So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe.
Look, I love nuclear technology. But time has moved on. The costs to rebuild this industry is astronomical and means we lose out on key-future technology like batteries.
Edit: But then there are bombs. And especially French love their nukes due national security. This is the only reason to keep pushing for nuclear, since Russia, the US and China are not gonna change direction on this either. But the very least we could do is be honest about it.
Edit 2: Changed from "World has moved on" to "time has moved on", since evidently China has invested for a good 2 decades to build their own fully functional nuclear-industry. Proving my point that it takes dedicated investment, network effects and scale to rebuild this industry. After all, they too want to mass produce nukes.
> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired.
This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?
1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
Yes, very few new NPP have been built in Europe recently. Quite a few have been built by Europe however.
The french company Framatome alone, with 18k employees, is actively building 2 EPR reactors in the UK (+ preliminary studies for 8 more), one reactor has been finished last year in France and recently multiple were built or being built in China, India, Russia (although I guess that might be canceled).
Its also already operating the 57 french reactors as well as operating reactors in South Africa, China, Korea, Belgium, Finland.
Sure, the industry will need to grow, but claiming it basically has to start from 0 is ludicrous.
> 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
> The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
The only reasonable conclusion from your logic is that it would have felt like an even worse idea to build nuclear reactors in the 1970's. Yet, using today's hindsight, it was a great idea.
Airbus would have been a terrible idea: no one had built commercial airliners before, and only the US had the know-how. Today, we know otherwise.
> Airbus would have been a terrible idea: no one had built commercial airliners before, and only the US had the know-how.
That's just plain false, Airbus started as a cooperation between a lot of european aerospace companies, which had different a lot of know-how in different fields. For example Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale, now Airbus) was the French part of the Concorde, they also had the Caravelle.
Well it made sense for France for multiple reasons even in 70s. France didn't trust / like Anglophone dominance in the world. They brutally kept their colonies, sometimes to the bitter end. The mistrust to US/UK hegemony and the strong sense of nationalism is the reason we have Ariane and Airbus programs. Henceforth, they also invested in their own nuclear program. To make small and cheaper nuclear weapons, you need plutonium which can only be created in reactors. Even with that knowledge they burned fossil fuels majorly before 70s.
France built majority of their nuclear reactors after 70s oil crisis. So it made sense to have independent resources for them. So they won't need to rely on other nations, some of which were their former colonies that hated them. They had two strong reasons to keep a nuclear base electricity generations.
> The only reasonable conclusion from your logic is that it would have felt like an even worse idea to build nuclear reactors in the 1970's. Yet, using today's hindsight, it was a great idea.
Consider opportunity costs. If all the public money that Europeans invested to nuclear (it started way before the 70s of course) was put into renewables/storage r&d, we would have had great renewables decades earlier, and by now would be swimming in it.
> The only reasonable conclusion from your logic is that it would have felt like an even worse idea to build nuclear reactors in the 1970's. Yet, using today's hindsight, it was a great idea.
If the competition was renewables and storage rather than plants running on imported oil during the oil crisis it would have been.
75% of all new capacity in TWh (I.e. adjusting for capacity factor.) globally are renewables and storage. There’s no need to swim against the river.
It is quite telling that you are spamming this entire submission with extremely strong opinions about how amazing nuclear power is, ignoring any contrary facts. Taking any mention of renewables close to a personal insult.
Then turning around and not understanding that ”TWh” is already adjusted for capacity factor.
In my eyes it is hard to take you seriously when you don’t comprehend even basic physical properties of our grid and energy systems. Let alone economics, timelines, opportunity cost etc.
Iter is a research project that Europe is a part of, along with the rest of the world. That has nothing to do with building power plants, at least not anytime soon.
We haven't built a reactor in a long time. So those EPRs being built are all way behind schedule and thus costing substantially more.
You can design whatever you want. Building one is a whole different story. That's not an opinion that's just what happened at the first 2 EPRs and Hinckley point isn't going great either
Yup. Europe can absolutely still build reactors, just not at a price that is economically competitive.
Olkiluoto 3 started regular production in 2023, taking 18 years to build at a cost of €11 billion (3x over budget).
Flamanville 3 started regular production in 2024, taking 17 years to build at a cost of €13.2 billion (4x over budget) or €19.1 billion including financing in 2015 prices.
Hinkley Point C (two reactors) is currently estimated to have its first unit come online around 2030, taking 14 years with total costs now estimated at £31-35 billion / €36–41 billion (2x over budget) in 2015 prices.
It would really be great to understand (rather than me guessing) China's rationale to build these plants, and also their safety.
They generate about 5% of their electricity with nuclear. That's a lot, but is it enough to power the country if other alternatives stop being viable (war, shortages, ...?) Maybe it's OK for them that in such a situation, they just turn off enough residential power to last through the night with nuclear and storage. z
Do they see the nuclear research as dual use? My understanding is that nuclear subs and ships do use entirely different nuclear plants. Maybe research into small modular reactors is more dual use. There's also use for those reactors if they really want to build moon bases.
Maybe at their cost of the plans (I heard ≈3B for a 1+GW plant), this is actually competitive with solar+storage. It's definitely competitive with western nuclear power plants, if they want to export in other developing markets.
Rather than being dual use I think it’s more that countries want to keep their strategic industrial capacity around in terms of the nuclear engineering expertise in firms and universities that can potentially be redirected if needed.
The problem is that we insist on building nuclear plants like cathedrals, when we need to build them like Model T Fords.
Small modular reactors need to be rolling out of a factory ready to go, so we can do large redundant arrays of them, put them on trains to transport them around, etc.
A nuclear power station making a couple MW should cost maybe a few million tops once we have the ability to make hundreds of them a year from a factory instead of creating these 20 year projects for gigantic facilities that are all bespoke
It’s far from certain that SMRs will end up having lower costs than large nuclear reactors. Maybe they will work out but there is a huge amount of hype.
Funny, the Finns are super happy with their "uneconomic" nuclear reactors. Current approval rating for nuclear is now 81%, up from 77% last year.
The UK is so disappointed by their HPC project (which is the most expensive nuclear reactor project in history, AFAIK), that they just completed the investment decision for the follow-up Sizewell-C, which will also be 2 UK-EPRs.
Oh, the guarantee price for HPC is the same as that for various off-shore wind-projects. So obviously economically uncompetitive. At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion. Which does put the cost of £41 billion into perspective, despite that being the most ridiculously over-time and over budget nuclear project in history.
Actually, Flamanville 3 did not start "regular" production in 2024, they were just given go-ahead to go to full power a few days ago. It was first grid-connected in 2024 and then started a lengthy ramp-up phase. It slowly coming online was the time for the Cour des Comptes to give its verdict, which was pretty damning.
Flamanville 3 was probably the worst run nuclear project in French history. And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
EDF is often accused of receiving heavy state subsides, with the implication that this is to keep the nuclear power plants going or subsidize nuclear electricity. It is true that EDF gets state subsidies. For their intermittent renewable projects. Ba-da-dum-tss. The nuclear party of their business is tremendously profitable, despite being forced to subsidize industry through the ARENH program.
Existing nuclear reactors produce incredibly cheap power. The German decision to stop theirs before coal should be considered an environmental crime.
Finns should be super happy with Nuclear since the cost overruns were overwhelmingly born by Areva (majority owned by the French state) which accumulated losses of €5.5 billion and went bust!
As a nuclear weapons power the UK has a national security interest to keep its nuclear industry around. It needs to build some reactors to do that, but given the prices of new nuclear I don't expect it to build more than the minimum necessary.
Hinkley Point C comes in at £92.50/MWh in 2012 prices (£128.90 in 2024 prices). At the last auction wind prices were £54.23/MWh in 2012 prices (£75.68/MWh 2024 prices).
Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas but that is still much cheaper than nuclear.
> Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas
Yes, let's just handwave those concerns away, it's not like the grid needs power 100% of the time or anything. Two weeks without wind? No problem, just burn gas :) It's so cheap, independent of foreign supply, doesn't leak out of pipes and isn't a huge environmental hazard at all.
Have you looked when they started construction and what their projected end date was?
Yes there are new ones but both of those are perfect examples of the lack of knowledge [1].
I'll quote:
> Many of the organisations chosen to work on the different parts of the plant did not have any experience in nuclear, and little understanding of the safety requirements.
We'll get there. But yes, we're rebuilding a lot of lost knowledge and paying for the teething issues.
Those are not really great construction examples, are they? Both projects took 15+ years to complete with huge cost overruns. And for those two "successful" projects, you can find 2 or 3 that failed.
Please adhere to the HN guidelines and refrain from this kind of language. We can discuss this more civilly.
But I'll answer what I can, assuming your are genuine.
> 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
10 reactors, 3 plants. (57 are currently operational)
I think this is a more American-centric comment than you realized... France had a bigger rollout in the 80's and a few from the 90's so there's another decade (*making this time key!*) before a slow decline. Also remember that France is a lot smaller than America so needs less power.
Not to mention, France exports a lot of electricity[0]. I want you to look pretty closely at that graph again. It says they exported 81.8TW this year. What's France's nuclear capacity? 380TW[1]. France exports about 15% of its total energy, more than all its hydro (it's next biggest source). You may be interested to see where that electricity goes....[2]
France can lose those reactors and be fine, Europe is a different story...
> 2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
4, In Russia. But France built 2 reactors in 2002.
> 3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
I don't have an answer to this but
> the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist
I can tell you that both France and the US are the biggest supporters of international aid in China's rollout. So the institutional knowledge exists and still progressing, albeit slower than before.
Besides, I'm not sure this fear even makes sense. What, China could "start from scratch" but "France" (or anywhere else) couldn't? What would make China so unique that such things couldn't be replicated elsewhere? This is a fallacy in logic making the assumption that once skills atrophy that they can never be restored or restore more slowly. If anything we tend to see skills restore far quicker from atrophy than from scratch! So why paint a picture of "give up"? Isn't that just making a self-fulfilling prophecy?
End of the day, it's just a big boiler; we invented it from scratch once, and it should be significantly easier to do it over again even if we do lose some knowledge. That said, the time to accelerate the industry really is now, before the situation gets any worse.
They also rely on imports of uranium - e.g. from Niger, which recently had quite the fallout with France.
It does not look to me at even a casual glance that French nuclear tech could fully work on its own. Similar for the UK.
It is not just about the experts, the supply chain too. Although, of course how much that matters in comparison is the question, since pretty much everything nowadays depends on some faraway place.
Uranium is very power dense. If there is a supply chain disruption, it is problematic but France keeps around at least 5 years worth of nuclear production, which gives it some time to react and adapt. Also, Uranium is not very rare nor expensive, so reliance on one producer is not that worrying I think. Enrichment facilities are rarer, but there is also one in France, so I can see French nuclear tech work on its own.
France isn't reliant on Rosatom at all for Uranium. Russia is one possible part of the supply chain mostly used for retreatment.
Most of the French uranium is produced by Orano which is quite close to being a public company (95% owned by France). It comes from Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger.
Greenpeace is not a reliable source when it comes to anything having to do with the nuclear industry by the way.
If you had followed the crisis from 2022 when a quarter of the reactors were out of service, you wouldn't ask that question. They had to fly in welders from the US because they were not able to fix the problem... Also, every new nuclear project done by the French in this century has been a complete disaster. Flamanville, Olkiluoto and now Hinkley Point C.
You are naturally correct and I have corrected my statement. I intended to refer to the West but my wording was factually incorrect.
China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology that they now have the industry which Europe once had. And to rebuild the same type of industry would take the same amount of effort that China had to do. Meanwhile, the US can't even build their own warships anymore.
> China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology... And to rebuild the same type of industry in the EU would take the same amount of effort.
You're factually wrong.
China started from 0 but the EU has kept building reactors, the French Areva/EDF finished three advanced 1600 MW reactors just 6 and 2 years ago. They are also building two reactors of the same type in the UK as we speak. The EU has never lost the expertise necessary for building nuclear reactors, they have actually advanced the state of the art since the end of the initial European wave.
Don't be confused by the lack of finished reactors in the EU, 2 of the completed Areva plants are in China and were built for a third of the time and cost of the same type reactors currently under construction in the UK. Therefore:
1. Looking at completed reactors in the EU cannot be used for judging the level of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) expertise in the EU.
2. Cost overruns in Europe are due to politics and civil engineering chaos there while the EU's NPP expertise is the best in the world.
3. Technology-wise, a new EU buldout of NPPs won't start from zero but from the the very top of the NPP technology ladder.
China has been scaling back and delaying their nuclear program in favor of renewables since Fukushima.
At saturation, given current nuclear build out based on actual construction starts and China’s grid size, China will end up with 2-3% nuclear power in the grid mix.
Enough to sustain a civilian industry to complement any military ambitions, but it does not move the needle.
In terms of electricity China is all in on renewables and storage with a backstop of locally sourced firming coal.
> China has been scaling back and delaying their nuclear program in favor of renewables since Fukushima.
Not "has". "Had". The whole world held their breath after Fukushima.
Now that everybody knows that nothing really consequential happened apart from state overreaction, Japan, China and the rest of the world are no longer holding their breath.
China has been approving 10 or more nuclear power plants per year the last couple of years. Given the lifetime of 80 years of modern nuclear reactors and Little's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law) that implies an expected fleet size of 800 reactors. At 1.2 - 1.4GW per reactors, that would be slightly above 1 TW of generating capacity, which is enough for 90% of current Chinese electricity production.
China strategy is clearly a mix of renewable and nuclear, renewable for bulk and nuclear for baseload.
At the moment, they are quickly building gaz-fired capacity to supplement the renewable during peak demand and when production is low. Their base load is mostly coal. Nuclear will allow them to phase out most of that. They are clearly targeting zero coal and are gaz poor anyway so nuclear allows them to limit their exposure to imports. That's basically France strategy in the 70s except France went all in while China can use renewable for bulk capacity as they produce a ton of the required mineral themselves
The opposition between intermittent and nuclear doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to run a grid purely on intermittent sources.
A lot of the discussion on statistics here don't make sense. China wants to switch off coal and gaz. You are looking at transition numbers focusing on current shares when you should be considering trajectories.
In 2024 alone, it added 360GW of wind and solar and the trajectory for renewables is steepening, not declining so this year's number looks like it will exceed this number - 450GW or more.
Capacity factors are just noise when you're dealing with nearly 2 orders of magnitude of difference in scale. Apply whatever adjustment for capacity factor differences that you like but 100GW of nuclear over 15 years is not going to catch up with 450GW of wind and solar per year.
China has 1,000 GW installed solar and 26 GW of wind which generate 2k TWh/yr. The total installed nuclear in China is a mere 60 GW which generate 450 TWh/yr. Therefore, the capacity factor of solar is 2 TWh/GW and that of nuclear is 4 times higher at 8 TWh/GW.
Calling an 4 times higher capacity factor "noise" is actual noise.
Besides, nuclear provides uninterrupted energy supply, no need for storage or special convenient places for installation. That's why China is building capacity of both types as fast as they can.
Europe is in a colder geographic area with less sunshine and more needs of energy during the cold/rainy days, nuclear is an absolute necessity there.
The scales of rollout are so vastly different, it is just noise.
China will add 450GW or more renewables this year alone.
Even after dividing by 4 this represents more additional energy production capacity in ONE year than their 15 year target for nuclear. This is after your capacity factor adjustment.
Nuclear’s contribution to Chinese electricity production at the end of their 2040 nuclear plan is likely to be below 5%. Even less than nuclear’s current global share of about 9% - down from just under 20% in the mid 1990s.
> In the 12 months to June 2025, wind and solar (2,073 TWh) generated more electricity than all other clean sources (nuclear, hydro and bioenergy) combined (1,936 TWh). Just four years ago, wind and solar generated half as much electricity as other clean sources combined.
So, both types generated approximately the same amount of power and it still isn't enough, one type cannot replace the other, they complement each other, that's why China is building more of each type, they know what they're doing.
These kind of "all the experts are retired" take are getting tiresome.
When you think about it, until recently there were no experts in stabilizing the electric grid on a continental scale using renewables, because it was literally never needed before! Didn't stop experts from sprouting out when it became necessary.
There were no experts in building continental scale EV charging frameworks, either, until we needed them, and then there were.
Same thing all over again.
What we can say about nuclear is that it's been continuously supplying a non-negligible part of Europe's energy need for generations, and there are people who've been maintaining that. That's more than what we can say about a lot of our industrial needs in 2025.
The technology of electricity production has advanced since nuclear peaked in the mid 1980s.
We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator.
Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part.
All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive.
Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.
We deploy 10x the capacity in renewables and batteries than we do in nuclear and its only accelerating. We are trending towards 1/10th the cost of nuclear per GW. There is no going back just due to the sheer scale of mass manufacturing renewables.
We are below $1B/GW for solar.
China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year.
Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years
I am a small-time investor in renewable energy businesses, but I am also a believer in nuclear energy.
Consider a city like Mumbai that needs about 3.8 GW per day. One would need lots of windmills and large solar farms that would need to be positioned in a different state having more sunlight throughout the year. Mumbai often experiences cloudy weather and intermittent wind. I cannot imagine only wind and solar supporting the needs of Mumbai.
There are countries other than the US who do not take 20 years to build a reactor. Out-dated regulations, punitive paperwork, and perhaps poor project management are the reasons for the oft-cited delays in the US. Other countries complete their builds in 6 to 7 years. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
The US delays with the Vogtle AP-1000s (the only recently completed US build) were extremely atypical.
First, it was a FOAK design. Which always takes longer to build, it is a prototype.
Second, the nuclear build know how in the nuclear engineers, construction workers, and supply chain was not really there any longer.
Third, they used a new permitting system, which in theory should have been better and probably will be better in the future: instead of ongoing individual checks and modifications, which made every nuclear power plant in the US a unique unicorn, you are now allowed to submit a master design and once approved you can build that over and over. Without changes.
Alas, Westinghouse wasn't actually done with the design when they submitted. So when they started building, they noticed that they had submitted plans that could not actually be built. Oops. That cause massive delays. And delays = cost.
And the suppliers fought each other, one went bankrupt etc. COVID also didn't help.
So how can we guarantee that the same won't happen in the future and that NOAK builds will be better? Well, for one they now have plans that are obviously buildable, because a bunch of AP-1000s have been built. So that exact thing absolutely can't happen.
Also, we can look to China. Turns out, China also built 2 FOAK AP-1000s. These also took about 10 years, despite China usually building in 5. And it turns out, China built some more AP-1000s after that. NOAK builds. And these took 5 years to build with buildable plans, experience building that reactors and a mature nuclear industry to back them.
So there is good reason to believe that future NOAK builds of the AP-1000 and of comparable reactors will be much faster and much cheaper than what we've seen so far.
Delays and cost overruns for nuclear are absolutely not atypical. Pick anywhere in the world you want and you’ll find them building reactors easy 50% over time and budget, and many >100%.
Also, Germany currently has the problem of much more and more reliable wind generation in the north, but not enough network capacity to send it all south when needed. It is being addressed, but as expected, it is very complicated because infrastructure across the whole country touches the interests of a lot of groups with very different interests.
We might need much better tunnel building equipment and a deep sub-terranean network... (useful sci-fi idea, needs to be able to cope with mild earth quakes in some regions).
Gas-fired power plants are planned for load balancing, and these are already being built in such a way that they can be converted to hydrogen operation at a later date.
You can move slider for last 24hrs, there were sunny bits in Germany.
CO2 is constantly shit over here.
And yeah.. what am I supposed to do when it's not sunny or no wind? Fart into windfarm?
This! Don't be disappointed by the downvotes. The fussile+nuclear energy lobby is desparte because of Germany's success. This industry is the equivalent of the tabacoo and pestizide industry of the past. Everything is fine, cheap and under control -- until it isn't ...
Since the capacity factor is so much lower, 10x in capacity just about matches the energy production of nuclear. Never mind the dispatchable power.
And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time.
So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.
An initial much stronger increase in renewables is a logical an unavoidable consequence of what I described.
The increase in renewable production needs to be 4x greater initially, because of the longer life of nuclear plants. Queueing theory/Little's Law. So this is entirely expected if you are targeting (a) a fairly constant fleet and (b) fairly constant production rate, both of which are desirable.
Under the Messmer plan, France ignored this and built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Which means that they were pretty much done after 15 years, their nuclear industry had basically nothing to do for the next 40 or so years and withered. Bad idea.
The current rate of new construction starts in China implies a build rate of at least 10 reactors per year. With an expected life of 80 years, that implies a target fleet size of around 800 reactors if the rate remains constant.
The problem is that much of Europe lies pretty far north. Certainly, Spain can deploy solar power with high efficiency, but Netherlands can't grab as much sunlight no matter what, to say nothing of Sweden or Norway. Wind power helps, but it's way more expensive than solar.
That cost is a property of the regulatory environment, it isn't intrinsic.
You can buy a floating nuclear power plant in the form of an aircraft carrier for a lot less than $16B. The US Navy builds these things as a matter of course in a few years using standard designs they crank out by the dozens.
Those carriers have 700MW thermal output reactors. The new generation EPRs built now are about 6x that.
And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)
Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
How is it stalling anything if it offers a cheaper and faster build than nuclear? If you need to build 1GW and want it anytime in the next 2 decades, you sure as hell don’t choose nuclear. You either do natural gas or renewables these days. Those are the only competitive sources of energy.
You actually need energy even when the sun doesn't shine.
And you are incorrect: renewables are not competitive without heavy subsidies and preferential treatment, such as being allowed to shift the cost of their intermittency onto the reliable producers.
The problems lies in the lack of storage. Which is why you need efficient and scalable battery technologies. This is the true key technology that yields much more promise than anything nuclear.
Since you use China as a comparison for solar: China builds 1.4GW nuclear power plants in 5 years for $3.5 bn.
And of course the capacity factor for PV is about 10%, so you need 10x the capacity to get the same output even on average. Never mind that you get nothing at night, and very little in winter.
>>It is important to note that within Germany’s generation data, Ember’s analysis has identified an unusual trend of declining solar irradiance-adjusted performance over the past several years. We do not yet have a definitive explanation for why this is, but it could be related to challenges in measuring behind-the-meter solar generation, exacerbated recently by high levels of residential battery storage. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that there is under-reporting of German solar generation.
Look at the boom of nuclear in the 70s. The industry wide and deep expertise from production, to planning, to logistics. Particularly the french did this par excellence. But nuclear has first languished and is now almost non-existent in Europe.
Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective.
We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.
>So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe.
You could say most of the same things about batteries. There is a little lithium in Europe. But Europe doesn't have a battery industry. It's in China. And you could buy batteries from China, but we aren't doing that and the political trends don't support more energy dependence on China. You could also buy nuclear reactors from China, but of course Europe doesn't want to do that either.
What they are proposing is that Europe is going to pivot from not making batteries to not building nuclear plants. They will, however, write lots of papers about the reactors (neé batteries) they would like to build, if only the prevailing wage or regulatory regime or other economic excuse du jour wasn't stopping them.
It has increasingly become my impression after watching these debates unfold that the core technology is not the real problem. The problem is a lack of political will to encourage the growth of new industries in green energy, failing both at regulatory and industrial policy. Solar is succeeding, not because it is the best form of energy (though it is) but because it is mostly paid for and installed by individuals and small businesses (with a little capital you can own your own solar farm!).
Sweden had a major company try to make lithium batteries but it was not economical viable without major and continuously infusion of government subsidies. The company Northvolt is the largest bankruptcy in modern Swedish industrial history.
>The deal with BMW was cancelled in June 2024 because of Northvolt not being able to deliver on time. [Wikipedia]
Certainly this is some kind of failure. But this is Hacker News. Surely we can appreciate that you can't just blame the core technology when a company fails. History is full of companies that failed. Japan and the USA have battery companies despite high wages. There is something to be learned here, but I don't have the determination to figure out exactly what it is.
We should definitively attribute some blame to the company and those who ran it. It is very similar to the nuclear projects in UK and Finland that went over budget and got delayed, except that those at least did finish and are predicted to create profit in the near future. Northvolt ended with nothing to show, and all the government subsidies it already received just went into the ether.
> The problem is a lack of political will to encourage the growth of new industries in green energy, failing both at regulatory and industrial policy
100% this, no doubt about it. There is a collective lack of investment into the future and I'd say we are witnessing managed decay more than anything else.
There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively.
Note that both the numbers are pretty large compared to the installed base (more than doubling the installed base), that they are increasing for the earlier stages (indicating more is in the pipeline than is currently being built), and that all the pipeline stages are increasing over time.
Which is of course consistent with the fact that 34 countries have now signed the international pledge to triple nuclear output that was first agreed at COP28. These countries include: France, the United States, China, Japan, Poland, Sweden, etc. India has plans and is on track to triple by 2032, but hasn't signed the pledge.
I am also not sure why you think that "all existing experts" have retired and there is no nuclear industry. The World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris November 4-6 of this year had over 1000 exhibitors, and more than half of those were from Europe.
Even phase-out-Germany still has substantial nuclear engineering capacity, there's even a nuclear fuel factory in Lingen. And of course the actual nuclear component of a nuclear power plant is only around 20%. About the same effort/cost goes into the steam turbines, of which Siemens is a major worldwide supplier.
And of course civil nuclear programs have next to nothing to do with military nuclear programs. There are many more users of civil nuclear power than there are military nuclear powers, and the military nuclear powers invariably got the bomb first, and added a civil program later, with some like Israel only having a military nuclear program, not a civilian one.
In fact, there's a fun anecdote from the beginnings of the French nuclear program, since you mention France: when the Messmer plan got started, the military wanted to deploy an indigenous type of reactor for the civilian program that was more suitable for military uses, but in the end the government decided to standardize on a US Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that was not useful for military purposes.
> There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively.
At about 1 GWatt per reactor, thats about 500 GWatt total new nuclear built over what must be decades, if it is built at all. A fair chunk of the existing 419 reactors will be retired in that time.
Meanwhile, Gemini tells me the planet added well over 100 GW renewable generation in 2024. That 100 GW is dispatchable. It was over 500 GW peak. Almost no renewables were retired in 2024. The rate new renewables are being added is growing at least quadratically.
Maybe Europe sunshine and wind resources mean they have no choice, it's nuclear or nothing. But renewables are being added at the pace they are for a reason. In the places that do have the renewable resources, they are far cheaper. If Europe is forced to go down the nuclear path, they are going to be paying far more than other places on the planet for their energy.
There's a German documentary called "Yellow Cake". It is about the cost of mining uranium. It really was eye opening and I have seen it like ten years ago when I was about thirty. It took thirty years for someone to show me how incredibly devastating the mining of Uranium is to the environment. That's how good of kept secret it is. Because once you see it, you would never ever want nuclear energy ever again. And you finally understand how bad people are lying when they say, it is clean energy. It destroys entire landscapes for generations to come! It is extremely expensive and it is very finite.
Here in Ontario, residentially we pay about 0.09 USD per kWh at night and 0.18 USD with demand peak pricing on weekday afternoons. Or if you have flat rate it's about 0.13 USD per kWh. This is considered very expensive by Canadian standards and it's due to our nuclear power program where about 55% of electricity is from nuclear, the rest from a mix of wind/hydro/solar/biofuel and gas. The increased price during the day is due to the need to burn a bit of gas at peak demand. The grid is otherwise nearly carbon neutral, and the long-term plan is to phase out the gas with a mix of wind, nuclear and pumped storage.
We pay less in practice than the rates given above for power, because the government also subsidizes it. But even without that I understand such rates would be relatively cheap in most European countries.
I was curious, so I asked an AI (Gemini) to compare the wholesale price of electricity in Ontario vs Sydney, in Canadian dollars, including any subsidies in the price. The reasoning is the wholesale price best reflects the cost of production.
The outcome was surprisingly close. Sydney seemed to be a little more expensive, with a spot market average of CAD$73/MWh vs CAD$65/MWh. A wash really.
I don't know what is going on with the retail prices. My rule of thumb is multiply by 3, but your multiple is closer to 4.5. I live in Brisbane for example, where the average price is $100/MWh and we pay around $.30/kWh retail. Have you looked at https://www.energymadeeasy.gov.au/ ?
Consumer price of the energy. Doesn't include connection fees, but those are a minority of the cost. Includes special energy taxes. But not sales tax.
For a real example, I'm on flat rate and if I use 1000 kWh my monthly bill will be 211 CAD (effective rate 0.21 CAD / 0.13 EUR per kWh) including taxes, connection, delivery, everything, but without subsidy. The amount I pay after the subsidy is applied would be less at 165 CAD.
Consumer price for here in South of Sweden during October was for me €0.22 per kW/hh which include tax. On top of that I also had additional fixed connection fee and an fee based on peak consumption rate (combined those two were an extra €125 for that month). No subsidy.
The reason for the high kW/h is because limited wind/solar during that month and high gas prices which result in high market price at the power exchange. The given reason for the fixed fees is because of the need to expand transmissions and build out more reserve energy to handle the increase variability of the grid as a result of the increase use of renewables and the outcome of decommissioning a few nuclear reactors in the south of Sweden.
It applies to most private residential and small-scale business electric use. Rationale would be getting quite political, as you might imagine. But I suppose there are several justifications that are given.
One is to offset the cost to the consumer for phasing out fossil fuels. Coal has been shut down and wind and storage and new nuclear is being built. Politically it has been presented as a matter of fairness; poor people are least able to pay for increases or to retrofit. A kind of wealth redistribution. (Though when you remember large corporately-run farms are included in the subsidy it's maybe not the most progressive form of redistribution.)
In Quebec where they have a great surplus of hydroelectric they also partly subsidize residential electricity with the profits of the surplus sale to the United States. The energy is so cheap there than resistive heating is cheaper than natural gas for home heating. Avoiding dependence on oil and gas imported from either the US or western Canada, or rather trying to lessen that dependence, is a standing issue for both Quebec and Ontario.
The argument against deregulation of energy prices is that poor people won't be able to afford it. But if you create a program that subsidizes some reasonable amount of energy per person per month the price of electricity can go as high as it needs to. I don't know if that was rationale in Canada but it's one possible rationale why government might want to aubsiduze energy usage.
Existing nuclear power is something to keep around as long as it is safe and needed.
The problem is that new built western nuclear power requires ~18 cents/kWh (Vogtle, FV3, HPC etc.) when running at 100% 24/7 all year around, excluding backup, transmission costs and taxes.
Now try sell that electricity to a home owner with solar PV and maybe a battery and you will get laughed out of the room almost the entire year. A firming new built nuclear plant with ruinously high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX is economic lunacy.
This does not even take into account that new built nuclear power requires ~15-20 years from political decision to working plants.
As soon as new built nuclear power’s costs and timelines are confronted with reality it just does not work out.
> Now try sell that electricity to a home owner with solar PV and maybe a battery and you will get laughed out of the room.
In EU, the split between flats (apartments) and houses is roughly 50/50, depending on how densely populated the country is. In the US, it about 1/3 in apartments. Canada is roughly 50/50, with a slight detached-house bias.
Not that it doesn't mean houseowner vs renter. Landlords have next to zero incentive to install solar PV because renters pay for electricity. In the US about 7% of homes have solar, I don't know about EU and Canada.
Solar can't provide baseline and even in sunny SoCal, you will go back to the grid often enough that being off-the-grid isn't reasonable for the typical household.
Vogtle costs 18 cents/kWh when running at 100% 24/7 all year around. A typical gas peaker runs at 15-25% of the time.
Running a peaking Vogtle now costs somewhere like 60-90 cents/kWh.
As soon as new built nuclear power with ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX hits the raw physical incentive systems of the our energy system it just becomes stupid.
Anyway, even if that were correct numbers, it would misleading on several fronts, as the only new western reactors were unrepresentative FOAK builds, and also troubled beyond just regular FOAK status.
Furthermore, the costs tend to be calculated for the period while they are repaying the loans, so it's mostly capital costs. Once the plant is paid off, the price drops dramatically.
The average build time is currently 6.5 years, median slightly less, trend downwards.
"Current european nuclear" is completely atypical and unrepresentative. The numbers are too low to be statistically significant anyhow, but on top of that they were all FOAK builds, all of a single (base) design that has been deemed too difficult to build by its manufacturer and thus discontinued, and mostly built in countries with little recent nuclear experience.
The HPC build, for example, was very explicitly intended to build up the UK nuclear industry, which was a significant part of the cost.
I think this response embodies the problem with new built nuclear power.
1. Start with ignoring the EPR2 costs.
2. Cherry-pick data that does not represent western timelines. Of course ignoring the best case for the first EPR2 reactor is 12 years if they start today.
3. Blame everything on ”FOAK”. Despite Hinkley point C being reactor 5 and 6 in the EPR series. But that is of course ”FOAK”.
4. Allude that the next UK reactor will be cheaper. Despite the projected cost for Sizewell C is £38B before even starting compared to the current projection at £42-48B for Hinkley Point C.
Sizewell C truly shows the state of new built European nuclear power. EDF is too financially weak to take on any further nuclear construction liability like a fixed price contract, and the CFD would be ruinously expensive.
Instead it is a pure cost-plus contract where an extra surcharge is added to all ratepayers as soon as construction starts having people today pay for electricity hopefully delivered 10-15 years in the future. Hiding the true all-in cost in terms the average tax payer doesn’t understand rather than a trivially understood CFD.
Like I said. As soon as new built nuclear power is confronted with reality it becomes economic and opportunity cost lunacy unless you can motivate it with for example military ambitions.
As I understand it, the technologies exist by which home owners who already have solar can draw only as much grid energy as they actually need. There are multiple uses of nuclear energy beyond home usage and there would be those who do not have access to adequate solar or wind energy. Apartment residences in large cities are one of the target segments.
Why should industry buy extremely expensive new built nuclear power when grid based zero marginal cost renewables are available?
If they’re having worries about price fluctuations then we already have markets for electricity futures. The perfect market for stable new built nuclear power.
The problem for new built nuclear power is that they need enormous tax payer based handouts to close the gap between the price of electricity futures and production cost. Let alone making a profit.
How does industry deal with 50% of the nuclear capacity having outages for months on end like happened in France during the energy crisis?
>... composed of representatives from employers' associations, workers' unions (trade unions) and civil society organisations.
I'm not sure how up they are on technical issues like the rapid progress in batteries and solar and the like.
Hinkley C in the UK was approved in 2016 and probably will be producing in 2031 so 15 years on. (cost ~£40bn). In the last 15 years the cost of battery storage and of solar panels have both fallen about 10x. If that goes on they will be much cheaper but the time nuclear comes online.
Radiophobia is an irrational or excessive fear of ionizing radiation, leading to overestimating the health risks of radiation compared to other risks. It can impede rational decision-making and contribute to counter-productive behavior and policies.
I think the concern most people have is not necessarily the long-term health effects of nuclear vs other forms of power, but the risks of a catastrophic incident
It's hard to see how non-dispatchable generation like nuclear can be competitive in Northern European markets dominated by intermittent wind power. So much wind capacity has already been built in Denmark that it sometimes meets 100% of electricity demand. Britain will be there soon, certainly long before substantial numbers of new nuclear reactors could conceivably be built.
I suspect the UK will only build the nuclear capacity required to keep the industry around on national security grounds.
Giving a preference to intermittent renewables is not a law of nature, but a rule that is irrational and needs to be removed.
Denmark is just now hitting problems with their wind strategy, and of course dependent on being a transit land between large producers and consumers. And currently looking at nuclear. As is Norway.
One of the reason is that intermittent renewables are pro-cyclical, that is once they reach a certain level of saturation, they cannibalize each other even more than they cannibalize steady suppliers.
The current plan is to quadruple nuclear power in the UK.
> Nuclear power is dispatchable, unlike renewables.
While you can turn nuclear up and down a little bit the fuel costs are negligible so it costs the same to generate 80% or 100% of rated output. It's done in France because nuclear makes up so much of their generation capacity they have no other option.
> Giving a preference to intermittent renewables is not a law of nature, but a rule that is irrational and needs to be removed.
I think carbon-free generation options should be considered dispassionately with a focus on minimising cost and reducing CO2 emissions as quickly as possible. But there is path dependence at this point. The wind generation capacity will already have been built out before many more nuclear plants come online. I think this will make the economics of expanding nuclear power generation unattractive because we will already have made the commitments to buy the wind generation and we will instead look for the lowest priced options to fill the gaps.
> Denmark is just now hitting problems with their wind strategy, and of course dependent on being a transit land between large producers and consumers. And currently looking at nuclear. As is Norway.
>
> One of the reason is that intermittent renewables are pro-cyclical, that is once they reach a certain level of saturation, they cannibalize each other even more than they cannibalize steady suppliers.
The fast decreasing cost of batteries will help smooth out fluctuations in wind generation across a day or two. That should reduce the level of cannibalisation between wind projects substantially, though does not remove the need for backup power for longer periods of little wind.
I suspect the proposed SMR projects in Norway and Denmark will depend on whether anyone is able to get SMR build costs down sufficiently to make them attractive. It certainly makes no sense to ban them outright.
> The current plan is to quadruple nuclear power in the UK.
That was the 2050 target from the last government. In terms of actual commitments the only planned plant after Hinkley C is currently Sizewell C. At the same time 4 of our 5 remaining nuclear plants will be decommissioned by early 2030. I think the target is highly unlikely to be met.
There is a £2.5 billion investment in SMRs (if you can call reactors around a 1/3rd the size of existing nuclear power plants small...) but will they really have reduced costs?
Australia, for instance, powers 40% of its electricity with renewables.
However, electricity makes up ~20% of _total_ energy consumption which means renewables made up 9% of _total_ energy production.
As the electrification of transport, industry, manufacturing, etc proceeds, the demand for electricity will increase (in the case of Australia, we need to 5x our electricity production).
Ironically, legislators are disincentivized from stimulating electrification as getting to 100% renewable electricity production is easier when electricity is only 20% of our energy usage.
Energy consumption does not equal useful work though. Much of that non-electrical energy consumption is wasted, e.g. car engines are only about 30% efficient and heat pumps can provide 3-5x the amount of warmth compared to the electrical input required to run. So we’re probably looking at around a 2x increase in electricity consumption rather than 5x.
Add to it the fact that things get more and more efficient, it's questionable if even a 2x increase is in the cards. The EU has added 10 million EVs in the last decade and total electricity consumption hasn't gone up at all. Norway's car sales are majority EV since around five years and over 90% now, and total consumption of electricity went up around 10%.
It could be, for the EU not Norway at least, that there was a consumption uptick but it's hidden because people charge their cars with their own solar panels. But even this is indicative of how the grid will work in the future.
Note that Denmark would have to keep deploying more wind capacity as the country would need more electricity over time (electrification of the transportation, heat, industry, etc.).
So, even if some days wind capacity does meets 100% of the electricity demand nowadays, we would need add more capacity.
1) Countries have major political interest in whether other countries have nuclear reactors
2) Countries are already, at large scale, manipulating discourse across the internet to achieve their political goals
Then of course it follows that any comment thread on a semi-popular or higher site about whether a country should build more nuclear reactors is going to be heavily manipulated by said countries. That's where (most) of the insane people in such threads are probably coming from.
How are we supposed to survive as a civilization with such corrupted channels of communication?
What is, according to you, the political interest?
There are countries that have interest of having gas or oil bought from them.
It is not clear if they are pro or against other countries going nuclear: on one hand, nuclear will replace part of their market. On the other hand, lobbying to move towards nuclear may impede progress in replacing gas and oil by renewable (a strategy would be to lobby so that the nuclear project starts and then lobby so that the project stagnates and never delivers).
There are countries that have interest in seeing nuclear adopted because they have a market for the ore extraction or waste processing. There are countries that have interest in seeing nuclear not adopted because they have a market around other generations.
Finally, some countries may want to see their neighbors adopt nuclear: the neighbor will pay all the front bills and take all the risk (economical but also PR, or the cost of educating experts, ...), and if they succeed, they will provide import energy very cheap that can fill the gaps the country did not wanted to invest in.
So it is not clear if there is just one stream of lobbying. The reality is probably that every "sides" does somehow contain manipulative discourse from foreign countries.
Does this apply also to fossil energy threads? Countries have a major political interest whether other countries use fossil energy, to mitigate the climate catastrophe and ramp down fossils use.
I am a former nuclear opponent. I used to think that nuclear waste was glowing green like they show in the Simpsons and in the Doom 1 game. Once I had access to the Internet in this century, I learned better.
Here are some sources of information that helped me understand the two oft-cited nuclear disasters better.
One regular complaint is the costs of nuclear energy. This is likely true in the US due to regulations that have not been revised for newer technology, but such high costs are cited around the world.
Likewise, the amount of waste and the danger of the waste is not well understood either, and certainly lots of education is needed here. For e.g., most people do not know that the volume of waste is limited and that the same waste can be reused in reactors of other designs.
I do believe that national ego issues get in the way of fixes. I believe that such ego issues got in the way of honest repairs (Fukushima) and timely action (Chernobyl). Certainly, nuclear inspections are still treated with suspicion and hostility, but in fact full transparency and integrity should be the norm.
Corruption and profit-centric thinking are two other problems that plague the nuclear industry. South Korea has had lots of corruption and shortcuts (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...). One of the accusations in India against France was that France licenses outdated nuclear reactor technology despite having newer technology. I am unable to locate a link supporting this accusation.
With thorium reactors and Small Module Reactors, there are many modern solutions to safety.
We need to stop citing and quoting US-based costs and problems that are linked to outdated US regulations. There are other countries that have more modern regulations and modern technologies.
Modern energi consumption confuses me. There has never been more wind and solar, coal fired plants are almost a thing of the past. Everything is becoming increasingly energy efficient, yet we produce more CO2?
Mostly, what you are seeing is that the half of the world living in the India-SEA-China circle [1] are living much better lives, which requires far more energy then living as subsistence farmers did. In the G7, CO2 emissions have declined (but not as fast as they need to stay below the 2C target) but the rest of the world is emitting more: during the negotiations for the Kyoto Accords in 1998 G7 countries produced about half of the world's CO2 and now they produce about a quarter. That's mostly because the rest of the world started emitting more and only a little because of drops in the amount produced by G7 countries.
There is obviously major ethical issues here. The rich, already developed world- having emitted enormous quantities of CO2 to get there- telling poor, undeveloped people living as subsistence farmers that they can't use any more energy because of all the CO2 already in the atmosphere is a really hard argument to make, locking them into being poor forever while the developed world benefits from all that CO2 consumption. But on the other hand, by skipping right to large scale solar, maybe those inside the circle can do a better job?
Roughly, greenhouse gases are, a quarter from (animal) agriculture, quarter from energy, quarter from industry (cement/steel etc), and a quarter from transport.
i couldnt believe that animal ag was the same as power, so i looked it up. Animal ag is ~14%, power is ~35%. so not close to equivilant, but ag is still a way bigger percentage than i would have guessed!
Per the International Energy Association:
What is the role of nuclear power in clean energy transitions?
Nuclear power accounts for about 10% of electricity generation globally, rising to almost 20% in advanced economies. It has historically been one of the largest global contributors of carbon-free electricity and while it faces challenges in some countries, it has significant potential to contribute to power sector decarbonisation.
Why does it matter to energy security?
Nuclear power plants contribute to electricity security in multiple ways by keeping power grids stable and complementing decarbonisation strategies since, to a certain extent, they can adjust their output to accompany shifts in demand and supply. As the share of variable renewables like wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) rises, the need for such services will increase.
What are the challenges?
Nuclear power faces a contrasted future despite its ability to produce emissions-free power. With large up-front costs, long lead times and an often-poor record of on-time delivery, nuclear power projects have trouble in some jurisdictions competing against faster-to-install alternatives, such as natural gas or modern renewables. It also faces public opposition in many countries. Its uncertain future could result in billions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions.
Do note: There are countries other than the US and France who license nuclear technologies and build-outs. There are innovative technologies by US companies that work with modern regulations and are faster and less expensive to build.
We must stop citing US nuclear build times that are largely due to outdated regulations and hostile review processes.
I think nuclear has parallel to mainframes. Capital intensive, long lead time, expensive to operate/maintain/dispose and practically irrelevant in the day of distributed (computing) generation and storage.
It’s uncanny how the narrative rhymes: we have insanely capable portable computing devices at price points that are accessible to every person across the planet. Similarly, distributed generation (and storage) are already bringing electricity to people who have no real chance of being on the grid ever.
I see no way the economics working out for nuclear, except for niche uses.
I can even imagine the grid being something relegated for long range / high intensity applications (instead of household distribution) in a few hundred years
Consider Poland. 80% of its electricity production (as of this moment, almost midnight) is coal + gas (and it imports from Germany). Its generation mix results in 855 grams of CO₂ per kWh.
Consider Germany. 50% is coal + gas, 22% is wind + biomass. At 490 g/kWh.
Italy: 60% gas at 386 g/kWh.
Then compare them to France: 75% of the electricity comes from nuclear, at 47 g/kWh.
All of this despite abundant wind+solar capacity installed in Germany, France, Italy, and Poland.
There is a strong need to remove CO₂-intensive generators and replace them by something that does not send CO₂ into the air.
There is also a strong need to build up capacity to store energy.
Nuclear Energy is incredibly expensive and has a lot of other issues like long term waste storage. It's arguably better than Coal and Gas but the KEY to decarbonisation is and always will be renewables. The Headline is rather misleading in that regard.
As long there is no need to use gas during periods of non-optimal weather, then solar and wind is great.
The lithium battery plant in northern Sweden went bankrupt so its difficult to say how to solve the storage solution by both being cheap and financial viable. New battery solutions are being made, but in the end it need to be cheap enough over the long term. The current use of gas for non-optimal weather means prices jump up by a factor of around 100x of what it is during good weather, and the average price in nordpool (the northen pan-European power exchange) is about 20x than what you get with good weather. That should illustrate how much variability there is in the energy price right now, and how much people are paying for that gas powered electricity in periods of non-optimal weather conditions.
A lot of fossil fuel subsidies goes directly to support the high variability power grid, and they more than doubled during 2022 when the gas prices went up. It is incredibly expensive, likely more than nuclear, to have a grid supported by renewables during optimal weather conditions and fossil fuels during non-optimal weather conditions. It also generate a lot of waste in term of pollution which has a bigger issue both short and long term than nuclear waste.
Nordpool prices are not true market prices, as much of the demand does not participate in the market. For example, many residential customers still have fixed-rate contracts, and some power companies sell the power they generate to their owners at cost price.
I would suggest finding more recent information than articles that already were disinformation back in 2020.
In recent news we are seeing the fossil lobby ally with new built nuclear power since wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power potentially may stymie renewable development.
Because it's technical and an advanced form of technology which appeals to tech people and where normal people have an "irrational" fear of it. And also IT and conversely HN is full of people who have trouble fitting in and pride themselves on being rational, and have made it a career and lifestyle of going the other way as everyone else.
Which is fine, except putting hopes into a technology that has failed repeatedly for 60 years is in itself irrational.
HN would do itself a favor if it learned the lessons of "worse is better" and applied it to, well, almost anything. In this case, a moonshot to advance nuclear globally might bring realistic results in 10-15 years. By that time the world will already be decarbonized by renewables as it's already happening. At best nuclear might be that last missing piece to get to 100%, but even this I would no longer bet on. There is already insane growth in undeveloped countries which will push demand even further. Renewables are ridiculously cheap.
Schon während seiner Kanzlerschaft sei die damalige Bundesregierung der Auffassung gewesen, die deutsche Energiepolitik aus der Abhängigkeit der Kernenergie zu befreien. "Wir fanden deshalb, dass es Sinn macht, auf Gas zu setzen."
Uranium is cheap, widely available (largest known reserves in Australia, 3rd in Canada, also Sweden recently had a large find), compact, solid, storable.
Only Germany did. They were quite anti-nuclear in the 80s. So they didn't upgrade the reactors. The closure was inevitable. US also supported this more neutral position btw and everybody mocked French for being the lone wolf.
I think Fukushima rather than Chernobyl looms over us as a more realistic disaster that could happen again.
When you look at the data though, its political fallout was much worse than the actual toll on human life, etc. Fukushima released a small about of radiation into the environment. But modern reactors don’t have the same runaway reactivity flaws that Chernobyl did.
Not zero risk. But not the level of risk resulting in half a continent potentially being uninhabitable.
Fukushima was the result of the biggest earthquake in 1000+ years of Japanese history occurring where the resulting tsunami knocked out the backup generators at the plant.
Such an extreme set of outlier events could happen again, of course, but it's not very realistic.
That Tsunami also knocked out most of the Tsunami walls it encountered, because it was so much bigger than expected. Nevertheless, a nearby power plant of the same design survived a slightly higher crest than at Fukushima unscathed and even served as an emergency shelter for Tsunami victims.
That plant had always had the higher wall due to one engineer who insisted, and Fukushima actually had a natural barrier that was higher, but lowered during construction for convenience. And TEPCO dragged their feet on increasing the height to the new norm that had recently been made mandatory. My understanding is that this is one of the reasons TEPCO got dinged.
And even with all that, a German reactor, for example, would have remained undamaged due to various mandatory safety features even without a sufficiently high tsunami wall. For example, multi-sited and bunkered diesel generators, so no flooding. Also Hydrogen recombinators, so none of those lovely hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off.
But of course Germany had to shut off its nuclear plants due to the regular occurring 1000-year Tsunamis in Germany that German plants would have survived.
We're crazy.
Oh, and still exactly 0 radiation deaths from Fukushima, and no measurable health impact expected. All health effects, including deaths were due to the unnecessary evacuation. And not just unnecessary in hindsight, this was known beforehand, gut officials panicked.
Did I mention that Japan is restarting their reactors and considers nuclear an essential part of their future energy strategy, as it is the cheapest baseload power source? The monetary cost of importing Gas exceeds even the vastly inflated cleanup and compensation costs (due to the unnecessary evacauations) by at last an order of magnitude. And of course the health impact of those fossil fuel plants during normal operations is higher than that of the nuclear accident.
Among others variables, the plant was designed to be constructed on a hill 30-35 meters above the ocean, but someones decided would be cheaper to construct it at sea level in order to reduce costs in water pumping, others decided to license this, and much latter, one decade before the disaster when was requested to reinforce the security measures within all the reactors in the country -in Fukushima for example to elevate critical systems to hills- others decided to ignore it [1][2]
What happens is that nuclear fusion is not here yet, and there is insufficient stable/maintained energy to meet current demand without using combined cycle power plants (combustion), and this without even a transition to full electric vehicles, with right now sounds to pure phantasy (how will be feed).
So the realistic by the moment sounds like to keep constructing new nuclear fission plants and renewables, keeping a diversification of sources, as is doing China with their mega projects. Without this will not be way to compete with their industry.
But more important, I think is needed to end the nepotism, the revolving doors (amakudari), and, of course, to prevent sociopaths from accessing positions of responsibility in any field... what sounds difficult because those positions are like magnets for them. This is what seems we don't learn from the human history.
Would Chernobyl have realistically made half a continent uninhabitable had the Soviets not taken all measures to contain it? Or is it more worse case fear mongering nuclear has always had, while oil tankers s[ill into oceans, pipelines leak into national parks, people die from polluted air, and climate change continues to grow worse?
I mean, the basic problem at Chernobyl was the lack of a big heavy containment vessel that essentially all other reactor designs have. That containment vessel (and a couple of other design features, e.g. negative void coefficient in a PWR) has, so far, largely prevented Chernobyl like issues at other, better designed reactors. So far a TMI/Fukushima Dai Ichi/Chalk River is about the worst that has been observed in a reactor with a containment vessel.
And as for how realistic it was that it would make large areas unlivable, the threat was of a melt-down going far enough down to hit the water table and contaminating the groundwater. That would make large areas only livable if you brought your own water, even for bathing, basically making the area impracticable. Obviously it didn't happen, but I'm not clear whether it was a 0.5% chance, a 5% chance or a 50% chance.
Look, I love nuclear technology. But time has moved on. The costs to rebuild this industry is astronomical and means we lose out on key-future technology like batteries.
Edit: But then there are bombs. And especially French love their nukes due national security. This is the only reason to keep pushing for nuclear, since Russia, the US and China are not gonna change direction on this either. But the very least we could do is be honest about it.
Edit 2: Changed from "World has moved on" to "time has moved on", since evidently China has invested for a good 2 decades to build their own fully functional nuclear-industry. Proving my point that it takes dedicated investment, network effects and scale to rebuild this industry. After all, they too want to mass produce nukes.
This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?
1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
Its also already operating the 57 french reactors as well as operating reactors in South Africa, China, Korea, Belgium, Finland.
Sure, the industry will need to grow, but claiming it basically has to start from 0 is ludicrous.
> The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
The only reasonable conclusion from your logic is that it would have felt like an even worse idea to build nuclear reactors in the 1970's. Yet, using today's hindsight, it was a great idea.
Airbus would have been a terrible idea: no one had built commercial airliners before, and only the US had the know-how. Today, we know otherwise.
etc.
That's just plain false, Airbus started as a cooperation between a lot of european aerospace companies, which had different a lot of know-how in different fields. For example Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale, now Airbus) was the French part of the Concorde, they also had the Caravelle.
England also made what I consider to be the prettiest bomber ever made - the Handley-Page Victor
France built majority of their nuclear reactors after 70s oil crisis. So it made sense to have independent resources for them. So they won't need to rely on other nations, some of which were their former colonies that hated them. They had two strong reasons to keep a nuclear base electricity generations.
Consider opportunity costs. If all the public money that Europeans invested to nuclear (it started way before the 70s of course) was put into renewables/storage r&d, we would have had great renewables decades earlier, and by now would be swimming in it.
If the competition was renewables and storage rather than plants running on imported oil during the oil crisis it would have been.
75% of all new capacity in TWh (I.e. adjusting for capacity factor.) globally are renewables and storage. There’s no need to swim against the river.
34 nations have committed to tripling nuclear capacity, including the US, China, France, the UK and many others. And they are acting on this as well.
The tide is nuclear, no need to swim against it.
And no, countries also doing renewables in no way negates this.
Then turning around and not understanding that ”TWh” is already adjusted for capacity factor.
In my eyes it is hard to take you seriously when you don’t comprehend even basic physical properties of our grid and energy systems. Let alone economics, timelines, opportunity cost etc.
Europe has never stopped working on creating new and better nuclear reactor designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
We haven't built a reactor in a long time. So those EPRs being built are all way behind schedule and thus costing substantially more.
You can design whatever you want. Building one is a whole different story. That's not an opinion that's just what happened at the first 2 EPRs and Hinckley point isn't going great either
Olkiluoto 3 started regular production in 2023, taking 18 years to build at a cost of €11 billion (3x over budget).
Flamanville 3 started regular production in 2024, taking 17 years to build at a cost of €13.2 billion (4x over budget) or €19.1 billion including financing in 2015 prices.
Hinkley Point C (two reactors) is currently estimated to have its first unit come online around 2030, taking 14 years with total costs now estimated at £31-35 billion / €36–41 billion (2x over budget) in 2015 prices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1ijcocq/chine...
It would really be great to understand (rather than me guessing) China's rationale to build these plants, and also their safety.
They generate about 5% of their electricity with nuclear. That's a lot, but is it enough to power the country if other alternatives stop being viable (war, shortages, ...?) Maybe it's OK for them that in such a situation, they just turn off enough residential power to last through the night with nuclear and storage. z
Do they see the nuclear research as dual use? My understanding is that nuclear subs and ships do use entirely different nuclear plants. Maybe research into small modular reactors is more dual use. There's also use for those reactors if they really want to build moon bases.
Maybe at their cost of the plans (I heard ≈3B for a 1+GW plant), this is actually competitive with solar+storage. It's definitely competitive with western nuclear power plants, if they want to export in other developing markets.
Small modular reactors need to be rolling out of a factory ready to go, so we can do large redundant arrays of them, put them on trains to transport them around, etc.
A nuclear power station making a couple MW should cost maybe a few million tops once we have the ability to make hundreds of them a year from a factory instead of creating these 20 year projects for gigantic facilities that are all bespoke
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-30/silicon-v...
(https://archive.ph/Wvfqr)
The UK is so disappointed by their HPC project (which is the most expensive nuclear reactor project in history, AFAIK), that they just completed the investment decision for the follow-up Sizewell-C, which will also be 2 UK-EPRs.
Oh, the guarantee price for HPC is the same as that for various off-shore wind-projects. So obviously economically uncompetitive. At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion. Which does put the cost of £41 billion into perspective, despite that being the most ridiculously over-time and over budget nuclear project in history.
Actually, Flamanville 3 did not start "regular" production in 2024, they were just given go-ahead to go to full power a few days ago. It was first grid-connected in 2024 and then started a lengthy ramp-up phase. It slowly coming online was the time for the Cour des Comptes to give its verdict, which was pretty damning.
Flamanville 3 was probably the worst run nuclear project in French history. And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
EDF is often accused of receiving heavy state subsides, with the implication that this is to keep the nuclear power plants going or subsidize nuclear electricity. It is true that EDF gets state subsidies. For their intermittent renewable projects. Ba-da-dum-tss. The nuclear party of their business is tremendously profitable, despite being forced to subsidize industry through the ARENH program.
Finns should be super happy with Nuclear since the cost overruns were overwhelmingly born by Areva (majority owned by the French state) which accumulated losses of €5.5 billion and went bust!
As a nuclear weapons power the UK has a national security interest to keep its nuclear industry around. It needs to build some reactors to do that, but given the prices of new nuclear I don't expect it to build more than the minimum necessary.
Hinkley Point C comes in at £92.50/MWh in 2012 prices (£128.90 in 2024 prices). At the last auction wind prices were £54.23/MWh in 2012 prices (£75.68/MWh 2024 prices).
Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas but that is still much cheaper than nuclear.
Yes, let's just handwave those concerns away, it's not like the grid needs power 100% of the time or anything. Two weeks without wind? No problem, just burn gas :) It's so cheap, independent of foreign supply, doesn't leak out of pipes and isn't a huge environmental hazard at all.
France finished Flamanville 3 in 2024. Finland finished Olkiluoto 3 in 2022. Are those not recent enough? both were EPR designs
Yes there are new ones but both of those are perfect examples of the lack of knowledge [1].
I'll quote: > Many of the organisations chosen to work on the different parts of the plant did not have any experience in nuclear, and little understanding of the safety requirements.
We'll get there. But yes, we're rebuilding a lot of lost knowledge and paying for the teething issues.
1: https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-nuclear-finlands-cautionary-...
Three more were built in EU since 2000: one in Finland (Swedish/Finnish design) and two in Slovakia (Soviet/Russian design).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
But I'll answer what I can, assuming your are genuine.
10 reactors, 3 plants. (57 are currently operational)I think this is a more American-centric comment than you realized... France had a bigger rollout in the 80's and a few from the 90's so there's another decade (*making this time key!*) before a slow decline. Also remember that France is a lot smaller than America so needs less power.
Not to mention, France exports a lot of electricity[0]. I want you to look pretty closely at that graph again. It says they exported 81.8TW this year. What's France's nuclear capacity? 380TW[1]. France exports about 15% of its total energy, more than all its hydro (it's next biggest source). You may be interested to see where that electricity goes....[2]
France can lose those reactors and be fine, Europe is a different story...
4, In Russia. But France built 2 reactors in 2002. I don't have an answer to this but I can tell you that both France and the US are the biggest supporters of international aid in China's rollout. So the institutional knowledge exists and still progressing, albeit slower than before.Besides, I'm not sure this fear even makes sense. What, China could "start from scratch" but "France" (or anywhere else) couldn't? What would make China so unique that such things couldn't be replicated elsewhere? This is a fallacy in logic making the assumption that once skills atrophy that they can never be restored or restore more slowly. If anything we tend to see skills restore far quicker from atrophy than from scratch! So why paint a picture of "give up"? Isn't that just making a self-fulfilling prophecy?
[0] https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/exchanges/import...
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/72h/hourly
Is this satire?
They also rely on imports of uranium - e.g. from Niger, which recently had quite the fallout with France.
It does not look to me at even a casual glance that French nuclear tech could fully work on its own. Similar for the UK.
It is not just about the experts, the supply chain too. Although, of course how much that matters in comparison is the question, since pretty much everything nowadays depends on some faraway place.
Most of the French uranium is produced by Orano which is quite close to being a public company (95% owned by France). It comes from Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger.
Greenpeace is not a reliable source when it comes to anything having to do with the nuclear industry by the way.
China's got 27 reactors under construction right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology that they now have the industry which Europe once had. And to rebuild the same type of industry would take the same amount of effort that China had to do. Meanwhile, the US can't even build their own warships anymore.
You're factually wrong.
China started from 0 but the EU has kept building reactors, the French Areva/EDF finished three advanced 1600 MW reactors just 6 and 2 years ago. They are also building two reactors of the same type in the UK as we speak. The EU has never lost the expertise necessary for building nuclear reactors, they have actually advanced the state of the art since the end of the initial European wave.
Don't be confused by the lack of finished reactors in the EU, 2 of the completed Areva plants are in China and were built for a third of the time and cost of the same type reactors currently under construction in the UK. Therefore:
1. Looking at completed reactors in the EU cannot be used for judging the level of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) expertise in the EU.
2. Cost overruns in Europe are due to politics and civil engineering chaos there while the EU's NPP expertise is the best in the world.
3. Technology-wise, a new EU buldout of NPPs won't start from zero but from the the very top of the NPP technology ladder.
At saturation, given current nuclear build out based on actual construction starts and China’s grid size, China will end up with 2-3% nuclear power in the grid mix.
Enough to sustain a civilian industry to complement any military ambitions, but it does not move the needle.
In terms of electricity China is all in on renewables and storage with a backstop of locally sourced firming coal.
Not "has". "Had". The whole world held their breath after Fukushima.
Now that everybody knows that nothing really consequential happened apart from state overreaction, Japan, China and the rest of the world are no longer holding their breath.
China has been approving 10 or more nuclear power plants per year the last couple of years. Given the lifetime of 80 years of modern nuclear reactors and Little's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law) that implies an expected fleet size of 800 reactors. At 1.2 - 1.4GW per reactors, that would be slightly above 1 TW of generating capacity, which is enough for 90% of current Chinese electricity production.
At the moment, they are quickly building gaz-fired capacity to supplement the renewable during peak demand and when production is low. Their base load is mostly coal. Nuclear will allow them to phase out most of that. They are clearly targeting zero coal and are gaz poor anyway so nuclear allows them to limit their exposure to imports. That's basically France strategy in the 70s except France went all in while China can use renewable for bulk capacity as they produce a ton of the required mineral themselves
The opposition between intermittent and nuclear doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to run a grid purely on intermittent sources.
A lot of the discussion on statistics here don't make sense. China wants to switch off coal and gaz. You are looking at transition numbers focusing on current shares when you should be considering trajectories.
In 2024 alone, it added 360GW of wind and solar and the trajectory for renewables is steepening, not declining so this year's number looks like it will exceed this number - 450GW or more.
Capacity factors are just noise when you're dealing with nearly 2 orders of magnitude of difference in scale. Apply whatever adjustment for capacity factor differences that you like but 100GW of nuclear over 15 years is not going to catch up with 450GW of wind and solar per year.
Calling an 4 times higher capacity factor "noise" is actual noise.
Besides, nuclear provides uninterrupted energy supply, no need for storage or special convenient places for installation. That's why China is building capacity of both types as fast as they can.
Europe is in a colder geographic area with less sunshine and more needs of energy during the cold/rainy days, nuclear is an absolute necessity there.
China will add 450GW or more renewables this year alone.
Even after dividing by 4 this represents more additional energy production capacity in ONE year than their 15 year target for nuclear. This is after your capacity factor adjustment.
Nuclear’s contribution to Chinese electricity production at the end of their 2040 nuclear plan is likely to be below 5%. Even less than nuclear’s current global share of about 9% - down from just under 20% in the mid 1990s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
> That's why China is building capacity of both types as fast as they can.
Nuclear power as a percentage of the Chinese grid mix is backsliding. Will likely land somewhere in the 2-3% range when their grid is fully built out.
China is building renewables and storage as fast as they can and provide a token investment (in terms of their grid size)for new built nuclear power.
> In the 12 months to June 2025, wind and solar (2,073 TWh) generated more electricity than all other clean sources (nuclear, hydro and bioenergy) combined (1,936 TWh). Just four years ago, wind and solar generated half as much electricity as other clean sources combined.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
When you think about it, until recently there were no experts in stabilizing the electric grid on a continental scale using renewables, because it was literally never needed before! Didn't stop experts from sprouting out when it became necessary.
There were no experts in building continental scale EV charging frameworks, either, until we needed them, and then there were.
Same thing all over again.
What we can say about nuclear is that it's been continuously supplying a non-negligible part of Europe's energy need for generations, and there are people who've been maintaining that. That's more than what we can say about a lot of our industrial needs in 2025.
Come again?
We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator.
Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part.
All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive.
Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.
We are below $1B/GW for solar. China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year.
Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years
Consider a city like Mumbai that needs about 3.8 GW per day. One would need lots of windmills and large solar farms that would need to be positioned in a different state having more sunlight throughout the year. Mumbai often experiences cloudy weather and intermittent wind. I cannot imagine only wind and solar supporting the needs of Mumbai.
There are countries other than the US who do not take 20 years to build a reactor. Out-dated regulations, punitive paperwork, and perhaps poor project management are the reasons for the oft-cited delays in the US. Other countries complete their builds in 6 to 7 years. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
First, it was a FOAK design. Which always takes longer to build, it is a prototype.
Second, the nuclear build know how in the nuclear engineers, construction workers, and supply chain was not really there any longer.
Third, they used a new permitting system, which in theory should have been better and probably will be better in the future: instead of ongoing individual checks and modifications, which made every nuclear power plant in the US a unique unicorn, you are now allowed to submit a master design and once approved you can build that over and over. Without changes.
Alas, Westinghouse wasn't actually done with the design when they submitted. So when they started building, they noticed that they had submitted plans that could not actually be built. Oops. That cause massive delays. And delays = cost.
And the suppliers fought each other, one went bankrupt etc. COVID also didn't help.
So how can we guarantee that the same won't happen in the future and that NOAK builds will be better? Well, for one they now have plans that are obviously buildable, because a bunch of AP-1000s have been built. So that exact thing absolutely can't happen.
Also, we can look to China. Turns out, China also built 2 FOAK AP-1000s. These also took about 10 years, despite China usually building in 5. And it turns out, China built some more AP-1000s after that. NOAK builds. And these took 5 years to build with buildable plans, experience building that reactors and a mature nuclear industry to back them.
So there is good reason to believe that future NOAK builds of the AP-1000 and of comparable reactors will be much faster and much cheaper than what we've seen so far.
Delays and cost overruns for nuclear are absolutely not atypical. Pick anywhere in the world you want and you’ll find them building reactors easy 50% over time and budget, and many >100%.
One observation is that Small Modular Reactors could take much less time: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/111356564/modular-...
Edited to add: China estimates 10 new reactors at 27 billion in total: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
It's going great!!!11
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
Thanks for cherry picking and not linking averages.
Also, Germany currently has the problem of much more and more reliable wind generation in the north, but not enough network capacity to send it all south when needed. It is being addressed, but as expected, it is very complicated because infrastructure across the whole country touches the interests of a lot of groups with very different interests.
We might need much better tunnel building equipment and a deep sub-terranean network... (useful sci-fi idea, needs to be able to cope with mild earth quakes in some regions).
The energy mix in Germany leads to a situation where electric cars are dirtier than diesel (for the first ~200000 km / 125000 miles driven).
Renewable share of electricity production is about 56% so this claim is not at all credible.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-covers-nearly-5...
Let’s not stare us blind at perfect in one sector wasting money and opportunity cost which needs to be spent on harder to abate industries.
And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time.
So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.
The increase in renewable production needs to be 4x greater initially, because of the longer life of nuclear plants. Queueing theory/Little's Law. So this is entirely expected if you are targeting (a) a fairly constant fleet and (b) fairly constant production rate, both of which are desirable.
Under the Messmer plan, France ignored this and built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Which means that they were pretty much done after 15 years, their nuclear industry had basically nothing to do for the next 40 or so years and withered. Bad idea.
The current rate of new construction starts in China implies a build rate of at least 10 reactors per year. With an expected life of 80 years, that implies a target fleet size of around 800 reactors if the rate remains constant.
Surprisingly it seems worthwhile to build solar in places like the UK/Netherlands/Denmark since solar production is negatively correlated with wind.
Norway and Sweden have large hydropower resources too.
You can buy a floating nuclear power plant in the form of an aircraft carrier for a lot less than $16B. The US Navy builds these things as a matter of course in a few years using standard designs they crank out by the dozens.
And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)
Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
And you are incorrect: renewables are not competitive without heavy subsidies and preferential treatment, such as being allowed to shift the cost of their intermittency onto the reliable producers.
And of course the capacity factor for PV is about 10%, so you need 10x the capacity to get the same output even on average. Never mind that you get nothing at night, and very little in winter.
- European electricity review 2024 by Ember
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective.
We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.
You could say most of the same things about batteries. There is a little lithium in Europe. But Europe doesn't have a battery industry. It's in China. And you could buy batteries from China, but we aren't doing that and the political trends don't support more energy dependence on China. You could also buy nuclear reactors from China, but of course Europe doesn't want to do that either.
What they are proposing is that Europe is going to pivot from not making batteries to not building nuclear plants. They will, however, write lots of papers about the reactors (neé batteries) they would like to build, if only the prevailing wage or regulatory regime or other economic excuse du jour wasn't stopping them.
It has increasingly become my impression after watching these debates unfold that the core technology is not the real problem. The problem is a lack of political will to encourage the growth of new industries in green energy, failing both at regulatory and industrial policy. Solar is succeeding, not because it is the best form of energy (though it is) but because it is mostly paid for and installed by individuals and small businesses (with a little capital you can own your own solar farm!).
Certainly this is some kind of failure. But this is Hacker News. Surely we can appreciate that you can't just blame the core technology when a company fails. History is full of companies that failed. Japan and the USA have battery companies despite high wages. There is something to be learned here, but I don't have the determination to figure out exactly what it is.
100% this, no doubt about it. There is a collective lack of investment into the future and I'd say we are witnessing managed decay more than anything else.
The Finnish EPR only took 18 years of construction. What a marvel of engineering and planning.
There is a massive nuclear renaissance in-progress.
According to the following tracker:
https://globalenergymonitor.github.io/maps/trackers/nuclear/
There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively.
Note that both the numbers are pretty large compared to the installed base (more than doubling the installed base), that they are increasing for the earlier stages (indicating more is in the pipeline than is currently being built), and that all the pipeline stages are increasing over time.
Which is of course consistent with the fact that 34 countries have now signed the international pledge to triple nuclear output that was first agreed at COP28. These countries include: France, the United States, China, Japan, Poland, Sweden, etc. India has plans and is on track to triple by 2032, but hasn't signed the pledge.
I am also not sure why you think that "all existing experts" have retired and there is no nuclear industry. The World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris November 4-6 of this year had over 1000 exhibitors, and more than half of those were from Europe.
https://www.framatome.com/en/evenements-clients/world-nuclea...
Even phase-out-Germany still has substantial nuclear engineering capacity, there's even a nuclear fuel factory in Lingen. And of course the actual nuclear component of a nuclear power plant is only around 20%. About the same effort/cost goes into the steam turbines, of which Siemens is a major worldwide supplier.
And of course civil nuclear programs have next to nothing to do with military nuclear programs. There are many more users of civil nuclear power than there are military nuclear powers, and the military nuclear powers invariably got the bomb first, and added a civil program later, with some like Israel only having a military nuclear program, not a civilian one.
In fact, there's a fun anecdote from the beginnings of the French nuclear program, since you mention France: when the Messmer plan got started, the military wanted to deploy an indigenous type of reactor for the civilian program that was more suitable for military uses, but in the end the government decided to standardize on a US Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that was not useful for military purposes.
At about 1 GWatt per reactor, thats about 500 GWatt total new nuclear built over what must be decades, if it is built at all. A fair chunk of the existing 419 reactors will be retired in that time.
Meanwhile, Gemini tells me the planet added well over 100 GW renewable generation in 2024. That 100 GW is dispatchable. It was over 500 GW peak. Almost no renewables were retired in 2024. The rate new renewables are being added is growing at least quadratically.
Maybe Europe sunshine and wind resources mean they have no choice, it's nuclear or nothing. But renewables are being added at the pace they are for a reason. In the places that do have the renewable resources, they are far cheaper. If Europe is forced to go down the nuclear path, they are going to be paying far more than other places on the planet for their energy.
We pay less in practice than the rates given above for power, because the government also subsidizes it. But even without that I understand such rates would be relatively cheap in most European countries.
Provincial regulatory report from 2025-2026:
* https://oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20251017...
Search for "RPP Price Report" for previous ones:
* https://www.oeb.ca/consultations-and-projects/policy-initiat...
The outcome was surprisingly close. Sydney seemed to be a little more expensive, with a spot market average of CAD$73/MWh vs CAD$65/MWh. A wash really.
I don't know what is going on with the retail prices. My rule of thumb is multiply by 3, but your multiple is closer to 4.5. I live in Brisbane for example, where the average price is $100/MWh and we pay around $.30/kWh retail. Have you looked at https://www.energymadeeasy.gov.au/ ?
For a real example, I'm on flat rate and if I use 1000 kWh my monthly bill will be 211 CAD (effective rate 0.21 CAD / 0.13 EUR per kWh) including taxes, connection, delivery, everything, but without subsidy. The amount I pay after the subsidy is applied would be less at 165 CAD.
The reason for the high kW/h is because limited wind/solar during that month and high gas prices which result in high market price at the power exchange. The given reason for the fixed fees is because of the need to expand transmissions and build out more reserve energy to handle the increase variability of the grid as a result of the increase use of renewables and the outcome of decommissioning a few nuclear reactors in the south of Sweden.
Would be very curious about the rationale for it if not. Why would you subsidize increased energy use
One is to offset the cost to the consumer for phasing out fossil fuels. Coal has been shut down and wind and storage and new nuclear is being built. Politically it has been presented as a matter of fairness; poor people are least able to pay for increases or to retrofit. A kind of wealth redistribution. (Though when you remember large corporately-run farms are included in the subsidy it's maybe not the most progressive form of redistribution.)
In Quebec where they have a great surplus of hydroelectric they also partly subsidize residential electricity with the profits of the surplus sale to the United States. The energy is so cheap there than resistive heating is cheaper than natural gas for home heating. Avoiding dependence on oil and gas imported from either the US or western Canada, or rather trying to lessen that dependence, is a standing issue for both Quebec and Ontario.
Bulk prices at exchanges are way lower, like 2.2¢ per kWh: https://www.ieso.ca/Power-Data/Price-Overview/Ontario-Market...
The problem is that new built western nuclear power requires ~18 cents/kWh (Vogtle, FV3, HPC etc.) when running at 100% 24/7 all year around, excluding backup, transmission costs and taxes.
Now try sell that electricity to a home owner with solar PV and maybe a battery and you will get laughed out of the room almost the entire year. A firming new built nuclear plant with ruinously high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX is economic lunacy.
This does not even take into account that new built nuclear power requires ~15-20 years from political decision to working plants.
As soon as new built nuclear power’s costs and timelines are confronted with reality it just does not work out.
In EU, the split between flats (apartments) and houses is roughly 50/50, depending on how densely populated the country is. In the US, it about 1/3 in apartments. Canada is roughly 50/50, with a slight detached-house bias.
Not that it doesn't mean houseowner vs renter. Landlords have next to zero incentive to install solar PV because renters pay for electricity. In the US about 7% of homes have solar, I don't know about EU and Canada.
Solar can't provide baseline and even in sunny SoCal, you will go back to the grid often enough that being off-the-grid isn't reasonable for the typical household.
Anyway, we still need new nuclear power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcony_solar_power
So you want a peaking nuclear plant for firming?
Vogtle costs 18 cents/kWh when running at 100% 24/7 all year around. A typical gas peaker runs at 15-25% of the time.
Running a peaking Vogtle now costs somewhere like 60-90 cents/kWh.
As soon as new built nuclear power with ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX hits the raw physical incentive systems of the our energy system it just becomes stupid.
Anyway, even if that were correct numbers, it would misleading on several fronts, as the only new western reactors were unrepresentative FOAK builds, and also troubled beyond just regular FOAK status.
Furthermore, the costs tend to be calculated for the period while they are repaying the loans, so it's mostly capital costs. Once the plant is paid off, the price drops dramatically.
The average build time is currently 6.5 years, median slightly less, trend downwards.
That is with the first reactor coming online 2038 with a perfectly executed project.
I suggest you stop referencing unsourced statistics when the topic at hand is new built european nuclear power.
Edit - toned it down
Which you did not answer.
And then you accuse me of referencing unsourced statistics and lying.
Hmm...
The 6.5 years figure is from here:
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
"Current european nuclear" is completely atypical and unrepresentative. The numbers are too low to be statistically significant anyhow, but on top of that they were all FOAK builds, all of a single (base) design that has been deemed too difficult to build by its manufacturer and thus discontinued, and mostly built in countries with little recent nuclear experience.
The HPC build, for example, was very explicitly intended to build up the UK nuclear industry, which was a significant part of the cost.
1. Start with ignoring the EPR2 costs.
2. Cherry-pick data that does not represent western timelines. Of course ignoring the best case for the first EPR2 reactor is 12 years if they start today.
3. Blame everything on ”FOAK”. Despite Hinkley point C being reactor 5 and 6 in the EPR series. But that is of course ”FOAK”.
4. Allude that the next UK reactor will be cheaper. Despite the projected cost for Sizewell C is £38B before even starting compared to the current projection at £42-48B for Hinkley Point C.
Sizewell C truly shows the state of new built European nuclear power. EDF is too financially weak to take on any further nuclear construction liability like a fixed price contract, and the CFD would be ruinously expensive.
Instead it is a pure cost-plus contract where an extra surcharge is added to all ratepayers as soon as construction starts having people today pay for electricity hopefully delivered 10-15 years in the future. Hiding the true all-in cost in terms the average tax payer doesn’t understand rather than a trivially understood CFD.
Like I said. As soon as new built nuclear power is confronted with reality it becomes economic and opportunity cost lunacy unless you can motivate it with for example military ambitions.
Was this really necessary?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcony_solar_power
Why should industry buy extremely expensive new built nuclear power when grid based zero marginal cost renewables are available?
If they’re having worries about price fluctuations then we already have markets for electricity futures. The perfect market for stable new built nuclear power.
The problem for new built nuclear power is that they need enormous tax payer based handouts to close the gap between the price of electricity futures and production cost. Let alone making a profit.
How does industry deal with 50% of the nuclear capacity having outages for months on end like happened in France during the energy crisis?
>... composed of representatives from employers' associations, workers' unions (trade unions) and civil society organisations.
I'm not sure how up they are on technical issues like the rapid progress in batteries and solar and the like.
Hinkley C in the UK was approved in 2016 and probably will be producing in 2031 so 15 years on. (cost ~£40bn). In the last 15 years the cost of battery storage and of solar panels have both fallen about 10x. If that goes on they will be much cheaper but the time nuclear comes online.
About reactor malfunctions and fallout?
Yes, I know the chances are slim and you know as well as I do they're not 0.
The actual safety is almost entirely unrelated to the fears people have. There is even a term for this: radiophobia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
Radiophobia is an irrational or excessive fear of ionizing radiation, leading to overestimating the health risks of radiation compared to other risks. It can impede rational decision-making and contribute to counter-productive behavior and policies.
I suspect the UK will only build the nuclear capacity required to keep the industry around on national security grounds.
Giving a preference to intermittent renewables is not a law of nature, but a rule that is irrational and needs to be removed.
Denmark is just now hitting problems with their wind strategy, and of course dependent on being a transit land between large producers and consumers. And currently looking at nuclear. As is Norway.
One of the reason is that intermittent renewables are pro-cyclical, that is once they reach a certain level of saturation, they cannibalize each other even more than they cannibalize steady suppliers.
The current plan is to quadruple nuclear power in the UK.
While you can turn nuclear up and down a little bit the fuel costs are negligible so it costs the same to generate 80% or 100% of rated output. It's done in France because nuclear makes up so much of their generation capacity they have no other option.
> Giving a preference to intermittent renewables is not a law of nature, but a rule that is irrational and needs to be removed.
I think carbon-free generation options should be considered dispassionately with a focus on minimising cost and reducing CO2 emissions as quickly as possible. But there is path dependence at this point. The wind generation capacity will already have been built out before many more nuclear plants come online. I think this will make the economics of expanding nuclear power generation unattractive because we will already have made the commitments to buy the wind generation and we will instead look for the lowest priced options to fill the gaps.
> Denmark is just now hitting problems with their wind strategy, and of course dependent on being a transit land between large producers and consumers. And currently looking at nuclear. As is Norway. > > One of the reason is that intermittent renewables are pro-cyclical, that is once they reach a certain level of saturation, they cannibalize each other even more than they cannibalize steady suppliers.
The fast decreasing cost of batteries will help smooth out fluctuations in wind generation across a day or two. That should reduce the level of cannibalisation between wind projects substantially, though does not remove the need for backup power for longer periods of little wind.
I suspect the proposed SMR projects in Norway and Denmark will depend on whether anyone is able to get SMR build costs down sufficiently to make them attractive. It certainly makes no sense to ban them outright.
> The current plan is to quadruple nuclear power in the UK.
That was the 2050 target from the last government. In terms of actual commitments the only planned plant after Hinkley C is currently Sizewell C. At the same time 4 of our 5 remaining nuclear plants will be decommissioned by early 2030. I think the target is highly unlikely to be met.
There is a £2.5 billion investment in SMRs (if you can call reactors around a 1/3rd the size of existing nuclear power plants small...) but will they really have reduced costs?
Australia, for instance, powers 40% of its electricity with renewables.
However, electricity makes up ~20% of _total_ energy consumption which means renewables made up 9% of _total_ energy production.
As the electrification of transport, industry, manufacturing, etc proceeds, the demand for electricity will increase (in the case of Australia, we need to 5x our electricity production).
Ironically, legislators are disincentivized from stimulating electrification as getting to 100% renewable electricity production is easier when electricity is only 20% of our energy usage.
It could be, for the EU not Norway at least, that there was a consumption uptick but it's hidden because people charge their cars with their own solar panels. But even this is indicative of how the grid will work in the future.
If you take as axioms:
1) Countries have major political interest in whether other countries have nuclear reactors
2) Countries are already, at large scale, manipulating discourse across the internet to achieve their political goals
Then of course it follows that any comment thread on a semi-popular or higher site about whether a country should build more nuclear reactors is going to be heavily manipulated by said countries. That's where (most) of the insane people in such threads are probably coming from.
How are we supposed to survive as a civilization with such corrupted channels of communication?
There are countries that have interest of having gas or oil bought from them. It is not clear if they are pro or against other countries going nuclear: on one hand, nuclear will replace part of their market. On the other hand, lobbying to move towards nuclear may impede progress in replacing gas and oil by renewable (a strategy would be to lobby so that the nuclear project starts and then lobby so that the project stagnates and never delivers).
There are countries that have interest in seeing nuclear adopted because they have a market for the ore extraction or waste processing. There are countries that have interest in seeing nuclear not adopted because they have a market around other generations.
Finally, some countries may want to see their neighbors adopt nuclear: the neighbor will pay all the front bills and take all the risk (economical but also PR, or the cost of educating experts, ...), and if they succeed, they will provide import energy very cheap that can fill the gaps the country did not wanted to invest in.
So it is not clear if there is just one stream of lobbying. The reality is probably that every "sides" does somehow contain manipulative discourse from foreign countries.
Here are some sources of information that helped me understand the two oft-cited nuclear disasters better.
The World Nuclear Energy write up on the Fukushima incident: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
Some information on the Chernobyl incident: The infographics show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uJhjqBz5Tk
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
A lecture in the MIT Courseware on the incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijst4g5KFN0
This lecture is way more informative where the professor explains how the workers took the system beyond the rated capacity as part of a test.
There have been many lessons learned, and the World Nuclear article linked above shares some of these.
Here is a writeup of the Three Mile Island incident: https://world-nuclear.org/Information-Library/Safety-and-Sec...
One regular complaint is the costs of nuclear energy. This is likely true in the US due to regulations that have not been revised for newer technology, but such high costs are cited around the world.
Likewise, the amount of waste and the danger of the waste is not well understood either, and certainly lots of education is needed here. For e.g., most people do not know that the volume of waste is limited and that the same waste can be reused in reactors of other designs.
I do believe that national ego issues get in the way of fixes. I believe that such ego issues got in the way of honest repairs (Fukushima) and timely action (Chernobyl). Certainly, nuclear inspections are still treated with suspicion and hostility, but in fact full transparency and integrity should be the norm.
Corruption and profit-centric thinking are two other problems that plague the nuclear industry. South Korea has had lots of corruption and shortcuts (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...). One of the accusations in India against France was that France licenses outdated nuclear reactor technology despite having newer technology. I am unable to locate a link supporting this accusation.
With thorium reactors and Small Module Reactors, there are many modern solutions to safety.
ThorCon's Thorium Converter Reactor - Lars Jorgensen in Bali https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1IrzDDI9g
Here is the full training by Thorcon on their reactors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkvEXm-rMW4&list=PLuGiwaUJYE...
We need to stop citing and quoting US-based costs and problems that are linked to outdated US regulations. There are other countries that have more modern regulations and modern technologies.
Where is the fossile fuel being burnt?
There is obviously major ethical issues here. The rich, already developed world- having emitted enormous quantities of CO2 to get there- telling poor, undeveloped people living as subsistence farmers that they can't use any more energy because of all the CO2 already in the atmosphere is a really hard argument to make, locking them into being poor forever while the developed world benefits from all that CO2 consumption. But on the other hand, by skipping right to large scale solar, maybe those inside the circle can do a better job?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle
China 50%, India 11%. And that is based on their official numbers so probably a lot more.
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
Why does it matter to energy security? Nuclear power plants contribute to electricity security in multiple ways by keeping power grids stable and complementing decarbonisation strategies since, to a certain extent, they can adjust their output to accompany shifts in demand and supply. As the share of variable renewables like wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) rises, the need for such services will increase.
What are the challenges? Nuclear power faces a contrasted future despite its ability to produce emissions-free power. With large up-front costs, long lead times and an often-poor record of on-time delivery, nuclear power projects have trouble in some jurisdictions competing against faster-to-install alternatives, such as natural gas or modern renewables. It also faces public opposition in many countries. Its uncertain future could result in billions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/electricity/nuclear-power
Do note: There are countries other than the US and France who license nuclear technologies and build-outs. There are innovative technologies by US companies that work with modern regulations and are faster and less expensive to build. We must stop citing US nuclear build times that are largely due to outdated regulations and hostile review processes.
It’s uncanny how the narrative rhymes: we have insanely capable portable computing devices at price points that are accessible to every person across the planet. Similarly, distributed generation (and storage) are already bringing electricity to people who have no real chance of being on the grid ever.
I see no way the economics working out for nuclear, except for niche uses.
I can even imagine the grid being something relegated for long range / high intensity applications (instead of household distribution) in a few hundred years
Consider Germany. 50% is coal + gas, 22% is wind + biomass. At 490 g/kWh.
Italy: 60% gas at 386 g/kWh.
Then compare them to France: 75% of the electricity comes from nuclear, at 47 g/kWh.
All of this despite abundant wind+solar capacity installed in Germany, France, Italy, and Poland.
There is a strong need to remove CO₂-intensive generators and replace them by something that does not send CO₂ into the air.
There is also a strong need to build up capacity to store energy.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/fifteen_min...
Anyways, solar is also cheaper
The lithium battery plant in northern Sweden went bankrupt so its difficult to say how to solve the storage solution by both being cheap and financial viable. New battery solutions are being made, but in the end it need to be cheap enough over the long term. The current use of gas for non-optimal weather means prices jump up by a factor of around 100x of what it is during good weather, and the average price in nordpool (the northen pan-European power exchange) is about 20x than what you get with good weather. That should illustrate how much variability there is in the energy price right now, and how much people are paying for that gas powered electricity in periods of non-optimal weather conditions.
A lot of fossil fuel subsidies goes directly to support the high variability power grid, and they more than doubled during 2022 when the gas prices went up. It is incredibly expensive, likely more than nuclear, to have a grid supported by renewables during optimal weather conditions and fossil fuels during non-optimal weather conditions. It also generate a lot of waste in term of pollution which has a bigger issue both short and long term than nuclear waste.
This is pretty far from the truth. Exactly One Swimming Pool is all that is needed to store the entire "waste" for a country.
If you don't recycle it.
Or if you don't put it concrete.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
In recent news we are seeing the fossil lobby ally with new built nuclear power since wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power potentially may stymie renewable development.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-12-09/nuclear-e...
Which is fine, except putting hopes into a technology that has failed repeatedly for 60 years is in itself irrational.
HN would do itself a favor if it learned the lessons of "worse is better" and applied it to, well, almost anything. In this case, a moonshot to advance nuclear globally might bring realistic results in 10-15 years. By that time the world will already be decarbonized by renewables as it's already happening. At best nuclear might be that last missing piece to get to 100%, but even this I would no longer bet on. There is already insane growth in undeveloped countries which will push demand even further. Renewables are ridiculously cheap.
Honestly the main part about nuclear energy is dependence.
In Germany we saw how well that played out in 2022 when Russian gas stopped flowing.
There is a shit ton of innovation around battery technologies, extending the grid and behind the meter micro-grids.
A more diversified, autonomous (as in, wind, solar) energy supply beats Nuclear in terms of national security and long term viability any day.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-dumbest-energy-policy-11...
Yep, the Gas that was needed due to ... the World's Dumbest Energy Policy.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/mecklenburg-vorpommern/nord-s...
Schon während seiner Kanzlerschaft sei die damalige Bundesregierung der Auffassung gewesen, die deutsche Energiepolitik aus der Abhängigkeit der Kernenergie zu befreien. "Wir fanden deshalb, dass es Sinn macht, auf Gas zu setzen."
Uranium is cheap, widely available (largest known reserves in Australia, 3rd in Canada, also Sweden recently had a large find), compact, solid, storable.
Security:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-p...
In Ukraine, nuclear is what's keeping the lights on.
When you look at the data though, its political fallout was much worse than the actual toll on human life, etc. Fukushima released a small about of radiation into the environment. But modern reactors don’t have the same runaway reactivity flaws that Chernobyl did.
Not zero risk. But not the level of risk resulting in half a continent potentially being uninhabitable.
Such an extreme set of outlier events could happen again, of course, but it's not very realistic.
That plant had always had the higher wall due to one engineer who insisted, and Fukushima actually had a natural barrier that was higher, but lowered during construction for convenience. And TEPCO dragged their feet on increasing the height to the new norm that had recently been made mandatory. My understanding is that this is one of the reasons TEPCO got dinged.
And even with all that, a German reactor, for example, would have remained undamaged due to various mandatory safety features even without a sufficiently high tsunami wall. For example, multi-sited and bunkered diesel generators, so no flooding. Also Hydrogen recombinators, so none of those lovely hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off.
But of course Germany had to shut off its nuclear plants due to the regular occurring 1000-year Tsunamis in Germany that German plants would have survived.
We're crazy.
Oh, and still exactly 0 radiation deaths from Fukushima, and no measurable health impact expected. All health effects, including deaths were due to the unnecessary evacuation. And not just unnecessary in hindsight, this was known beforehand, gut officials panicked.
Did I mention that Japan is restarting their reactors and considers nuclear an essential part of their future energy strategy, as it is the cheapest baseload power source? The monetary cost of importing Gas exceeds even the vastly inflated cleanup and compensation costs (due to the unnecessary evacauations) by at last an order of magnitude. And of course the health impact of those fossil fuel plants during normal operations is higher than that of the nuclear accident.
Among others variables, the plant was designed to be constructed on a hill 30-35 meters above the ocean, but someones decided would be cheaper to construct it at sea level in order to reduce costs in water pumping, others decided to license this, and much latter, one decade before the disaster when was requested to reinforce the security measures within all the reactors in the country -in Fukushima for example to elevate critical systems to hills- others decided to ignore it [1][2]
[0] https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp...
[1] https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp...
[2]https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p...
What happens is that nuclear fusion is not here yet, and there is insufficient stable/maintained energy to meet current demand without using combined cycle power plants (combustion), and this without even a transition to full electric vehicles, with right now sounds to pure phantasy (how will be feed).
So the realistic by the moment sounds like to keep constructing new nuclear fission plants and renewables, keeping a diversification of sources, as is doing China with their mega projects. Without this will not be way to compete with their industry.
But more important, I think is needed to end the nepotism, the revolving doors (amakudari), and, of course, to prevent sociopaths from accessing positions of responsibility in any field... what sounds difficult because those positions are like magnets for them. This is what seems we don't learn from the human history.
And as for how realistic it was that it would make large areas unlivable, the threat was of a melt-down going far enough down to hit the water table and contaminating the groundwater. That would make large areas only livable if you brought your own water, even for bathing, basically making the area impracticable. Obviously it didn't happen, but I'm not clear whether it was a 0.5% chance, a 5% chance or a 50% chance.