probably not be immune to some sabotage, specifically explosives around the reactor. But a reactor which uses a metal coolant would be. It just so happens that the nature of a SCWR cooled with water means that the reactor core has to be much beefier anyways, so it's a lot harder to really damage even if that was an explicit goal.
> Gen II reactors everywhere are subject to war and sabotage.
<eye roll> this is just bullshit.
Which Gen II reactors are subject to war, exactly?
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, where one employ was killed by a drone strike?
What’s the status of the four new planned(?) reactors at Khmelnitski?
Wikipedia seems to indicate that two new AP1000 reactors are under construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmelnytskyi_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
A country that is having a hot war with its neighbour Russia(!) is getting the fuck on with it, while the rest of the Western world still thinks windmills are cool.
> Which Gen II reactors are subject to war, exactly?
Potentially any of them. World governments aren't static. Mitt Romney was literally laughed at for talking about the Russian military threat in 2012.
> two new AP1000
These are Gen III+ reactors, which thoughout this thread I've been saying we should be building to replace the Gen II reactors.
If Ukraine was building new Gen II reactors you might have a point.
> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death,
There have been plenty of direct deaths caused by coal power. Coal dust can be quite explosive and has caused a lot of deaths over the years. And plenty of coal fired boilers, both stationary and mobile (locomotives) and failed causing plenty of deaths.
It's instructive (and scary) to google pictures of exploded boilers!
> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done
By that definition housefires also lead to very few direct deaths if most people die due to smoke inhalation instead of burning alive.
Unlike with nuclear that, even if we entirely ignore CO2 emissions and climate change the remaining "indirect" damage due to pollution and long-term effects on the environment are largely know and quantifiable and are astronomically higher per MHw produced compared to nuclear power.
> > ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
> That's a non-sequitur.
I think this is to establish that the large number of deaths from the disaster weren't due to the nuclear plant, which people seem to assume.
People assume it, I did not. Nor did I claim it. It is a non-sequitur because we aren't talking about deaths from natural disasters.
We actually are.
There are plenty of smaller nuclear power reactor issues listen on Wikipedia, but the three big ones are Chernobyl, but that was an RMBK, which no one built except those crazy Russians, TMI which didn’t kill or injury anyone, and Fukushima Daiitchi which resulted in one death.
So we’re not really talking about deaths from nuclear power reactors, because there aren’t any, discounting Chernobyl because that won’t ever happen again.
So we must be talking about the deaths from that one natural disaster associated with the Fukushima Daiitchi meltdowns. Otherwise, I dint know what deaths you’re talking about.
More people injur themselves falling off ladders while trying to clean their solar panels than nuclear power ever will.
You are, I'm not.
Good luck.
Ok, which deaths from nuclear power.
State your case, enumerate them.
The idea that nuclear isn’t safe, and can’t be competitive in thr market is just nonsense.
Seventeen AP1000s are currently in operation or under construction. Four are in operation at two sites in China, two at Sanmen Nuclear Power Station and two at Haiyang Nuclear Power Plant. As of 2019, all four Chinese reactors were completed and connected to the grid, and as of 2026, eleven more are under construction.
It goes on…
Two are in operation at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant near Augusta, Georgia, in the United States, with Vogtle 3 having come online in July 2023, and Vogtle 4 in April 2024. Construction at Vogtle suffered numerous delays and cost overruns. Construction of two additional reactors at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station near Columbia, South Carolina, led to Westinghouse's bankruptcy in 2017 and the cancellation of construction at that site. It was reported in January 2025 by The Wall Street Journal and The State that Santee Cooper, the sole owner of the stored parts and unfinished construction, is exploring construction and financing partners to finish construction these two reactors. The need for large amounts of electricity for data centers is said to be the driving factor for their renewed interest.
Twenty-four more AP1000s are currently being planned, with six in India, nine in Ukraine, three in Poland, two in Bulgaria, and four in the United States.
China is currently developing more advanced versions and owns their patent rights. The first AP1000 began operations in China at Sanmen, where Unit 1 became the first AP1000 to achieve criticality in June 2018, and was connected to the grid the next month. Further builds in China will be based on the modified CAP1000 and CAP1400 designs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000
The fact is, nuclear power is a 21st century success story.
> State your case, enumerate them.
My case is that Gen II reactors have a design flaw which gives them a risk that should be eliminated. We should replace Gen II reactors with Gen III or later reactors as none of them suffer from the same problems as Gen II reactors do.
The rest of your post is about AP1000, which is a Gen III+ reactor. A fine reactor to replace Gen II reactors with.
I've made this point, to you, a couple of times so now I feel like you aren't actually reading my responses.
I'm not interested in one sided conversations.
Yes we actually are talking about deaths from natural disasters.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant was destroyed by the Tsunami. It didn't spontaneously combust.
A lot of other infrastructure that was impacted/destroyed by the Tsunami claimed lives. For example, a dam broke due to the Tsunami and that dam breach killed 4 people. Which coincidentally happens to be 4 more than were killed by the nuclear power plant when it was destroyed by the Tsunami.
IDK why you'd think a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors in an article about decommissioning nuclear reactors should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters.
More people die from car accidents and heart attacks. More people get radiation poisoning from sun exposure. Also non-sequiturs because we are not talking about that here.
It is very tangentially related because the nuclear accident in the current thread was caused by an earthquake that also killed people. Not something that affects the discussion about how we should handle nuclear plants in the future because "This number is bigger" is a meaninglessly point to make.
> a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors
This is actually an article about Belgium taking over nuclear plants for restart.
> should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters
How did we get to natural disasters?
Well:
You brought up Fukushima, where a natural disaster destroyed a nuclear power station. You also incorrectly claimed that Japan had "decided" to "decomission" "these" reactors, rather than "rebuild" them.
Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission. These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
I think most people who read this interpreted this as "these" meaning "Japan's reactor fleet". Because that's the only interpretation that makes at least a little sense (though it is wrong).
It certainly can't mean the reactors at Fukushima, because those have been destroyed, there never was any question of "rebuilding" them and so no "decision" not to do that. And not due to some unfixable "design flaw", but due to a Tsunami that another plant of the same design withstood without damage.
So: we got to natural disasters because you brought up natural disasters.
And yes, technical equipment and infrastructure gets destroyed in natural disasters. Like that dam in Japan that killed 4 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami. Like that nuclear power plant that killed 0 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami.
> More people get radiation poisoning from sun exposure.
What. The. Fuck. Are. You. On. About.
That has never happened.
Radiation poisoning. From sun exposure.
Are you ok? Would like some water? Do you want to sit down?
If you think that’s a thing, I don’t know what to say. I hope you don’t vote.
You should stop now before you embarrass yourself. Go away and do some reading. Come back when you’re read to play with the big kids.
We’re doomed!
UV light is radiation from the sun. Sun burns are, in fact, a form of radiation poisoning.
I'm sorry this isn't something you knew.
Also, be aware you are violating HN posting guidelines. I'm not going to interact with you further because you are just flaming.
> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death
This is not true at all.
Direct Occupational Deaths (Mining & Accidents)
Even in a highly regulated environment like the United States, coal mining is not a zero-fatality industry. United States: According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), there were 8 coal mining deaths in 2025 and 10 in 2024. This is a massive improvement from 1907 (the deadliest year), which saw 3,242 deaths.
In countries with less stringent safety oversight, the numbers are much higher. For example, China's coal industry—though improving—has historically recorded hundreds to thousands of deaths annually.
In 2022 alone, hundreds of people died in global coal mine accidents.
Chronic Disease: "Black Lung" (pneumoconiosis) is still a leading cause of death for miners. In the U.S. alone, thousands of former miners die every decade from lung diseases directly caused by inhaling coal dust.
> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths.
Huh? Are you not counting coal mining, which historically caused thousands of deaths per year and presumably still causes at least hundreds per year (not sure what info we have on that from China).
> 1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths
"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.
> 2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Sure, but Belgium has to be prepared for something like the North Sea flood of 1953 - which climate change is only going to make worse.
> 3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Irrelevant.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Correct, but a nuclear power plant in Belgium should be safe enough to survive the kind of disaster which is likely to happen in Belgium - which is very much a topic of debate.
If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
> "Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
The actual death toll of the accident itself is zero.
There was one incident of cancer that was ruled a "workplace accident" by an insurance tribunal that went through the press without much vetting.
However, this was for his overall work at the plant, largely preceding the accident.
The WHO says there has been and will be no measurable health impact due to Fukushima.
What caused a lot of deaths was the evacuation that almost certainly should not have happened.
"The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Nuclear is insured. The German nuclear insurance so far has paid out €15000,- since it was created in 1957.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Nuclear_Reactor_Insuran...
For comparison, just the German nuclear auto-insurance pays out north of €15 billion per year.
There is a reason both Japan and Ukraine maintain and are actually expanding their nuclear programs.
>Nuclear is insured.
You should read the article you linked to. It actually explains that nuclear is defacto not insured, and that is the reason why they have only paid 15000 euros in total.
The TLDR is that basically no matter what happens, the cost is covered by the government of the country the plant is located in, and secondly other governments.
This is course also true even if nothing goes wrong with the plants, future tax payers pay for decommissioning, maintenance, storage etc.
None of this addresses the points made. It is talking around the subject by trying to shift the focus or narrow the perspective.
The cleanup bill is real.
The inability to get insurance is real.
The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
The possibility of Fukushima scale accidents all depend on local conditions. And it may be as trivial as upgrades and component changes over the decades leading to safeties protecting the component rather than the larger system causing defense in depth to fail. Like happened in Forsmark in 2006.
Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history. There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
> The inability to get insurance is real.
Which obviously doesn't prove what you think it proves...
> The cleanup bill is real
This still feels irrational compared to other dangerous industries.
> The inability to get insurance is real
It's real, but how much of it is rooted in emotional fear or bad industrial policy?
> The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
And that's one of the lessons to learn from the Fukushima accident, that's why Canada changed their evacuation plans to be more granular for example.
> Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history.
Storage gets very expensive as your share of renewables increases (because the capacity factor of storage goes down then). Having an amount of clean firm generation (nuclear) brings the overall cost of the system down.
edit: capacity factor might be the wrong term for storage, the point is their rate of utilization goes down and so does their profitability.
> There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
I don't understand what we could effectively do with civil nuclear builds decades ago cannot be replicated today. Let's also talk about the cost of the transition to renewables in Germany please.
>>1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths
>"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
Wikipedia asserts one "suspected" death, which I think is within bounds to call "basically zero". It does list a couple dozen injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
Just a few lines down:
> The displacements resulted in at least 51 deaths as well as stress and fear of radiological hazards
It's not clear the mismanaged massive evacuation was even necessary. In hindsight its like that less people would have died if they just stayed there for a few more days.
> It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.
Apparently wildlife is thriving in the radiation zone.
Intensity of radiation fades over the years (exponential decay). The bad stuff is gone fairly quickly. Decades means pretty low levels.
Just leave the radiation zone as a nature preserve, like the Chernobyl zone.
> Irrelevant.
How can that be irrelevant. The disaster was directly caused by a very specific external factor that was not properly accounted for when it was built i.e. it's not generalizable to all nuclear plants in different areas.
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Because it doesn't make sense from a risk management perspective, the risk is astronomically low and impossible to estimate, just like the potential damage which might be huge and again impossible to estimate. How do you even calculate the premiums or anything else for that matter?
> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
> Irrelevant.
Well, that needs more nuance.
You have to understand that Japan is unusually well prepared for natural disasters. From earthquake resistant building codes, to alarm systems, education, to building, to earthquake refuges. I would venture to say that it is the most earhquake-prepared country in the world (although I have no proof of that point and I don't feel like looking for evidence on that it). Earthquakes that would have killed hundreds in other countries are footnotes in the news in Japan.
The earthquake alone was not enough to bring down Fukushima; the reactors shut down, as designed. The earthquake wasn't the direct cause of many deaths. It is difficult to estimate given the circumstances, but tens or maybe hundreds.
So in in that sense, yes, the earthquake is irrelevant.
However, after the earthquake, came the tsunami. That did shut down the Fukushima backup generators. No generators means no cooling, which means meltdown.
The tsunami also killed the most people. Now, why is this relevant?
Because the Japanese have had drills and tsunami education for decades. They have seawalls, strong buildings, and prepared infrastructure. The tsunami hit the least populated areas of the coast. In short, they were aware, trained and prepared, and they were not hit where most people live.
And still, ~15000+ died. That gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.
Sure, but Chernobyl didn't require a massive tsunami, and neither did Three Mile Island. On top of that there have been dozens of near-misses. On the other hand: what would have been the result of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami hitting a wind farm, or a PV installation?
Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business, with virtually unlimited damages if something goes seriously wrong. I'm sure all the reactor operators reviewed their flood procedures after Fukushima and a 1:1 repeat is unlikely, but why didn't they do so before the incident? What other potential causes did the industry miss?
In this case it was indeed a large-scale natural disaster which caused the accident, but how sure are we that some medium-scale terrorism can't do the same, or some small-scale internal sabotage or negligent maintenance? The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.
Thought experiment: imagine nuclear were 100 times as deadly as it is, but ten times more prevalent (supplanting other fossil fuels, or even hydroelectric)
What would be the net effect? (I think it would be roughly on par with gas or hydroelectric and an order of magnitude safer than other fossil fuels even with this extremely pessimistic hypothetical)
> What would be the net effect?
It wouldn't be a linear increase i.e. you can more or less estimate how many people would die per MWh produced in hydro, gas, coal etc. plants.
With nuclear if somebody dies that means a some sort of catastrophic event likely occurred regardless if a 1 or 100+ people die the reactor will be out of commission and it will cost a massive amount of money to contain it.
I'm not following the argument for being able to estimate deaths per [T]Wh for hydro, gas, etc. but not nuclear. I think hydroelectric is especially analogous
Should we include this case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Why wouldn't we?
> Sure, but Chernobyl didn't require a massive tsunami, and neither did Three Mile Island.
Three Mile Island was a success in the sense that even the worst case scenario the safety measures are sufficient to more or less fully contain it.
In Chernobyl's case... well yes it proves that if you let incompetent and stupid people build and operate nuclear power plants horrible things can happen.
> Three Mile Island was a success in the sense that even the worst case scenario
No, as it involved a partial meltdown, not a complete meltdown.
It's a success. The redundant systems of 3mi meant that the 10 miles around it received the effect of a chest x-ray.
I mean we allow coal plants to vent radioactive material. Surely nuclear considering it an accident is an improvement.
I was arguing about the fact that the number of deaths on the tsunami was relevant. I think you must have answered to the wrong thread.
You're arguing based on pure hypotheticals.
> Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business,
Well, let me introduce you to airplanes — flying is inherently risky, and so many people have died on commercial flights. We should abolish it immediately!
> The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.
Maybe. I'm more concerned about coal plants that are, as we speak, dumping metric tons of harmful materials, including radioactive ones, into the atmosphere we all breathe, which causes approximately 100_000 people to die each year.
These are real things happening right now, not some hypothetical problems that may happen, but haven't in the last 60 years of commercial nuclear reactor operations.
Seriously, all you can cling to are what, 2-3 major accidents in all this time? With negligible death tolls? Please. This is just concern trolling.
The impression I've gotten is that almost all of the massive bills associated with nuclear power are because of an irrational fear of the radiation. Factoring in all the nuclear disasters and the radiations released from them, nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.
> nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.
If we demonstrate scientific honesty and begin to apply the same level of techniques that are used to obtain the result of "10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt", we can come to the conclusion that even a small accident at a small nuclear power plant can destroy life on planet Earth as a phenomenon.
That's kinda like saying we can release the tiger from the cage because it hasn't killed anyone while it was in the cage.
No? It's like saying that its safe to have more zoos with tigers because tigers pretty much never get out of their cages and get a to kill people unless there is some massive fuckup (i.e. you let soviet engineers supervise your tiger)
>No? It's like saying that its safe to have more zoos with tigers
No, then the original statement would have to have been "we should keep paying big bills so we can have safe nuclear", but it wasn't.
To be more direct, using statistics about incidents to claim something is safe a fallacy. Something extremely dangerous that is kept safe through effort and expense won't appear in the stats until you remove the effort and expense.
After genetically engineering a super tiger and keeping it hungry.
Not quite, because there have been disasters and radiation leaks. And if the number of deaths per megawatt produced is 10,000 times less than coal, despite those radiation leaks, radiation leaks cannot be anywhere as dangerous as commonly perceived.
“Better than coal” is a weak argument. Coal hasn’t been in the “game” for decades. The problem for nuclear isn’t anything irrational - it’s economics and operational and deployment flexibility - newer tech like solar PV, gas turbines, batteries and wind have created a new Pareto frontier for electricity generation and nuclear just isn’t anywhere near this frontier for any objective.
> Coal hasn’t been in the “game” for decades.
What are talking about?
* China's installed coal-based power generation capacity was 1080 GW in 2021, about half the total installed capacity of power stations in China.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_China
India is the fifth-largest geological coal reserves globally and as the second-largest consumer, coal continues to be an indispensable energy source, contributing to 55% of the national energy mix. Over the past decade, thermal power, predominantly fueled by coal, has consistently accounted for more than 74% of our total power generation.
https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documen...
The last new coal power plant to come on-line in the US was in 2013 at Sandy Creek - 13 years ago. The last new coal power station built in Australia - Bluewaters Power station was built in 2009 - 17 years ago. In Europe coal's share has dropped from over 40% of generation at its peak in 2007 - about 20 years ago - and has declined to about 9%. Coal's days are over - natural gas is cheaper and more flexible, while solar PV and wind are cheaper.
There is of course a large installed base - a coal plant will last 50 years. The fact that developing countries have large installed coal capacity is neither here nor there.
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Almost every plant is bespoke, leading each plant to have unknown failure modes and rates. Additionally, insurance works by pooling risk amongst a large group of individuals but the statistical uncertainties of failure rates (too few events) and low total rate of plants leads to an incredibly uncertain risk profile.
The claim made in your first sentence is actually a reason to be concerned.
The fact that it's impossible to estimate the risk because the failure rates are unknown is concerning?
Yes, more frequent failures would make it easier for insurance companies to estimate the risk and calculate premiums but I don't exactly see how that would be good thing...
And also largely irrelevant to a possible future standardised fleet.
Also, obviously, that could lead to an issue with one being an issue with many.
The Fukushima disaster could have been averted simply by putting the backup electric generators on a platform, and venting the hydrogen gases outside.
Yes.
Or not having your plant destroyed by the biggest Tsunami in recorded Japanese history, much larger than the size they planned for when they built the plant.
Or upgrading the seawall to the size mandated after scientists found out that Tsunamis of that size could actually happen, despite having no historical record of them. One of the reasons TEPCO was culpable.
A sister plant of the Fukushima plant actually survived a slightly higher crest and was even used as a shelter for Tsunami victims, because one engineer had insisted on the sea wall being higher.
German plants for example, despite facing no immediate Tsunami risks, have bunkered and distributed backup generators as well as mandatory hydrogen recombinators. Any German plant at the same location would have survived largely unscathed.
A larger seawall can still fail. Better to put the generators on a platform. Simple and cheap.
Another backup would have been a pipe leading away from the reactor, where one can, from a short distance, pump water into it and it would cool the reactor.
Everything is "simple" with hindsight in mind.
After SL-1 we realized that that we needed to allow a reactor to fully shut down even with the most important control rod stuck in a fully withdrawn position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1#Accident_and_response
> Everything is "simple" with hindsight in mind.
The fixes are still simple and cost little.
I used to work at Boeing on airliner design. The guiding principle is "what happens when X fails" and design for that. It is not "design so X cannot fail", as we do not know how to design things that cannot fail. For Fukushima, it is "what happens if the seawall fails", not "the seawall cannot fail".
Airliners are safe not because critical parts cannot fail, but because there is a backup plan for every critical part.
Venting explosive gas into the building seems like a complete failure to do a proper failure analysis.
I don't know but i feel like Nuclear reactors are something worth taking to the 99.99% percentile of safety. How much money does it really cost? And how does that money compare to the economic prosperity of the land that is currently radiation free. As well, i think us (assuming) not knowledgeable Nuclear engineers discussing the cost benefit of reactor safety should be basically locked out of the conversation. Plausible sounding soundbites are just too easily generated these days for anyone without credentials to have stake in these decisions.
Nuclear is already at a much higher safety standard than 99.99%!
About costs: it is actually cheap. 95% of the average total cost of a MWh is in building the plant. Comparisons sometimes show the cost of a MWh from wind or solar, but is a fallacy because they assume an infrastructure on the side to ensure 24x7 power generation (i.e. they point out a marginal cost instead of average total cost).
Yep!
Wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries are cheap!
Until you factor in the gas peaker plants that need to be built watt-for-watt unless you’re okay with poor people freezing in the dark, or melting in the heat. Because rich people can afford their own back up generators or on-site batteries.
> How much money does it really cost?
The problem is as much time as it is money. We have reactors producing energy now, it will take a decade plus to replace them, and due to both climate policy and supply issues around the wars in Russia and the Middle East, we can't afford to do without the energy for that decade...
And if that nuclear would be displacing coal power, you have to consider the health and environmental costs of that coal generation which you haven't displaced.
> climate policy
Fuck climate policy.
There could be an earthquake any moment now that ruptures a massive natural CO formation that would eclipse any anthropogenic generated emissions in matter of hours. What have we done to mitigate that risk? Nothing.
There is a non-zero chance Earth will be relieved of the responsibility of harbouring complex life any moment now by a loose pile of gravel travelling at 60 kilometres a second. Zero mitigation.
Let’s work out this food-housing-energy deal for everyone before we mandate unaffordable unreliable energy that results in unaffordable everything.
Maybe your shielded from that because your own a mid six figure income at $UNICORN, but I guarantee you the rest of us have had enough of this climate change fucking bullshit luxury belief.
Air pollution has a direct negative impact on everyone's quality of life, I don't see why would you chose to decouple from "food-housing-energy". Coal would still be a bad deal even if climate change wasn't a concern.
Hey man, I live on a small farm ~50km from the city, where we get to battle more and more wildfires every year, and it no longer rains enough to keep the water supplies flowing all summer. Climate change is a bigger issue for a lot of of the world than your personal experience might suggest
> and it no longer rains enough to keep the water supplies flowing all summer.
It no longer rains enough?
Are you a time traveller?
Otherwise you can’t possibly know that.
When it comes to climate and weather, no amount of recent past data can reliably predict what’s going to happen next.
I know that in the last 5 years, we've had 3 major droughts, and in the preceding 50 years, no droughts. This is more than sufficient evidence for me.
I'm not going to argue long-term weather cycles versus man-made climate change with you.
> What have we done to mitigate that risk
Climate change isn't a risk that needs mitigation, it is not a contingency of hypothetical events. It is happening right now, and lives are already being claimed.
Maybe you are shielded from that and want to keep your lifestyle rather than adapting.
> It is happening right now
We don’t actually know that.
We don’t have a second, identical Earth, where an industrial revolution powered by coal and oil and gas didn’t happen.
Maybe you don't know it. The rest of us who can read scientific work have a pretty good idea.
> 1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths
"Fukushima Daiichi Accident: Official figures show that there have been 2313 disaster-related deaths among evacuees from Fukushima prefecture. Disaster-related deaths are in addition to the about 19,500 that were killed by the earthquake or tsunami."
According to the "World Nuclear Association" (mission: to facilitate the growth of the nuclear sector by connecting players across the value chain, representing the industry’s position in key world forums, and providing authoritative information and influencing key audiences)
Source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
You write as if Fukushima was the only example. Take chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
You are correct that there were only few deaths but there was radiation damage, and if you sum that up then Fukushima was definitely noticable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
Chernobyl happened, but it’s irrelevant to calculating risk for any other operational nuclear power reactor.
That RMBK was built by those crazy Russians who thought it was reasonable to not even bother with a containment vessel / building.
Lets try to speak as adults about this.
1) There are at least 403 cases registered of Fukushima residents developing Thyroid cancers after 2011 and the study is still ongoing. This is five times the expected cancer ratio.
Of those at least 155 cases of malignant cancers happened in children (Sokawa 2024). We know that thyroid cancers are rare among young people... except in one special place were a sudden increase in similar cases was registered since the 80's. This place is called Chernobyl. Children that lived in towns around Fukushima daichi where the accident happened have three times more probability of suffering thyroid cancer than children that lived in towns farther from the plant.
2) Not the strong excuse that it seems, after the company was warned by scientists about the possibility of such earthquake and the urgency to improve their safety measures. They had a lot of time to fix it, and did absolutely nothing
> It's worth noting that the Fukoshima disaster Lead to basically zero direct deaths
Which was really just pure luck.
It was melting down. Humans could not go in to stop it, robots could not go in to stop it. Pure luck it didn’t go a lot bigger.
Also it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water, which will have impacts for a very long time
> severe contamination of ocean water
No it didn’t
Like I said at the time, you could melt all of the cores down at the Fukushima Daiitchi site and dissolve them all in to the oceans and it would be undetectable in sea water.
The oceans weigh around 10^21 kilograms, and the six reactor cores at Fukushima Daiichi would weigh, what, several hundred tons and contain, what, several tens of tonnes of radioactive products.
We’re talking beyond parts per trillion.
Greenpeace lied a lot about it at the time, though. Maybe that's where it comes from.
I wonder how much money it made Greenpeace. A million? Two million?
> Which was really just pure luck.
It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred. Yes it could have been worse, and I suppose it could have been struck by a meteor too.
> it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water
Citation please. I suggest reading the relevant Wikipedia article in full.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_of_radioactive_water...
> It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred.
The tsunami and tidal wave that took out the generators were unlucky.
The fantastically lucky part was that it didn’t create an explosion and spew much more radiation into the air. We couldn’t do anything to stop it, just stand back and hope for the best.
that was immensely lucky.
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was NOT using Generation I reactors.
"Gen I refers to the prototype and power reactors that launched civil nuclear power. This generation consists of early prototype reactors from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Shippingport (1957–1982) in Pennsylvania, Dresden-1 (1960–1978) in Illinois, and Calder Hall-1 (1956–2003) in the United Kingdom. This kind of reactor typically ran at power levels that were “proof-of-concept.”"
https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati...
Got my gens mixed up, so thanks.
But I think my point is still valid. These Gen II reactors should be retired and replaced.
> if input power fails fission ultimately stops
AIUI fission was stopped basically immediately. The problem was removing the decay heat from the fission by-products; without pumps to move cooling water that didn't happen.
I think modern reactor designs have enough passive cooling that this failure mode can't happen. There are a lot of active reactor plants where it still could be possible though.
Fukushima Daiichi is irrelevant to European nuclear reactor safety.
That's a big nevertheless.
> Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.
You used plural? What disasters are you talking about?
Even Chernobyl wasn't technically first generation (not that it has anything to do with power plan safety in western countries anyway).
Three Mile Island kind of proved it was fairly safe given that's the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors (like tsunamis or being designed and run by soviet engineers..)
I may agree with your conclusion that old plants are safe enough (or at least take a deep dive study to see if their expected externality is worse than whatever would replace them). However:
> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors
The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.
The Fukushima quake was a truly extraordinary outlier though!
4th biggest quake ever recorded in history hit at the exact spot where the tsunami could overpower the protective wall at the reactor. Yet nobody died from the radiation.
Meanwhile the 20k people who died in the tsunami are forgotten. No one demands we stop building cities by the ocean.
I lost count at 50
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
That list includes:
- a nuclear missile test site
- theft of radioactive material
- incorrect disposal of research or medical equipment
- radiotherapy accidents
If you can't be bothered to examine your sources for relevance, why should we?
> A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.
Tell me you don't work in energy without telling me.
Most heavily regulated industry on the planet - constant upgrades and safety reports.
Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.
There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.
We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.
> Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.
That's a bit of an impossible ask.
To give you a comparison with airplanes, F16 aren't "upgraded" to F35s. But there is an upgrade process, and F16s today are vastly different from F16s as they were in 1978.
Likewise for nuclear plants, reviews are done following incidents and new discoveries, and overhauls are done, both in terms of process and material changes. Gen2 plants aren't the same as they were when they were built.
The difference between different generations is wildly different and regulations aren't structured to allow for upgrading. It becomes a cost and regulatory burden thing - might as well rebuild then upgrade, very little to do with safety.
And I agree. I think this is a place where the regulations are broken. They should be changed to encourage new gen nuclear be built. Ideally, they could be tweaked so that the sites of old nuclear plants can be reused to produce new nuclear plants.
half of french fleet through carenage? Gen 2 candus were recently allowed in Romania
safety is great and in some cases it can be improved. check out what great carenage is in france
Even assuming all bad stuff, nuclear is statistically ok https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Do you fly?
>I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
Time and Cost seem like excellent reasons to get started now, so we can finish by 2035 and get some materials purchased before inflation gets even worse.
All of the excellent arguments Pro-existing plants apply to new ones too.
Given Hinkley Point C, a plant approved now will be operational some time in the 2040s.
I think people have missed how much of a hockey stick graph renewables deployment can look like. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-bo...
Hinkley Point C is a prime example of regulation causing cost and schedule overruns.
"Fish disco", for example.
If you are starting now wind and solar are almost always your best investment. Some form of storage is next, but not until you have large amounts of wind+solar in the system. (which many areas are already reaching)
This just seems like kneejerk anti-Nuclear stance in disguise. Maybe you did intend it as just a neutral observation but it's hard to take it that way.
Like maybe you're right... why not also support Nuclear plants, which we in fact need for baseload energy? Surely there are better places to cut the budget than other carbon-free energy sources.
I have no argument with building out solar and wind maximally. I will always push for new Nuclear as part of the mix.
Where does this "need for baseload" energy come from? Baseload is a demand side concern. It can be fulfilled by any number of sources and we already have grids operating with zero baseload.
The grids have dispatchable power. But that is a different concerns.
Point out the "baseload power" in this grid:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
You also have to look at it in terms of outcomes. How do we get the most decarbonization the quickest per dollar spent?
Focusing on reducing the area under the curve. Looking at it from that perspective wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power leads to spending longer time entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
We don't need baseload energy! That is something the coal lobby likes to repeat but it is false. We need enough energy to supply demand. These days gas peaker plants amortize cheaper to run 24x7 than a new baseload plant and so a lot of new "baseload" is actually covered by a peaker plant.
Baseload doesn't have a consistent definition, but the general concept is some power plants are cheap at 100% output, but don't throttle back well, so you have a mix of these cheaper baseload plants, and the more expensive to operate peaker plants that are more expensive to operate, but can start/stop/slow as needed. However we don't need that. In any case even when baseload is cheaper than peaker, it is still much more expensive than wind+solar which have zero fuel costs, and so when you amortize the costs out wind+solar plus peaker plants to make up the difference is overall cheaper.
25 years ago I was with you - nuclear was the best answer. However wind+solar have really grown since then and now they your best bet. Because the times have changed I've in turned change. I'm against nuclear because it no longer makes sense even if the price was reasonable. (nuclear would still make sense for ships, I don't know how to push that though)
Edit: Come to think of it, I'd go so far as to say if you have a baseload coal plant today, you should be shutting it down immediately for new wind and solar plus gas peaker plants. It is economically stupid to not be doing that. Now, there may be coal power plants that are not baseload, but instead can be dispatchable. If so, I don't know how the economics of those play out. And likewise, nuclear, although it is baseload, probably is cheap enough to continue running as long as it's not too expensive to keep maintaining, and I would keep it running for the near future.
Gas peak plants are neither clean nor economical stable in Europe. The war in Ukraine and now the war in Iran has demonstrated how extreme the price of energy can become if we allow demand to exceed supply for any extended period, and multiple European governments in the last few years got elected explicitly to solve this. Having a single month cost as much as a full year, or even multiple years, is a costly lesson for voters and the economical effects are not slow to provide a second demonstration on how important stability is in the energy market.
Coal is not an option, nor is oil nor gas. Batteries for something like central/northern Europe is also not an option as a seasonal storage of weeks/months are prohibitively expensive. Hydro power has demonstrated to cause (near) extinctions of several species and ecosystems, modern research on soil has show some terrible numbers in terms of emissions, and the places where new hydro power could be built are basically zero. Biofuels from corn and oil is prohibitive expensive and also bad for the environment, and the amount of fraud currently being done in green washing corn ethanol as being "recycled" food waste is on a massive scale and not something Europe can build a seasonal storage on. Green hydrogen is not even economical yet for being used in manufacturing, not to mention being burned for electricity and heating. Carbon capture for synthetic fuel is even further away from being a realistic storage solution.
That leaves very few options, and if current world events continue as they have we will see more governments being elected on the promise of delivering a stable energy market. Wind+solar+Gas peaker plants are not that. It was already an bad idea when it got voted as "green" in EU, as it cemented a dependency on natural gas from Russia and middle east. In 2026 it should not be considered an option. Gas need to be phased out, as should the last few oil and coal plants.
yes. The whole hopium strategy in countries like Germany is expand gas to replace it sometime with dirt cheap H2
> time and cost as much as anything else
you people have been saying that for at least twenty years. In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe, sentiment is increasingly pro-nuke but your adage keeps things still. Of course yf you never start, you never finish.
> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.
> twenty years
When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.
Heartening to see someone talking about both the pros and cons. I find here and on, for example reddit or twitter, that people are unanimously in favour of Nuclear.
I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.
I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.
But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.
> Even small modular reactors fail to address this.
I'd be willing to engage with SMRs on the merits of actually constructed systems, but if you open https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-... and restrict to "operational" all but two of the projects disappear.
One in China and one in Russia.
I doubt they are talking about the same thing as the US companies. So it would be useless to extrapolate their economics.
Not only this, but the benefit of SMR is based on the possibility that they can be mass-produced at low cost. Until that happens, the benefit doesn’t exist. Solar and batteries and wind have already passed that threshold, but cheap mass-produced SMRs don’t exist yet, even if someone can point to a couple of expensive, bespoke SMRs.
It doesn’t really matter if people on HN or Reddit are in favor of nuclear. At the end of the day, nuclear will get built if someone thinks the cost is worth it over the alternatives. The Internet fan club is mostly irrelevant.
How the public understand what they are (or are not) signing up for is critical though.
That relies on imports of nuclear from France and isn't winter, its easy to say you don't need nuclear when you import a massive amount of others nuclear when the sun doesn't shine as much.
UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.
And what is your median domestic electric unit price? (actually consumed)
It's certainly not £0.01203/kWh, or even in the same order of magnitude.
Later
(For context for non-Brits: there is a price cap of £0.2467 kWh currently, which many people are paying (or very close to that))
In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear.
As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.
In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.
> renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.
If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?
Yes. On the other hand nuclear is still single biggest source of power in EU, despite german phaseout) There is still not a single country matching french emissions with ren alone if it doesnt have hydro/geothermal
Renewables are not suitable for replacing nuclear, coal and other traditional sources of energy due to the fact that you cannot control production.
Why do you need to control production? Why not over provision and store?
> Why do you need to control production?
Because there's a minimum demand you must be able to supply.
Here in Norway we get just about all our power from hydro, and we have a lot of pumped storage lakes which we use as "water batteries". However, eventually hydro relies on water falling from the sky.
Not long ago there had been some really dry years, and our storage was running at record lows. Had the subsequent year been dry we'd be in a real pickle.
Another aspect here is that production is one thing, but grid-scale renewable production rarely happens right next to the primary consumers, and has to be transported. And the grid might not be able to.
Again here in Norway, we had a situation not long ago where the price difference between the north of Norway and the south of Norway was 100x because the south struggled to produce while the north was overflowing, but there was insufficient capacity on the grid to send all the energy being produced up north down south.
How?
There's this thing called battery
Battery storage is still very inefficient and doesn't scale to cover the winters in more northern latitutes.
Tell me you've been in coma the past 10 years without telling me you've been in a coma the past 10 years.
> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.
First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.
It's not France but Engie, a french company with lots of gas business. New nuclear makes sense if it doesnt take 20y to build. Probably that's why US wants to partner with Korea/Japan
Strictly: Engie was forced by a previous Belgian government to decommision the nuclear power plants.
> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
As you explain in your next paragraph, none of Belgium's power plants are within their planned lifetime. Tihange 1, Doel 1 and 2 were operating on an extended service cycle for a decade before their shutdown. The two youngest reactors (Doel 4 and Tihange 3) surpassed their planned lifetime last year.
Everything is cheaper outsourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
Not really sure what the relevance of this is, other than an argument against proliferation? I note that Pakistan has had a very rapid solar transition extremely recently.
> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
This is pretty much the summary of the whole discussion. Building new nuclear is a debate, seeing as renewables are dirt cheap it might or might not make sense to build new nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Shutting down existing nuclear capacity to replace it with Russian or Saudi or Qatari oil and gas though........
The West built the existing rector fleet cheap and fast in the past, and those reactors have proven to be safe and reliable and maintainable.
It’s a proven technology with decades decades in service.
We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.
What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?
> We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.
The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.
That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.
Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.
thing is, when you look at what ABWR achieved, I wish we just thrown money at hitachi for a messmer like deployment in all EU countries that want nuclear
> What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?
No one said "scrap", you're making up a lie and arguing against it. They're saying keep one and build more of the other.
Germany did indeed make that choice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292341 can we call it Triceratops' law now?
Renewables are cheap. Renewables plus battery storage still are not and nuclear is a reasonable alternative for base load power.
Renewables + battery are already the cheapest solution in some places. By the time a new nuclear power plant is built they will be cheaper everywhere.
People said that 40 years ago and see where we are today, if people hadn't said that we would have a much cleaner world today. We might have that good and cheap batteries in 20 years, but also possible we wont have that. Would you really wanna bet our planets climate on your gut feeling that batteries will get that good?
Nuclear isn't an economically viable option for base load. Nuclear is the most expensive form of power generation. If there is excess supply, forcefully turning off renewables to buy electricity from nuclear would make the electricity needlessly expensive and kill the free market. In other words: it can only be a base load if we massively subsidize it and throw away free renewable electricity.
On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.
renewables are already curtailed and market is still not killed. Nuclear is very expensive if you build it in 20y.
H2 per lazard even at 25%mix is as bas as vogtle in terms of lcoe. And thats with cheap us gas for the rest 75%
1. LCOE is not the appropriate metric, especially when you have intermittent renewables in the mix.
2. Lazard themselves say that their LCOE numbers for nuclear are not indicative.
https://x.com/mpweiher/status/1811656245700358478?s=20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16HVh_Fx6LQ
I know, full system lcoe must be considered with all bells and whistles. I'm comparing lcoe of worst nuclear project in us vs lcoe of hydrogen peakers
More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions.
With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).
But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.
One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.
The main benefit of battery storage is that it is trivially easy to decentralize, so if anything it will save money on grid upgrades. Same with solar: no need to upgrade long-distance transmission lines when production happens right next door to consumption.
Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable.
I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?
One small problem, nuclear is also dependent on water: https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-forc...
France was net exporting 14GW at that time. There's no reason for EDF to build cooling towers there - where would you sell the power?
Dry cooling towers exist.
Such a difficult resource to find.
Solar is REALLY CHEAP. And provided you keep existing central European gas heating infrastructure around for a while, you can basically just wait out the really good energy storage by using existing caverns you pre-fill with methane to keep your people from freezing. If you're not curtailing a substantial fraction of PV yield (yearly) in central Europe that's a sign there way not enough capacity yet.
Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate. We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.
I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amounts of fuel.
"PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)."
On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Good news: nuclear costs the same to run at max output as it does idle! No change in fuel costs.
Other good news: solar and wind is trivial to curtail at the press of a button. And very cheap to deploy far more than needed on a day with perfect conditions.
Thus the obvious solution is keep your nuclear running at full load 24x7 and vary the rate at which you feed solar and wind into the grid on those days of optimal production. Idle solar is nearly free, which is one of its largest benefits! This way you have enough solar and even short term battery to meet peak daytime demand even on relatively cloudy days, and don’t need to overbuild your nuclear fleet. But you still get seasonal energy storage in the form of extremely dense nuclear fuel.
Nuclear compliments renewables quite well if you remove the fake financial incentives of “I must be allowed to be paid dump every watt possible into the grid at all times even if not needed, but cannot be called on to produce more energy when required”. Solar produces the least valuable watts. Nuclear the most. So use the cheap stuff whenever possible but fill it in with the expensive reliable source when needed.
That or you’re just gonna be backing renewables with natural gas. Which is of course cheaper, but not all that green.
No not at all. You can vary reactor output, its generally as simple as pulling rods in or out. But they cannot just turn on and off. That takes a ton of time and effort.
Huh, I don't know where I read that their output can only be at 100% then.
It's generally uneconomical to throttle output once the plant is built. because the fuel is so cheap. The real cost is building the plant and decommissioning it.
Some reactor types are better at going up and down in power fast than others. It is definitely a solved problem, though, and has been for decades.
I remember, decades ago, that anti-nuclear activists (some of them were even university professors who ought to know better) argued that it was impossible while France had already been doing exactly that for decades (at the time).
There is a lot of disinformation about nuclear power that has been so widely and consistently disseminated that it has basically diffused into the background.
no, you can do wild variations as long as it's not full shutdown
A small amount of coal has a huge environmental impact.
look at open RTE data. You can modulate nuclear a lot.
Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point.
New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.
It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.
And importing gas famously has zero known serious externalities, as vividly demonstrated in Europe and the Gulf at the moment.
in belgium case the choice is rather nuclear or new gas plants from engie. Why do you think engie wants them shut?
> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.
I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
> I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.
> The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price.
They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.
Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.
The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.
For better or worse, we live in a highly capitalist world, and most western electricity is an open market. In this construct we only make decisions based on money.
The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the 30+ year lifetime… is not a popular move. It works only in single party states (eg china)
This is just the reality of economics and the world we live in
Power build outs are rarely driven by cost structures in a vacuum, or we'd all still be digging for coal. They're regularly driven by policy. It is a farce to think electricity choices are entirely capitalistic in nature, although maybe that's the case in some localized regions that probably (and regularly) hold other backwards policies in the name of "capitalism".
So your answer is use the state to force people to pay more for less competitive energy? There isn’t another choice here.
That's what we are currently doing. We are using the state to force people to pay for expensive intermittent renewables.
Where? In every country in the world? Because the world met something like 85% of the energy growth of 2025 with renewables. All regions of the world are seeing massive and accelerating renewables buildout. All forced by the state? Extraordinary claims require evidence.
The state's role is to help shape policies that might help people over a time horizon greater than a couple of years. Often, this means current people are supposed to subsidize the world for future generations. This used to be the societal handshake that let kids have better outcomes than their parents. Somewhere along the way, the average joe seems to have lost sight of that societal contract and is more focused on instant gratification and short term payback.
I agree in general, but you may as well be wishing for ponies and unicorns as for change here. Short term economics is the current dominant force.
Also consider that if you’re wrong about the progress of clean tech, and it closes the gaps on storage, the kids “better outcome” is going to be being locked into paying higher energy prices for a lot of their life. (Of course if you’re right it will help them)
Except they are mutually exclusive. Money spent by utility companies (or by taxpayers more broadly) to add new generation is not infinite, every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on other renewables.
Do you also believe they're eventually going to balance the budget and tackle governmental debt?
> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime
I completely agree, but that's a massive "but". Belgium's nuclear power plants are mostly known for their reliability issues.
They are outdated 2nd-gen PWR reactors, designed by a company with no other nuclear experience, operating in some of the most densely populated areas of Europe. Keeping them operating long beyond their original design lifespan probably isn't the best idea - and it is almost a certainty that cleanup costs are going to be significantly higher than expected.
To me it sounds like Engie has struck an incredible deal by offloading a giant liability to the Belgian government.
reliability issues doesnt mean unsafe. Most EU units are gen2 and doing fine. Engie wants units shut down to push for new gas plants. If belgium keeps reactors on engie will suffer massively. Decomissioning of npp is generally fine too. Isar2 decom in germany is going full speed
The "old car" analogy seems right, with the extra complication that the car is supplying a non-trivial chunk of the country's electricity and replacing it is not quick
> It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.
This is a different choice because the car analogy usually has "buy new one" as a term. Not having to build a new plant makes the choice far less controversial and also cheaper.
Also, turbines for gas plants are back ordered until 2030
A nuclear reactor can generate 1 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for 60 years.
At a cost which could generate ~10 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for decades if invested in renewables.
Also remember that large parts of a nuclear plant is replaced over its operational life. Control systems, steam generators, turbines, generators, tubing, valves etc.
What stays is the outer shell and pressure vessel. A nuclear plant doesn't just "work" for 60 years. And there's no trouble designing renewables with a 60 year lifespan.
We just don't do it because spending money on getting their expected operational lifetimes from decades to 60+ years is betting on extremely uncertain future returns.
Under appreciated benefits of Big Photodiode is that there's no moving parts larger than an electron.
They do degrade over time, especially due to weathering of the seals and UV exposure, but all the quoted numbers are worst-case.
(Inverters are more complicated products and may need more frequently replaced)
but for ren you need parallel gas firming. For nuclear you need some backup, but not fully parallel grid. Paid off npp can generate very cheaply, at 4-7ct/kwh
I don’t see the difference with nuclear power? Take California, a yearly baseload of 15 GW and peak load of 52 GW. What problem is even a ”baseload” of nuclear power solving?
But we should of course keep our existing fleet around as long as it is safe, needed and economical. In that order.
EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
France does not have a fully parallel nuclear power grid ready to step in when some other half isnt working. Germany has a fully parallel fossils firming grid on top of their ren deployments.
EDF isnt crying. It's just treated poorly even by looking at ARENH tax which was replaced with another one this year, while ren business gets CFD's and curtailment payments.
French nuclear fleet is extremely flexible, RTE data is public. In fact, due to ARENH law EDF was forced to subsidize competition because otherwise that competition would not exist.
Nuclear reactors work at night and when there is no wind. Reliable electricity is far more valuable than unreliable electricity.
Did we have rolling blackouts from electricity shortages during the energy crisis? No.
Was the electricity extremely expensive? Yes.
Reliable electricity has a certain worth. And that is vastly lower than what nuclear power needs when running at 100% 24/7 all year around.
And that is disregarding that EDF is already crying about renewables crater the earning potential of their existing nuclear fleet due to load following and increased maintenance costs. Let alone horrifyingly expensive new builds.
With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.
You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.
Going forward, so long as you have competent engineering, the biggest risk of hydro power will be your water sources effectively drying up. (That could be literal, or diversion to irrigation and other uses, or various combinations.)
But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.
Competent engineering isn't enough. You also need to never end up being in a war zone, and being able to commit to ongoing maintenance forever, or outlawing all construction far downstream (or finding the even more scarce type of locations where nobody wants to build downstream).
Yeah, kinda?
In "most" military situations, the enemy would not want the dam destroyed - because it's a valuable part of what they want to conquer, or doing so would flood their own supply lines, or whatever. And having a well-placed reservoir could save your butt if a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#City_firestorms got started.
To keep providing power to the grid, everything from coal to solar to nuclear needs "forever" maintenance. Yes, an unmaintained dam is a hazard. That can be neutralized with a strategic breach, or (some locations) letting the reservoir silt up. But high-rise buildings, flood-control dikes, and quite a few other things are also "people die if not properly maintained" hazards.
The issue is that many large dams will kill a huge number of people if they fail.
The Banqiao dam failure alone is the worst power plant failure in human history by several magnitudes.
Not many dams have the potential to kill that many, but there are thousands of damns with potential to make Chernobyl look like a minor little affair.
As for wars, you just need to go back to 2023 for the last major dam to be blown as part of war. It "only" made 60k people homeless and killed 200-300. Just last year another dam was hit by drones but didn't burst.
While "big dam failed, lots of people died" is a very clicky headline, you are overselling it.
Between the direct costs (at the plant), and still having a 1,000 sq. mile exclusion zone 40 years later, Chernobyl really isn't overshadowed by the potential of thousands of dams.
And by the hellish standards of that war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain... - 200 to 300 dead is a rounding error.
> With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.
By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.
The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.
The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".
Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...
* Also: https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
If I remember well most radioactive waste by volume is not from nuclear energy production and the share that is very small would be drastically lower if places like the US didn't ban it's recycling. It's half life can also be drastically reduced.
I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?
You simply put waste deep underground in geologically stable rock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Considering how dangerous CO2 induced climate change could be this is like worrying about drowning when using water to extinguish fires.
And? Conventional power plants are killing people now.
wait till you learn what we do with arsenic which lasts forever...
There are natural concentrations of radionuclides on the planet as well, there was even one place where a spontaneous fission reaction took place (Oklo, Gabon) millions of years ago. If you dig a sufficiently deep hole in a massive slab of granite (like Scandinavia), you can store all the waste of mankind there for approximately eternity.
German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.
I think a better analogy would be an old gas boiler.
Worst case for a car is that you break down on the side of the road (or I guess the brake lines give out).
Worst case for an old unmaintained gas boiler is that your house explodes. I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.
Edit for the downvoters: A properly maintained old gas boiler will probably be fine for longer than its designed lifetime. Also here's some sources for the cracked concrete: https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actual...
In light of that, planning for their decommissioning is very sensible I would say.
>I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.
Are you referencing something specific that isn't bullshit?
Tihange and Doel have had incidents and significant maintenance downtime related to issues with concrete.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...
So we should burn more gas for some decades because of the ceiling of a backup system in the nonnuclear part of the plant?
Is this like when Van der Straeten with obviously no ulterior motive whatsoever decided we needed to shut them down over the ultrasonic scanning of those vats that nobody else does?
Knowing this country we'll drain a shitload of money trough a bunch of committees. Do feasibility studies of nonsensical shit and then eventually fix and improve support of the ceiling anyway whilst the backup system keeps working ...but at 10 times to cost, in a slow way and a couple years later than one would expect.
and this doesnt mean explosion still...
NPPs have actually gotten more reliable over time.
Worst case for a car is the approximately ten people who will die today in the US alone due to the poor state of their, or someone else's vehicle.
I believe the downvotes might be from you downplaying the danger of a badly maintained car.
Yea, fair point.
Maybe there just isn't a good analogy for a more than 40 year old NPP.
Maybe an old NPP is just an old NPP.
Back in reality though coal and gas and oil actually kill many tens of thousands of people every year in Europe alone, while nuclear is demonstrably, objectively safer (HBO scaremongering series notwithstanding).
It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).
The EU also released a plan in the past week to accelerate the deployment of both nuclear and renewable energy. This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts.
https://energy.ec.europa.eu/publications/accelerateeu-energy...
> This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts.
It is not only the oil shock.
Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y.
The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.
The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'.
Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power.
The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.
Yep even before the war German industry was ringing alarm bells about how their high energy costs made it very difficult to compete against China.
They should be adopting every sort of energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme...
> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.
Germany has one of the world's highest energy costs because taxes on electricity are astronomical. This is a selfmade problem.
Building _new_ nuclear is not going to make their energy costs cheaper. It is the most expensive form of generation
While this is true, we don't have a good solution for long term energy storage. Even with plummeting costs and new technologies like sodium ion, batteries still only get you maybe ~12 hours of discharge. Pumped hydro give you longer storage, but there are limited places where you can build it. Unless geothermal becomes competitive, nuclear is still the best solution for carbon-free baseload.
There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons. This is a solution that has been proven for billions of years.
We can already capture solar energy at a much better energy efficiency than living beings. Making hydrocarbons with hydrogen extracted from water by electrolysis and concentrated carbon dioxide has acceptable efficiency and already almost one century ago it was possible to do this at a large scale where fossil oil was not available.
The step that has the least efficiency for now is concentrating the dilute carbon dioxide from air, which plants do much better.
There is no doubt that the global efficiency of such a process could have been greatly improved if only a small fraction of the resources allocated to much more frivolous goals had been allocated to this purpose.
While other alternatives are speculative, it is enough to look outside to see plenty of PoCs that this is feasible.
There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons - that'll cost you in the end much more than throwing some nuclear in
This.
And alternatively just making hydrogen but storage is a problem with that.
So simple with negative peak energy prices...
~12 hours storage + overbuilt solar + load shifing seems like it could probably be a complete solution for the vast majority of the world (everywhere that's vaguely close the equator).
I agree storage is a problem.
But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
The only way you can make it work is state subsidies and/or forcing people to buy the more expensive nuke power. Which will be unpopular. But maybe you can sell it as a “grid backup fee” or something.
Storage is not just 'a problem', it doesn't exist and won't for many many decades.
The planned solution is hydrogen power plants, but no one wants to build them because the infrastructure, including electrolysers, is way too economically unfeasible.
Therefore, Germany is and will continue to be dependent on coal and gas, as these are the main producers every night. That's your 'grid backup fee' for you.
Long term storage is a problem. Nightly will be solved soon by batteries. California is well on the way, down to 25% fossil in 2025 from 45% in 2022, due to batteries. And they just keep getting built. Australia is on the same track.
If we have to burn some gas to cover the occasional long term weather issue, I’m ok with that , if we’re at 90+% decarbonized at that point it’s still a huge win.
May be base-load is not the best term but in case if batteries and other storages will run out during long cloudy stretch with weak winds nuclear will at least allow to power critical infrastructure. It’s bad that some consumers will loose power but less bad than total apocalypses when the storage is empty and you have no unintermittent power source in the grid.
for the foreseeable future that weather-anomoly backup role is going to be filled by gas. Spins up very fast, nearly zero marginal cost while sitting idle. And yes, it creates emissions, but if you're only using it for rare weather events, you're probably talking >5% of the supply annual total that produces emissions. Which is fine.
You probably have to look at the whole picture. Having part of the energy generation from nuclear probably makes the total cheaper than having no nuclear. Even if nuclear maybe is the most expensive.
Not having enough energy or having it cut off by a neighbour is very expensive.
That is not the case. Grid modelers always land on renewables being cheaper. Except for the cases when the studies start with "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
That is not the case. There are LCOLC, LFSCOE and others which land on renewables being way more expensive. Even without your made up claim about "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".
Which are extremely simplified metrics.
Like the LFSCOE study is only using one source of renewables through all weather together with 2020 data on battery costs.
Which is why I linked a recent full system analysis. With Danish data so a vastly harder problem than a place with abundant solar. So tell me what they missed.
They even tilted the study heavily towards nuclear power and assumed that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive.
Still finding that renewables are vastly cheaper when it comes to meeting a real grid load.
Then why is China building 30 new reactors on top of the 60 they already have, if it's not competitive?
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i...
The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.
The way China building new reactor is not typical.
Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification.
China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type.
If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.
They have a huge number of people that can specialize in many different things.
But their government has actually explained it. They purposely diversify any tech that doesn't have a clear winner, so in the long term a winner appears and they can focus on it.
They also, most importantly, don’t have to care if any of their reactors make economic sense. It is a single party state, and the incentive structure is very different.
most of chinese units are hualongs now
China can build ten reactors for the cost of Germany running the appeals, environmental studies and neighborhood consultations for one
And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper.
And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.
No it's not.
You actually have to build out intermittent renewables much faster than nuclear even for comparable generating capacity due to the much shorter lifetime of the equipment. See Little's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law
China recently signed up to the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear generation. In the same time period, worldwide electricity generation is predicted to rise by 50-100%, so the nuclear share will grow by 50% - 100%.
Are you referring to the debunked idea that solar panels only last 20 years? Because yeah, bunk.
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...
china wants nuclear to provide 10-20% of their needs. If china wants that, they'll achieve it. Nuclear is extremely competitive in china.
competitive is the wrong word. It does not have to compete on price or all in lifecycle cost, because its single party state that owns everything and cant be voted out. But i do agree that if they want it, they'll make it happen.
it's not a wrong word. Competitive - it's in the sesnse of what price can it sell to get profits, even if the price is set by govt. Even our existing fleet of npp is competitive on the market ->
www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html
https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
But chinese nuclear is built faster and cheaper vs our units even during messmer in france. So their price guarantee is lower too. Probably similar to what distributed solar got there of 0.4y/kwh in the past. Albeit subsidies for solar were cut last year to stimulate a healthier growth
its expensive if it takes 20y. It's cheap if it takes under 6-8, like Barakah or China
Citation needed.
(Narrator: yes it will, and no it's not).
Austria is also trying to block nuclear, at least in Czechia and Slovakia.
> The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.
Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.
Can we get one in Lithuania?
German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.
>German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century,
The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.
Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me
phaseout was adopted by redgreens in 2000 and continued by cdu in 2011. THat's a fact German solar was just not competitive - labor, electricity and coal were more expensive in germany. Solar industry was showing problems even before cfd's reduction (which applied to chinese ones too but they endured since costs were lower)
> continued by cdu in 2011.
because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public.
The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).
Not only that, aggressive cuts to the EEG subsidies killed dogfooding their own solar industry in the country.
> It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.
Now that is a lie. The anti-nuclear push came from the Greens in the 90s. Conservatives just used it for a quick win once that policy became very popular in Germany.
And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.
What is that storage you speak of?
germany has highest prices in eu without any nuclear. It spent on eeg double the cost of entire french fleet. and that fleet wasnt even very cheap looking at what china does now. Germany also needs gas firming per fraunhofer ise report since bess is not sufficient
> And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.
It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice.
Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation.
A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view.
Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore.
In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent.
(1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation.
(2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around.
(3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent.
Like often: there is no silver bullet.
The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1].
[1]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...
I think it is actually the pro nuke case that often has misconceptions of how a modern grid works, repeating terms like “base load” etc
Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
What happens in days where renewables can't produce enough energy? Or the evenings where we don't have enough batteries (all evenings so far and for the next decade at least)? You can call it base load or whatever you want, but that energy is coming either from hydro, nuclear or a carbon-based source. And those carbons are hard to come by these days, so even if nuclear power is expensive, at least it is reliable.
It takes a decade at least for any new nuclear starting today to come online in the west. In that decade you’ve built an awful lot of batteries for the same amount of money.
No one wants to bet $10s of billions of nuke capex against the relentless progress of batteries and other tech over the next 10 years, and then the 30+ years of plant operations. It’s a suckers bet , so the only ones who can take it are nation states.
So now the discussion is not about whether base load is a thing or not, it is that you firmly believe that batteries are the answer to everything.
First it should be said that this thread is primarily about decomissioning existing nuclear power plants. It makes enormous sense to keep operating those plants until we have a world like the one you describe, regardless of how much newer plants would cost.
But more importantly, your assumptions about the future are very optimistic. I'm sure the Germans also thought they were being very smart when they decided that nuke capex was not worth it because gas was so cheap and easily available, and then now we are finding out that this decision crippled their economy because it caused a dependency. In my opinion throwing all your chips into a technology that requires materials and production capacity you don't have, and in some cases doesn't even exist yet, is a real sucker's bet. All your rosy scenarios would fall apart in one second if China decides to stop selling batteries to you.
How about you answer his question?
given that we dont have nukes, and we wont for 10 years even if we started today, and we arent going to start them because theyre economic disasters...
in the medium term its going to be batteries + solar/wind + gas backups for rare weather events. If we get the total annual use of gas down to a very achievable 10% we're still massively winning climate wise. California is getting there, 45% gas in 2022, 25% gas in 2025, and adding batteries at massively increasing rate. Full coverage of an average night is within sight, using gas just for shortfalls.
We can hopefully transition the last peaking gas backup usage to something else in the long term (hydrogen? SMRs if they ever exist?) but it isnt _that_ important in the grand arc of saving the climate.
> Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y.
Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1]
> The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical.
Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost.
But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one.
In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks.
[1]: https://www.iea.org/countries/china/electricity
A lot has changed since the 2023 data in your link.
Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth.
1 https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
> Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
That is just economics.
The intermittent nature of renewable means that overcapacity is structurally required to arrive to match partially the demand.
As an example, Germany has > 100GW of Solar installed capacity for a country where the average power demand is around ~60GW *total*.
Overcapacity means that the price of electricity naturally goes to zero (or even to negative) as soon as the sun shine. And this is very visible on the EU electricity market currently [1].
It is (obviously) terrible for the profitability of the means of production and it is not sustainable: No investor sane of mind would put money on the table for a system that sell at negative price when it produces...
To compensate that, most EU countries created the CfDs (Contract for difference) system. A minimum price is guaranteed by contract to the investor and the State pay the difference when the price are too low. The UK did it (and it costs billions) [2], France did it (and it costs billions) [3] and Germany is doing it [4].
So we are subsidizing and using public money to create an artificial profitability on top of an industry that we know is not profitable due to overcapacity caused by bad public policies.
Considering that this overcapacity is also reducing the profitability of nuclear powerplants in the first place (because nuclear is CAPEX based).
The pain is triple: The final consumer pays (1) the cost of the Grid restructuring for renewable (2) the cost of the Cfds to maintain the system alive due to overcapacity (3) the additional €/MWh to the now reduced profitability of the historical production means.
So yes, at the end, the price increase.
And it is what we see currently everywhere in Europe: Electricity price are increasing continuously even if Solar/Wind LCOE is lower than ever.
[1]: https://ibb.co/6cf99PfZ
[2]: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/another-record-year-cfd-s...
[3]: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/euro...
[4]: https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/germany-to-reset-gove...
I don’t know about the particulars of the EU schemes, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Elsewhere in the world, Australia is saving money due to the rollout of renewables [1]. So is the UK [2] 3. A billion in march alone.
1 https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/record-battery... 2 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/28/wind-pow... 3 https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-wind-and-solar-s...
The CfDs pay either party the difference. Their effect is to make the cost of that electricity guaranteed, it's actually a remarkably cost effective mechanism.
The subsidy is that different technologies secure a premium on the CfD. For a UK solar farm the strike price most recently was £65 per MWh. In case you were wondering no, nobody will run a gas power plant for £65 per MWh, even before Trump's war spiked price 50-100%
Yes, the offshore wind farms are significantly more expensive than a solar CfD, their strike prices were close to £100 and for that much money (adjusting for inflation) you could definitely get interest from gas plants, especially before the war - but now we're into the weeds about platform diversity. A Middle East war seems like a particularly stupid time to insist we shouldn't desire diversity...
Because of how summer works, this "But solar energy is expensive, gas is cheaper" is going to take a break for a few months because it will seem very silly, but it won't go far, expect it back in autumn.
Yeah, but solar is "whenever I want to deliver" electricity, not "when I need electricity". Not the same product.
For wind this makes a little bit of sense, but for solar "whenever I want to deliver" is largely once per day as regular as clockwork for several hours and that means you can bridge with BESS.
You can already see it in charts, initially BESS shifts some of that peak midday sun energy to evening usage where it's worth more to us, but gradually competition drives down that evening price and so the BESS cuts deep into the night chasing those higher prices. It's most exaggerated in Australia today, where the reason the power is relatively cheap when you wake up before dawn isn't that somehow coal is less expensive at night - it is because much of that is solar power from yesterday and if they don't sell it to you now for whatever price they can get they've wasted a whole cycle, 'cos the sun, with free power, is coming up like it or not.
the last offshore wind auction was 90, and that beat gas at 40% even before the war. https://electrek.co/2026/01/14/uk-offshore-wind-record-aucti...
The next one in july should be interesting!
Couldn't ask for better unintended outcomes from that Iran war than to fast track deployment of renewable and nuclear energy.
Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds.
Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...
Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.
The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
Saying gas has relatively little emissions reminds me of the joke german car manufacturers are making about their latest combustion cars using relatively little fuel ('hocheffizienzverbrenner'). It's marginal gains. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-... Gas is 200gCO2e/kWh, plain old diesel is 260. Better than nothing but not going to make a big dent
Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)
GP is saying gas has relatively little emissions in this scenario because we wont use it much total in a year. Not because its cleaner.
All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.
Interesting fact: Belgium's neighbor Germany has commenced a search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste indefinitely in the 1970s. Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one.
All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.
The search is not expected to conclude before 2040 at the very earliest.
This is such a non problem, here is the waste from the entire french nuclear production ever (the red cube): https://www.discoverthegreentech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023...
Meanwhile I've been filtering the german coal byproducts with my lungs, and paying my electricity 2-3x more per kwh than the french
Yep. The anti-nuclear group's narrative is always that "but no one wants that in their backyard..." but my god if only most voters realize that the waste from their whole state/country can literally fit in one single backyard.
That’s only the high-level radioactive waste. There is also the intermediate-level with long life radioactive waste that is problematic. Overall you’re right, it’s much less of a concern than many people seem to think, but no point in downplaying it.
Yup, nuclear waste also includes all the hazmat suits and apparatus used at the site, all the fabrics and plastics that have built up sufficient levels of radiation, fluids and chemicals that can’t be treated, vehicles and equipment, irradiated concrete and structural materials…
Is that the real location or a mere simulation of size? If it's the former I wonder why close to the water? I'd understand if it was a nuclear reactor...maybe for cooling purposes but only for storing the waste? I guess it's just a size simulation, although if it were reality maybe the though is: Oceans are big enough to dilute the whole thing in case it breaks...as a watersports and ocean fan that makes me sad
How much of that waste is needed for a dirty bomb?
Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
Me neither.
BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive? The prices for consumers were still raised
> Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
That's a very dumb point actually, without nuclear Ukraine would be in a much tougher situation energy wise. They're getting their shit fucked regardless, and they seemingly have 15 active reactors producing energy right now, if russians wanted to blow them up they would be long gone.
> BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive?
So what? Energy is a national security matter, electricity is a service, subsidies are fine. Btw these prices are inflated because of European wide electricity schemes (or scams, depending on how you want to see it)
Even if germany got free, unlimited and non polluting electricity right now they'd need 50+ years to make up for how much pollution they released compared to france since ww2
The French government have been able to safely store actual nuclear weapons without incident, so I'm sure they can do just fine with a few barrels of nuclear waste.
So you want to guard nuclear waste by the military just like nuclear weapons or what is your point?
Yes obviously. Its a trivial amount of waste generated over 60 years, less than the size of a football field. I'm pretty sure a football field can be guarded.
"Fears" is the correct word. See also: Radiophobia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
Reality, on the other hand, is that nuclear power is what keeps the lights on in Ukraine in this war, and Ukraine is looking to expand.
The ARENH program is not a subsidy, it is, in fact, a reverse subsidy. It requires EDF to sell electricity cheaply to its competitors.
most of Ukraine's ren infra is destroyed or conquered by russia. Zaporozhie is in cold shutdown. Thousands died from dam collapse caused by russia.
Waste is irrelevant for bombs due to parasitic isotopes. You clearly have zero idea about the topic.
France pays no subsidies(yet, epr2 is another topic). In fact EDF was forced to pay a tax till this year called arenh to subsidize competition. This year that tax was replaced by another tax. Many read the law wrongly about 70eur. It's not that EDF will get guaranteed CFD. It's that EDF will be forced to pay EXTRA tax IF it sells above that limit. French prices dropped both in 2025 and now in 2026. French households have lower prices vs german ones per eurostat.
Basically all your statements are nonsense antinuclear rambling
Interesting fact: Finland just built one, for €1 billion.
How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US:
"The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[6]" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Some German state governments even made this explicit, stating that they would not allow a repository to be designated until the German nuclear exit was finalized in their official coalition agreements.
Another nice little trick was changing the language to require the "best possible" site, rather than a suitable one. Sounds innocuous, but anyone with a bit of experience in algorithms know that in theory, this actually makes the task impossible, because how can you definitively prove that there isn't an even better site that you haven't looked at yet?
In practice it has made the process of finding a site incredibly lengthy, difficult and expensive. It doesn't help that the BASE, the Germany federal agency for nuclear waste has been completely taken over by the Green Party, so there is no interest in actually finding a site, and they spend almost their entire budget every year on spreading anti-nuclear propaganda.
> if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The german government and institutions were (are?) full of pro gas (pro russian/russian tied) people who spend decades in the government before bouncing of to russia to work for petro companies. It's hard enough when you try, so imagine how hard it is if you don't even try
> Gerhard Schröder, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, has worked extensively for Russian state-owned energy companies since leaving office.
Isn't it rumored that many of the activists who lobbied (successfully) for Germany to shut down all of their nuclear power plants were being unwittingly funded by Russian interests?
Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine.
It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse, and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste, plus a large amount of contaminated salt mine material, sitting above ground right where it started.
I reckon they would rather not want a repeat of this.
1. Asse does not house spent reactor fuel
2. It was an old mine turned into a research mine. It was never intended for actual use.
3. The waste there is mostly medical and low-level other waste like gloves.
4. It is actually safe where it is, moving it is another giant waste of time and money whose sole intent is to stoke fear and create costs.
1. Does it matter where the radioactive material comes from? It still represents the ability of storing nuclear waste. 2. Never intended, but still used as such [0] 4. Seems like most experts disagree here
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140118011319/http://www.haz.de...
Why the hell did they build this in a former salt mine with known water intrusion.
They didn't. It's a research mine and never stored any spent fuel.
asse was never intended to be final repository. It was experimental repository without a plan to extract the waste if their experiment goes sideways. Onkalo does account for such factors, hence the name- final repository
Most of the waste in asse is from medical and research sectors
This sounds like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. There are certain types of reactors that can reuse uranium to further reduce its half life to around 6000 years so the one million years legal requirement is an unreasonable target.
Any material that is still radioactive after a hundred years wasn’t that deadly to begin with. There is a strong link between ”hotness” and short half-lifes, fast-decaying extra spicy isotopes are..fast-decaying
Actually, those materials can be MUCH more radioactive in the beginning compared to 'conventional' nuclear waste, the half-life is just so short that you can let them sit for a couple of decades and then deal with it.
IIR, those "certain types of reactors" and their supporting infrastructure are (1) very handy for producing weapons-grade nuclear material, and (2) extremely difficult to operate (historically) without sundry environmental disasters.
Which problems make them considerably hotter - politically - than no-reuse type reactors.
That's an argument in favour of using such reactors in the EU, isn't it?
We need EU-level nuclear missiles and we need them fast. We also need EU-level nuclear-powered submarines and maybe carrier groups.
Most of the "danger" from nuclear waste passes in a few years as the most radioactive isotopes decay quickly (which is obvious when you think about it).
Interestingly the US/UK/USSR dumped loads of nuclear waste in the ocean in the 1950s-70s and I recently read that there was basically no trace detectable of any of it.
If you have more info on that, I'd be interested. They're currently trying to keep it geologically stable and far away from any water that might disperse it, but then dispersion by just putting tiny tiny quantities per m³ of sea water sounds... almost too easy to be true tbh. Would be interesting to read about. (Surely they've looked into this and found that stable geology was the better solution, rather than that it's just more palatable to the public!)
And do you know, even if there's no trace today (sufficient dilution), if it also didn't have an impact on the ecosystem in the area at the time?
Yes, nuclear power regulations are unreasonably strict because that was the method we used to soft-ban it.
I wonder where they store coal waste.
In their lungs.
On ash and slag heaps that are incredibly toxic to their surroundings. Current research suggests that living in the vicinity of such a heap has an immense effect on cancer rates.
> Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one.
Pah! We have a lot of those places but excessive federalism has every German state blocking any concrete plan.
Dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years is pure fearmongering. There are loads of chemicals, metals and other nasty stuff that are dangerous forever and also need to be stored somewhere safely, indefinitely.
I personally live close to a commercial Asbestos dump (an old mine) and absolutely nobody cares about it. It's so unimportant it doesn't even have a Wikipedia article.
Yet the second radioactive waste is concerned (even if it's just old rubble) everybody seems to lose their minds and refuses to even think rational.
The most bureaucratic thing ever done... search for a place to store something for 56 years. still not done
What if they dump it in a trench in the ocean, what will actually happen? The ocean is very large...
Why would it need to be safe for "hundreds of thousands of years" in the first place? Do we not think we would find some other use of nuclear waste within the next decades/centuries, and if not, just send it to space?
> if not, just send it to space
So what do you think is going to happen when (not "if") one of those rockets has a malfunction and blows up?
Terrorists already have a use case
Naive question - why couldn't we just launch this nuclear waste into ... space ?
> All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.
Some was stored underground in the past with bad results because the former mines were unstable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_re...
> they have not yet found one.
Meaning no region can be selected by a politician with out committing political suicide.
I think it's the other way around:
Rejecting nuclear waste site is an easy and almost cost-free way of garnering browny points with the part of your electorate that has been indoctrinated into massive radiophobia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
It is almost cost-free because in reality, nuclear waste is so low in quantity and so easy/unproblematic to store "temporarily" that it just isn't a real problem. Politicians know this. So they can play this game.
And once pressure builds enough you dig a hole in the ground like you always could have and like the Fins just did and start storing.
Yes, putting it in a swing state is a non-starter. But putting the waste in a solid red or blue state? Makes perfect sense.
I was referring to Germany and I am not aware, that a concept such as "swing states" exists there. Is declaring a suitable place for nuclear waste an issue in the USA as well?
they havent found one bc they dont want to. Otherwise they would approve storing in say, herfa neurode
Everyone focuses on the safety of power production, and I totally get that and think it's important, but the mining and enrichment of uranium should also be considered. Nuclear "disasters" aren't just 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. There are plenty of other disasters that aren't power plants.
Growing up in the USA, my home town was contaminated with uranium, thorium, and radium due to a nearby uranium processing plant that later became a superfund site. It was in the soil, the water, and sometimes even the air. I knew far too many people who've died of cancers, and I, like many from that area, have thyroid issues from exposure.
Solar and wind also require many materials extracted through mining, you can't really get away from mining whatever you do.
considering nuclear needs least mining, i doubt effects are too big per kwh vs alternatives.
where was this?
There are a small number of such sites in the US. One that fits closely with this description is a legacy of the Manhattan Project: Coldwater Creek, MO. The Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined a lot of uranium, and waste handling was about what you would expect given the prerogatives of the 1940's and the Cold War. They carried on refining for power plants after WW2.
Obviously, fuel refining hasn't just carried on like that, in the US and Europe at least. But it's one of many handy cudgels to use whenever folks get excited about nuclear.
It carried on until at least 1989, and the effects were present majorly until around 2000, and the superfund site was completed in 2006. So, like, pretty darn recent on the scale of a human lifetime.
That's all correct; a long tail of consequences.
Going in the opposite historical direction is the other side of that ledger. The actual plant in question was shut down in 1957. The AEC stepped in years earlier to triage the operation, after actually establishing formal exposure limits in 1950, which didn't exist prior to that point. Before that, the company itself had hired staff to control waste and detect contamination. They had to build their own survey equipment because there were no commercial tools available. The worst of the actual contamination was actually incurred prior to that; 1942-1945, when the gloves were entirely off building bombs.
The lessons have been learned. It's tragic and shameful history, but not terribly relevant to modern practice in nuclear power.
The one that injured me and those where I lived was not Mallinckrodt Chemical Works. It was Fernald, and it was active until ‘89.
I see that here a viewpoint is widely reflected that we can substitute nuclear with solar/wind. And maybe today it could be feasible in certain areas albeit not always economical. What this viewpoint misses, is the fact that we will need an increasingly more power, as we always did, and I am certain that if we would have a chance to go 100 years into the future, power demand will be so high that our current abilities to supply power via nuclear and solar/wind combined will not be enough to cover the demand.
Nuclear energy is pure economic madness in a context where wind and solar power are generating a surplus of electricity. Today, May 1, electricity prices in Europe are in some cases at the technical minimum of minus €500/MWh.
Thermal power generation, which is difficult to control, is completely unnecessary in an environment where we have negative electricity prices practically every day from March to October. In Europe, we need rapidly controllable energy sources—obviously more storage capacity.
Due to the many hours during which electricity prices are close to zero, the economically viable full-load hours of a nuclear power plant are reduced to barely 3,000 hours per year, effectively tripling the real levelized cost of electricity (LOCE). In addition to the high costs of nuclear power plants, there is also the enormous expense incurred by the government for military and police security at the facilities.
Since the government prioritizes nuclear power, this leads to heavily manipulated electricity prices, with homeowners with solar panels being among the biggest losers, as they are required to feed electricity into the grid but are effectively paid the full negative prices (usually via weighted average pricing methods)
I would counter that being reliant on gas and oil from our enemies as we currently are is madness.
I think I'm super pro nuclear everything now. See the new Russian built nuclear plant in Bangladesh. Crazy populated country currently not able to import adequate fossil fuels due to the strait conflict.
Nuclear energy is a God send if managed with extreme care.
I love that you mention 'extreme care'. I was enthralled with this look inside a plant and the operations involved. Truly a sight to behold. And extreme care is not an overstatement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0afQ6w3Bjw
Good. It's time we realised that we need a good strong stable power grid and clean nuclear energy is absolutely going to be a massive part of this.
I'm always wondering how long it will take for popular sentiment to finally shift. So many years of things like Blinky the fish in the Simpsons really did a number on our shared consciousness.
I think the series of actual nuclear disasters from the 1950s to 2000s - plus the fear of a hot nuclear war in the ‘70s - had more impact on the collective consciousness than The Simpsons.
Yes. A nuclear power plant should be considered a national treasure, like a mine or hydro power plant, or any other large scale resource.
To demolish a functional nuclear power facility is pure lunacy.
It is not lunacy. Polish professor Krzysztof Meissner (https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~meissner/home.html) in one of the interviews called the whole process of turning off nuclear power plants as result "of the pressure of the other forces". It was well crafted plan developed by Germany and Russia. According to this plan Germany suppose to be the hub for gas imported from Russia over Baltic Pipe - man in the middle for all UE countries. War on the Ukraine and Baltic Pipe being destroyed by "unknown people" makes this plan obsolete.
Baltic Pipe is not destroyed (and it goes in the other direction and not even through Germany).
Nord Stream, on the other hand...
I am sorry to hear that Belgium also has been sold out by its political elite.
especially when it is NOT an RBMK
I'll feel even more sad when I drive past San Onfre on the 5 now
If you think that's lunacy, let me add some extra info on top of it: It was the green party that lead the closure, and then replaced it with gas power plants.
If we want decarbonation, nuclear power is inevitable until today. We can't rely on renewables for stable power for the masses. Other possible solutions for the future: hydrogen with it's problems and eFuels that need x4 energy to produce. But we said we have enough cheap solar.
There's a very dark scenario where for some reason or another (all out nuclear war or asteroid hit) sunlight is blocked, in which case having stable base load energy production from nuclear would be very useful. I know this is an unlikely scenario and hopefully it never happens, but it's always good to think about tail risks like these.
If sunlight is blocked the amount of people who die due to starvation from crop failures will probably more than make up for the difference in lost solar power energy. That is to say, we'll have much larger issues than a stable power grid to contend with.
If we directed worldwide LED production all into artificial light for farming, and grew whatever was most calorie-efficient, I think we could theoretically feed every human alive if the sun was blocked out tomorrow.
Obviously that isn't what would happen. The poor would starve whilst the rich still fed cows to eat steak.
Did a bit of maths and this isn't true - worldwide LED production would only feed ~1%.
It doesn't necessarily take a full blockage of sunlight. Extreme weather conditions that create multi week collapse in solar outputs is enough to create grid stress, if one is totally dependent on solar and 24hr batteries.
The world doesn't even have the foresight of doing something basic, like mitigating against fuel crisis scenario, let alone what you have suggested.
Volcanic winters are far more frequent than catastrophic asteroid blasts. Disregarding a volcanic winter possibility and its impact is like disregarding the possibility of a pandemic.
> Volcanic winters are far more frequent...
True. But if you're working in public policy in a vaguely-democratic country, and trying to get anything useful done - then the public feels vastly more familiar with "giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs" than with volcanic winters. So, just like "Zombie Apocalypse (wink)" disaster prep - you go with a "close enough" scenario which lets you achieve some actual preparation.
536 and the Norse stories about the Fimbulwinter ought to be argument enough.
For the 1% who are so interested in science & history & such that learning about those would not be an issue, plausibly yes.
For the 99% - who don't have the time, or interest, or attention span, or cultural identification, or whatever, to sit through all that - NO.
Is your priority further education of the 1%? Or to actually get some large-scale public disaster prep done?
Surely you must realize that the fuel for nuclear power plants is not more freely available than sunlight. In the event of "all out nuclear war or asteroid hit", you're not getting those shipments from Kazakhstan.
I just want Belgium to go all-in on renewables, we [already have a pretty good electricity production make-up](https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/energy/electricity-product...) but we're still [too dependent on oil](https://www.iea.org/countries/belgium/energy-mix).
Hopefully the current energy crisis is a wake up call.
> want Belgium to go all-in on renewables
I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil fuels.
IIRC those old Belgian reactors got in the way of more renewables for some time. They provided a very cheap base load that seemed hard to modulate, which meant that even cheap renewables couldn't really compete on price. If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
> If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
It's not new, it's that PWRs have to be built and operated with that capability (load following), which most nations didn't bother with until pretty recently because it does have a cost in complexity & efficiency. But France has done it that way pretty much the entire time.
> Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
Nukes with load following aren't peakers: PWRs can modulate output by 2~5%/minute (depending on their exact design and operating mode) between 30 and 100%. They're not reactive enough to compensate for wind, although they can work with the daily and seasonal patterns of solar pretty well.
The replacement for peakers are mostly batteries (hydro and pumped hydro where that's available but usually where available it's already done)
Depending on the country's situation, you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright. But the transition is non-negotiable at this point.
> you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright
The EU has north of €1 trillion into new gas infrastructure. That's €1 trillion of commercial interests with a vested interest in negotiating the non-negotiable.
Using fossil fuels for transition is fine, particularly if it's replacing coal with natural gas. But building LNG terminals and installing gas turbines because ding dongs in Dusseldorf got scared of nukes a quarter of a continent away is a great way to raise the continent's energy prices, volatility and carbon continent.
I'm not disagreeing
Compared to other countries I've lived in, Belgium doesn't do too bad of a job in promoting 'green energy'. Although I've not lived there for some years, they used to subsidize things like solar panels on roofs (at least when my parents installed them 20-ish years ago). And there are 'green energy' companies as far as I'm aware, so you don't have to stick with the larger energy providers.
That said, my information is outdated.
Belgian greens are remarkably less crazy than German "greens".
Even someone like De Sutter didn't come across as crazy in the European Parliament -- but the German ones, meine Götter!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_De_Sutter
That is about production. The story that you don't get from these graphs is that Belgium is highly dependent on imported energy because the production is just too low.
just FYI - unfortunately HN doesn't have markup like reddit so your hyperlinking doesn't work
Thanks, I'll leave it as sucky markdown :D
the choice here was nuclear or new gas from engie
For years, even leading up to starting the decommission of the power plants, Engie has been saying it's literally impossible to reverse the decision. And now that we're 2 years into the decommission, suddenly it is possible after all.
How is that possible? And what are the consequences?
They said it was impossible for them to reverse the decision. Nothing has changed; they won’t be in charge of that. The state will.
A significant reason of the “impossibility” of reversing the decision is the regulations around nuclear. Take the problem of micro tears in the concrete. Engie could have maintained the concrete. Because the plant was scheduled for decommission, they did not. So there will be small tears in the concrete. The law does not allow those small tears. Repairing the concrete now is too expensive.
The plant will be owned by the state so now the state has two options: (1) invest a truckload of money to repair the concrete or (2) change the law to allow small tears which have virtually no security consequences anyway.
We all know that the state will choose option (2) but there would be far more opposition if they did so while the plant were owned by a private company that is making profit rather than owned by the state which is operating at a deficit.
Engie was lying. They just didn’t want to be in the nuclear business anymore.
Everyone is scared of nuclear energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Every country should invest massively, nuclear for energy and defense, to eventually protect themselves and solar for energy security.
Good news: we will leave oil
Bad news: according to the discussions here on HN it appears that there is no consensus on what the good mix of renewable/nuclear is. Therefore us, citizens, will be manipulated by politics.
The manipulation risk is real, but it usually comes from pretending there is a painless answer
Decommissioning always seemed odd absent either specific dangers or higher costs of operating than renewables. For new construction of course the costs shift dramatically, but existing plants that can continue to run would seem to provide exactly the legroom that enables more rapid expansion of renewables. Less time spent backfilling and exposure to both market and geopolitical forces of other energy sources, eg when there are disruptions of the sort going on now.
I‘m very interested in the financials of this decision. Nuclear plants are designed for base loads but are way more expensive than solar and wind energy. The losses will increase the costs of energy.
Baseline energy is incredibly important, and often not factored into the "cost" comparisons.
Especially true now with the explosive growth of data center and AI workloads.
Actually, nuclear is not way more expensive.
And already-built nuclear is pretty much the cheapest power you can get.
It's cheap because we are offsetting the cost if its ultimate pollution onto future generations. We do this for everything else, and nuclear is our best chance for a liveable planet - if we don't want to make the slightest effort to give up on our comfort. But we have the belief that humanity will be able to manage nuclear waste for the next 100k years while we don't know how the pyramids were built... and it was only 3k years ago.
nobody is offsetting anything, it's accounted, please dont spread this tired russian propaganda nonsense https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... Or search what's onkalo. Or what we do with arsenic/cadmium/lead waste
That cost has a lot to do with amortizing the construction costs of the plant. I expect that just running a plant is a lot cheaper than that.
This is about *not* decommissioning working plants.
Amen - we need more sense coming from European politicians.
It really helps that the current European Parliament is not as insane as the previous one... and that both Merkel and Scholz are gone.
The environmentalist put a giant scam on Western nations
Nuclear energy is one of the few technologies that have big tent support. How many things can we get both the Rs and Ds to support? Build build build!!
Unfortunately that support doesn’t seem to extend to making the process take less than decades and cost less than gazillions due to overregulation so there’s no incentive to build.
Lip service support. Nukes are too expensive and too slow to build. in the 10 years it would take to get one producing power from today, they’ll be even more cost obsolete by the relentless progress of renewables and battery. When leaders see the bill, they baulk.
keen to keep an eye on this. it implies restarting shut down reactors, all the while a transfer of know how to different ownership.
No Belgiums goverment is gonna investigate if it is worth to take them over for free from engie and run then for longer and maybe reopen some, but the study first needs to show if it is viable.
The interesting part will be whether Belgium can turn this into a coherent long-term plan
This doesn't seem like a terribly great idea, for several reasons. Belgium is nearly bankrupt, with a government deficit that the EU is already giving us grief for, in spite of some of the highest tax rates in the world. That same government hasn't exactly managed any of its semi-public companies particularly well: the national telco is for shit, postal service is nearly bankrupt, railways are mismanaged and underfunded, etc.
The reactors in question have been shut down by virtue of being too old (1974, 1975, 1982, 1985). Some of them have cracks in the reactor vessels. Maintenance has been lacking. There was also a case of sabotage which was never resolved.
Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
Belgium’s government might not be in its best shape. But still the logical conclusion in my humble opinion isn’t “let’s shutting down the one power source that actually works.”
Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.
At some point reality has to trump ideology.
Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.
>Some of them have cracks in the reactor vessels.
If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.
>Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.
> That same government hasn't exactly managed any of its semi-public companies particularly well: the national telco is for shit, postal service is nearly bankrupt, railways are mismanaged and underfunded, etc.
In fairness, it's not the same gov that nuked the public service than the one in power now. But on the flip side, the selloff of public services to private sector was a success and achieved the stated goals: Destroy it from the inside and use that as an excuse for more liberalization.
> Belgium is nearly bankrupt
can anyone jumpstart me on this, since when is belgium bankrupt?
> since when is belgium bankrupt?
It's not.
Belgium is rated investment grade by all three agencies [1]. The cost to insure its debt implies a <2% chance of default in the next 5 years [2], lower than America [3]; the IMF assesses its "overall risk of sovereign stress...as moderate" [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_ra...
[2] https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/cds-historical-data/bel...
[3] https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/cds-historical-data/uni...
[4] https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/cr/2025/en...
Bankrupt is a politically loaded term, but they have very high debt and taxes, political gridlock (it is very divided among French and Flemish linguistic lines, plus all the other traditional left/right polarization), and it is all but impossible to make reforms. IIRC there was no sitting government for 500 days at some point. It's also got all the classic problems of an aging population.
Belgium is a curious country that was formed via historical quirks around religion (many Flemish/Dutch speaking catholics not wanting to be part of protestant Netherlands, but that is a gross oversimplification and the history is very complex - read up on wikipedia if curious). Historically the Flemish were the poorer part of the country, but after deindustrialization the story flipped as most of the industry was in the French parts. The result is bitterness that holds the whole country back.
Good job.
Now detail three strengths Belgium posses.
If you hyper focus on the problems, you’ll be completely oblivious to the solutions.
They asked if it was bankrupt, not for a feel good or balanced essay.
That being said, Belgium can be and is wonderful. I'm a geopolitical nerd and I loved touring the WW1 battlefields.
Ghent is one of my favourite mid-sized cities in the world! It's got some of the best gothic architecture around, an amazing and creative beer scene, and is not overrun with tourists the way Bruges is. I was there for a conference (I'm Canadian) with a colleague who grew up in Paris. He literally said "If I knew Belgium had this, I would have visited far more often". Belgium gets a bad rap because it got so hammered in both world wars and if you just visit Brussels you're left with the impression that it has little history outside of one preserved tourist block.
You still didn’t answers the question.
I’ll get the ball rolling.
Belgium is tiny about 30,000 square kilometres.
But it produces a metric fuck tonne of food.
You only got to come up with two more now. C’mon, you can do eeeeit!
Also…
> They asked
I don’t understand this approach.
You’re on an open discussion board.
Yeah, they asked. Now I’m asking something.
Or do you expect the chair to bang their gavel and tell me I’m out of order.
It isn't, but it is inching closer.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w...
Debt to GDP ratio of 107%, only Greece, Italy, and France are worse. Even Spain and Portugal are better! It is frightening how many member states are over 80% when they are supposed to be at 60% or better.
I had the same thought. Even we have a high debt ratio (near 107% of GDP), we can still pay this debt.
If you want to. Like Italy and France, there is no sign visible from the outside that you are.
They’ve not been defaulting on government bonds, therefore they’re paying the debt.
It's fine to shit on things but I have service almost everywhere and I take the train often with usually few issues aside from works on the tracks. Let's not blow up issues, it takes away from what we should focus on.
Well... there are worse places than Belgium for sure, and as a foreign citizen who has been living in Belgium for about a decade I think it's a reasonably well functioning country for west European standards, but I wouldn't use either SNCB/NMBS as an acceptable example as I'm not sure I have even had a single train be on time in the last few years (well I don't take the train much anymore for obvious reasons, but I still have to do it a few times a year) and cell service is absolutely not as good as it should be for such a small and dense country.
And my experience is only with Flanders which is basically one large city, I can only imagine how it is in the less populated areas of Wallonia or Limburg.
But I absolutely think that nuclear is a good option for such a small and dense country. Taking over the plants as they are nearly decommissioned is a stupid move though, but you can't expect anything sensible from this government.
That's fair, I have plenty of international coworkers and I think (and from what I hear from them), that Belgium is decently welcoming, at least in large cities.
I do take the train quite often as I said, anything on large axes is usually fine (Brussels - Charleroi, Brussels - Antwerp, etc) but yeah smaller lines are usually struggling some more.
I wish we had more ambitious governments in general, not only in terms of energy but also in the (bio)tech scene, which used to be touted as our great strength (we do have a lot of pharma companies though).
Agreed.
Running ancient nuclear power plants in one of the most densely populated countries does not seem wise.
These plants have been running with phase-out in mind for the last 20 years.
This is bad news because those are some of the most risky plants operating in Western Europe. Many, many safety issues over the years, quite a few of which were waved off from being properly fixed because they were going to be decommissioned anyway. Now whoever owns them will have to do all that back maintenance first. Or not...
Both Doel and Tihange have a long, long list of issues.
Better a potential bad outcome than directly measurable and ongoing harm, though
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-... with the different energy mixes at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/. I know which european country's energy mix I'd choose if I could just pick one at will (with the caveat that running flat countries on hydro is not going to work, so that's sadly not ubiquitously available)
Long term, sure, also France has to transition. Uranium isn't infinite. But an existing reactor? Let's save lives and buy time where we can please :|
Almost everybody that trumpets how fantastic France is doing with their nuclear fleet has no clue how they are really doing. You can start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
Oh, and good chance that in the summer months (when demand is pretty high, especially in the South of France) they may have to shut down again because of a lack of cooling capacity. France was ahead of the game in the 70's, but should have invested a lot more than they did since then. That they installed more than they needed also didn't help, especially not because the energy produced is sold on the open market at a net loss just to keep the reactors operating.
And last but not least: they have an ever growing waste problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste_management_in_Fr...
The cost of which (besides the maintenance costs mentioned above) has not been accounted for in the electricity pricing. If they did, they'd be running at an even higher loss. Probably the next generation will be presented the bill for that.
It is a really bad idea to half-ass this. A nuclear disaster in Europe would likely kill off any positive sentiment the public has for nuclear power.
And that’s ignoring all the physical effects of the disaster.
They had so much cheap electricity they had lamps on highways. This is pure civilization regress.
Glad to see a country be less foolish.
Thank you for the sanity.
Everytime this comes up, HN is becoming more and more an X-like echo chamber: Touting nukes as the solution to a spike-load problem in a densely populated area, and the waste disposal as a solved problem (by externalizing the cost).
Meanwhile the prices dropped further than ever, 20kW peak with 20kWh batteries for EUR 10k, which provides >95% self-sufficiency in a 2p Household and lets you sell more than 80% of the yield (though prices are already very low when the sun is shining). And this is without an EV yet. Please enlighten me: Why are we still having these discussions? I don't see why that wouldn't scale in the US as well, what's the status with flexible energy pricing?
If anything, we need to build fast, flexible power plants, but their lobby groups are well oiled already without our support.
> If anything, we need to build fast, flexible power plants
And what are those?
Industrial uses plus those missing 5% are the problem.
I didn't know there were so many nuclear engineers on HN.
What about all the solar and battery engineers?
What do you mean, I watched that HBO show, so I'm an expert now.
Praise the Lord
I wonder if there will one say be an autobiography that reveals the russian hand behind the naive EU fossilsmaxxing.
Not a big surprise, eventually we are going to move to nuclear one way or another
Feels like a bailout. Belgium’s playbook is simple: skip maintenance, let it decay, then replace it on the taxpayer’s dime.
No, it was a deliberate strategy from the green party that were very anti-nuclear. They replaced it with gas power plants. And if you think this is a joke, no it isn't.
I understand the "Realpolitik" here, but ...
> "This government chooses safe, affordable, and sustainable energy. With less dependence on fossil imports and more control over our own supply," he wrote on X.
Really? So nuclear power plants are suddenly the new "clean" hype? Because if Belgium is stating "more control over our own supply", can we mention a little something THAT BELGIUM HAS TO IMPORT URANIUM? So the "own supply" here is ... what exactly? Besides, I question the "nuclear is now clean" campaign that Leyen is doing. She is the ultimate lobbyist. It is also strange how the EU says "russian energy is bad", but then is silent when uranium is imported into the EU from Russia. We are here being lied to by these lobbyists/politicians. And a few make a lot of money, at the expense of the great majority. Why were renewables barely strategically expanded? China did so. Why are democracies so incompetent nowadays?
I found this source about Belgium imports of uranium [1]. The partner "World" is about 50% of the total. These data are from 2023.
Maybe something changed in 2024 because [2] "Belgian nuclear plants no longer run on uranium from Russia". It ends with "Engie does not disclose how many different contracts were concluded and with which suppliers, but does say it obtained a sufficient geographical spread of its supply, Belga News Agency reports." So who knows.
[1] https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/BEL/yea...
[2] https://www.brusselstimes.com/1080337/belgian-nuclear-plants...
The most important question is: who the hell decided to do such a stupid thing and in the name of what. When we have an answer maybe we can look on other ideas the same people figured out and also rethink them.
Say, sorting thrash. EU new idea is to make Europeans to sort thrash into 12 separate beans. So what that all trash goes through sorting process before being dumped, and there are very modern and efficient sorting robots that use AI, etc. that can do sorting much better than any human.
So, maybe, just maybe it is better to invest more into new technologies, instead of turning Europeans into wastes sorting machines.
And this is only one more example where EU countries are doing something plain idiotic, nevertheless, like in the great Buñuel's movie "The Exterminating Angel", nobody is able to admit that there is something stupid going on and it is enough to open the doors and walk away.
> most important question is: who the hell decided to do such a stupid thing and in the name of what
Short answer: Russians and Germans. The former had influence in the latter. And the latter gained a measure of economic command over the continent. (With its export and energy model under shock, that influence is near its post-unification nadir right now.)
I'm glossing over anti-nuclear national politics, as well as the genuine fiscal pressure of capex-heavy power sources like nukes (versus opex-heavy ones like gas). But broadly speaking, take Russian influence in Germany out of the picture, or have one other large fiscally responsible economy going into the Eurozone crisis, and I doubt this would have happened.
Sorting machines are in fact used in these countries. But most of the trash separating efforts were introduced many decades ago, long before the capabilities of modern AI systems.
I would be more worried about the fact that a lot of the garbage that first gets separated ends up getting burned anyway because recycling is not even possible in a lot of cases.
> EU new idea is to make Europeans to sort thrash into 12 separate beans
Do you have a source for this, or are you just making things up?
Where I live (Belgium) waste collectors pick up "rest" waste in relatively expensive trash bags weekly, PMD (plastic/metal/drink cartons) weekly, compostable waste every two weeks, cardboard monthly, and glass also monthly. Certain things we have to bring ourselves to a collection point (batteries) or recycling park where everything gets sorted even more specifically. I tend to go to the recycling park once every two or three months, the rest gets collected at home.
So the stuff they collect doesn't need 12 different kinds of bags/bins, and the (financial) incentives are correctly aligned. I think it's a good system and pretty convenient, but I'd wish they recycle & process the waste even better afterwards. But the hardest part – getting the population on board – seems to be well-established.
Recycling is difficult, some materials are relatively easy (aluminium cans, steel), some not so much (plastics f.e. tend to degrade, some materials are energy intensive to recover). Contaminants are a major issue that still need more public awareness. But we're going in the right direction.
Good.
Lets hope we see less policy which is at a very small step back basically: "we're competing to punch ourselves in the face the hardest" in the international arena.
I am surprised that a community like HN where a large percentage consists of developers is so positive about a nuclear power plant.
One bug could lead to severe damage to everything and everyone around a nuclear power plant. We see those kind of bugs on the front page daily.
In my opinion it is absolutely irresponsible to start them up in the first. I have seen too much to actually trust in people always getting their shit right.
We can engineer planes to function extremely reliably. And power plants operate in more predictable environments than planes.