EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

https://www.weplanet.org/post/eu-court-rules-nuclear-energy-is-clean-energy

by mpweiher • 10 months ago

1053 1206 10 months ago

tietjens3• 10 months ago

Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.

gsibble2• 10 months ago

That's a shame.

kulahan10• 10 months ago

With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".

RandomLensman9• 10 months ago

It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.

Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).

toomuchtodo3• 10 months ago

You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops.

Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025

US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025

oceanplexian3• 10 months ago

It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.

pstuart2• 10 months ago

There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.

fuzzy2• 10 months ago

If AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)

V__12• 10 months ago

I willing to wager that the AI bubble will burst before you could even begin to build power plants for them.

i5heu2• 10 months ago

Not with a tech that needs 15 years to be build

ThinkBeat• 10 months ago

A country is not forced to have AI farms running in it. Building giant powerplant for the AI tech (possible) bubble not seems wise.

The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point.

SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.

croes5• 10 months ago

The wait until after the AI bubble and buy the cheap surplus of energy.

AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither.

cyberax5• 10 months ago

Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.

Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.

After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.

_aavaa_5• 10 months ago

The data does not back up this narrative: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas.

_9ptr• 10 months ago

Yeah, but we're Germans. We don't stop when it's reasonable, not when we want to follow an idea.

fundatus4• 10 months ago

Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.

StopDisinfo9108• 10 months ago

Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start.

Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.

darkamaul2• 10 months ago

I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy. There must have been stronger political reasons behind it than simply « not liking nuclear ». I’d be curious to read something deeper on the subject and understand the reasoning behind those strategies since the Fukushima accident.

ViewTrick100244• 10 months ago

France is sabotaging France on nuclear.

Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

Germany doesn't need to sabotage France on nuclear energy; France has done a fine job of sabotaging themselves.

croes5• 10 months ago

Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell.

Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?

The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.

froh4• 10 months ago

and a municipality willing to have the German finale nuclear waste storage in their backyard.

the Söder Challenge is Legend:-)

pyrale2• 10 months ago

if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.

So basically, be the only energy source not subsidized? There are plenty of decent reasons to be against nuclear, and there's a discussion to be had on its price, but pointing out subsidies in the energy sector is like casting stones from your glass house.

m10124• 10 months ago

German people mostly just listen to what their leaders tell them. If their leaders change their mind then the German people will step in line and believe they changed their mind out of their own free will too.

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

Let's not pretend that the companies running those plants are being hindered by the government. They themselves have said turning them back on is a stupid idea.

gsibble2• 10 months ago

It is. And that's great news!

binaryturtle• 10 months ago

This is clean, until something goes catastrophically wrong.

(Which eventually it will. The more reactors, the more chances for it to happen.)

pelagicAustral• 10 months ago

I'd say a reactor in inland Europe is far from the craziest place to put one. God forbid someone were to put one in the Pacific ring of fire... oh, wait...

IAmBroom3• 10 months ago

Why? Are you concerned that, like Lex Luthor in that worst-of-all Superman movies, someone will use nuclear reactors to somehow cause damage to continental plates? Actually, that's more of a stretch than the movie took.

mgaunard• 10 months ago

Meanwhile lignite mines (which Germany are re-opening) actively affect the health of everyone nearby, even when everything goes perfectly alright.

pydry4• 10 months ago

The nuclear industry did say that this would happen but the reality was the exact opposite:

According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.

https://theprogressplaybook.com/2025/02/19/german-state-of-b...

yellowapple9• 10 months ago

Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

epistasis21• 10 months ago

Sure, in deaths per unit energy. But the real risk of nuclear is financial. The tail risk is huge for any producer on their own, which makes insurance extremely expensive, and which means that usually only nations bear the full financial risk of nuclear.

ryao3• 10 months ago

Data reported by Forbes put the death rates for nuclear power in the US below all other sources of energy including solar:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

The death rates are wildly different than the ones at the site you linked. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy.

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

These are death rates with the current saturation of plants. If we wanted to cover all of Europe, a much more densely populated area, with nuclear, the deaths (and other negative consequences) would be far greater, no?

sollewitt• 10 months ago

Pebble-bed reactors are incapable of catastrophic failure, and molten-salt reactors have negative feedback loops with increasing pressure. Nuclear doesn't have to mean the same designs that were used in the 60s.

acidburnNSA7• 10 months ago

Both those design types were operational in the 1960s in the US but have been shut down due to lack of performance and industrial interest. New interest has started today, but let's not claim the new ones are some kind of new improved tech that evolved out of our workhorse water cooled/moderated plants.

exabrial2• 10 months ago

You are incorrect fortunately.

Western designs are safe, most Soviet-era ones are/were not. It's unfortunate that nuclear power still has this stigma, as it's like saying "all cars are unsafe" while comparing the crash test ratings of a modern sedan to a 1960's chevy bel aire.

nilslindemann16• 10 months ago

Then why did Fukushima happen?

ainiriand• 10 months ago

What is a bit scary is that we cannot easily deal with the consequence of something really wrong... We have to real with it.

yellowapple9• 10 months ago

[flagged]

robotnikman2• 10 months ago

and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.

I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.

pydry4• 10 months ago

Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.

So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.

(E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).

opo9• 10 months ago

Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented.

…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...

The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:

…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US $70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...

Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.

In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.

If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.

ben_w2• 10 months ago

Greenpeace is both halves of the name.

While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.

This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.

Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.

SequoiaHope2• 10 months ago

Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.

exabrial2• 10 months ago

the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons

I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.

echelon• 10 months ago

I've heard and think I've read multiple times that Greenpeace was fueled by Soviet monies to prevent Western energy independence and economic takeoff.

I don't have sources and would appreciate if anyone has anything to offer on this.

pydry4• 10 months ago

There's a fun game you can play with countries that build nuclear power plants: "guess the existential threat".

In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.

In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.

awalsh128• 10 months ago

Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.

Eji1700• 10 months ago

There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.

V__12• 10 months ago

I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.

The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.

oceanplexian3• 10 months ago

How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?

ahmeneeroe-v27• 10 months ago

Solar and battery have had immense investment to bring down that LCOE. Where can we get if we invest similarly in nuclear.

lol at wind though. that's not real.

alexey-salmin6• 10 months ago

That's only true because both solar panels and batteries are produced in China off cheap coal power.

LCOE is not a fundamental metric. EROI is and it's pretty bad for photovoltaics.

StopDisinfo9108• 10 months ago

If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.

For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.

quickthrowman• 10 months ago

There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.

mpweiher63• 10 months ago

It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.

None of this happens to be true.

A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.

Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.

Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.

And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.

What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?

Here the Finnish environment minister:

""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.

He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."

https://yle.fi/a/74-20136905

Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.

While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.

varispeed2• 10 months ago

These are orchestrated by Russia. They want to destabilise European energy sector and economies and they are sponsoring various organisations to spread such misinformation.

varispeed2• 10 months ago

The West is losing information war with Russia - see the downvotes. Sites are infested with Russian bots and useful idiots helping the genocidal regime.

jltsiren• 10 months ago

I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence.

However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.

quotemstr5• 10 months ago

It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure.

It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.

Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.

throwawayffffas5• 10 months ago

The more I observe a lot of activists the more I suspect, a lot of organizations and movements are cold war era Soviet psyOps that outlived their handlers.

tomhow2• 10 months ago

You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or think you are. This comment breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

yellowapple9• 10 months ago

Sorry. I'll tone it down going forward.

pkoiralap3• 10 months ago

Asking because I don't know. How is enrichment governed? Say for instance if a country is only using it for energy vs defense/offense. And are there elements that can be specifically used for energy vs otherwise? Last I remember, having access to enriched uranium was grounds for a country to bomb another one.

msk-lywenn• 10 months ago

Energy needs like 5% enrichment while weaponizing needs much higher and much more difficult to obtain 85% enrichment

nradov2• 10 months ago

You should read the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as it addresses several of those issues. Possession of highly enriched uranium isn't necessarily an act of war by itself.

https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...

philipkglass• 10 months ago

The only way to ensure that a civil uranium enrichment program remains strictly civil is via transparency and monitoring. A country that has mastered uranium enrichment technology for fueling civil power reactors could use the same technology to produce bomb-grade uranium. It actually takes more work to enrich natural uranium into fuel for power reactors than it takes to further enrich power reactor fuel into bomb material:

https://scipython.com/blog/uranium-enrichment-and-the-separa...

pkoiralap3• 10 months ago

This is scary. so the extra effort to move from, say, 20% to 85% is relatively small compared with the effort to get up to 20% in the first place. Might as well build a feature into the reactor so that it only works with <=20%

KyleBerezin• 10 months ago

IAEA inspections verify your claimed inventory and enrichment facilities. They are trying to detect if any nuclear materials are being skimmed/diverted. As for weapons, nuclear fuel is very low enrichment (usually under 5%). Iran surpassed 60%, which has no peaceful use, so that is why it was said they were perusing weapons.

Polizeiposaune• 10 months ago

Natural uranium on earth is currently about 0.7% U-235; civilian power reactors typically need low-enriched uranium which is 3% to 5% U-235.

The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).

Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.

magicalhippo• 10 months ago

Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.

Which, as I understand it, is because at 20% enrichment you've already done about 70% of the work needed to get to 85%.

hugo1789• 10 months ago

Imo that's a pretty complicated topic. On one side if you just build LWRs you just don't need very highly enriched uranium or plutonium so posession of those is a red flag. On the other side fast breeder reactors are the ones which are able to produce the least harmful waste. But fast breeders and closed fuel cycles produce and handle plutonium which in turn can be used for bad things.

throwawayffffas5• 10 months ago

Modern weapons use plutonium not uranium, uranium weapons can be constructed.

All it takes is the enrichment to produce the fissile material for a weapon.

As far as I know countries have agreed to not build weapons, with the exception of those that already have them, there is an international body that monitors enrichment sites, but checks are voluntary a country can choose to not accept inspections and/or build additional secret enrichment sites.

The fissile material is not sufficient for a weapon though, as I understand there is quite a bit of science that goes into making a bomb.

Additionally, first generation weapons are large and unwieldy, i.e it takes a bomber to deploy a single weapon with a very small yield.

Miniaturization, building a weapon small and light enough to put on a missile is a significant problem that took the current powers years to get over.

But that's about it, if you can figure out how to make a small bomb of variable yield, you can make bombs small enough to fit a large backpack, and thermonuclear weapons that fit in a ballistic missile as well.

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

Modern weapons use plutonium not uranium, uranium weapons can be constructed.

Thermonuclear bombs use uranium in the tamper of the secondary. Some use enriched uranium there.

m10124• 10 months ago

You don't actually need enriched uranium for nuclear power. The design is easier if you enrich it, but there are reactors that would work on unenriched uranium.

The solution to these issues is just to manage the enrichment supply chain. If a country wants nuclear power but can't be trusted, supply then with at cost uranium.

anthk• 10 months ago

Well, compared to carbon, it is.

reenorap3• 10 months ago

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.

epistasis21• 10 months ago

Which are the fake costs from regulation?

We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?

I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.

If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.

reenorap3• 10 months ago

It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.

darkamaul2• 10 months ago

All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate.

However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.

krisoft2• 10 months ago

If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution.

That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.

That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.

boringg6• 10 months ago

Its multifold.

1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital. 2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab. 3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.

China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.

helaoban• 10 months ago

Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?

Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".

jjk1662• 10 months ago

I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.

One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.

Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.

Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...

yellowapple9• 10 months ago

I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.

I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.

ahmeneeroe-v27• 10 months ago

Yeah it seems like having State control is not a silver bullet

carstenhag• 10 months ago

I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".

Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?

diordiderot2• 10 months ago

Maybe roll back regulation to when France rolled out the Messmer plan?

They spent 1/4th of what we do today.

ahmeneeroe-v27• 10 months ago

You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.

Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control

Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.

reenorap3• 10 months ago

PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.

epistasis21• 10 months ago

Unless by "taxes" you mean "delivery charges" this is simply untrue.

The generation is cheap. The delivery, the grid cost, is 3x-5x the cost of the generation.

It's all PG&E and the regulators's fault, for not containing costs more.

acidburnNSA7• 10 months ago

This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.

I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.

https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...

zdragnar• 10 months ago

I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.

If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.

tstrimple3• 10 months ago

I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.

I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.

And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.

I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.

lawn• 10 months ago

Another big reason for the high costs is the lack of experience building the plants.

SCUSKU2• 10 months ago

The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.

The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]

[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees

ahmeneeroe-v27• 10 months ago

the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state

Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.

SVP vs PG&E

This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...

raverbashing2• 10 months ago

the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation

Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"

Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs

mixdup2• 10 months ago

A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely

Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc

Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction

nicce8• 10 months ago

It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.

ciconia• 10 months ago

Exactly. What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise, where the engineering effort is concentrated in building economies of scale. To me it's clear that nuclear energy's pros largely outweigh the cons, and that it is a perfect complement to solar and wind power generation.

ViewTrick100244• 10 months ago

We’ve been trying to build ”SMR”s since the 1950s and a bunch has been built throughout the decades.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...

The problem is: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?

cpach• 10 months ago

There are some companies that are trying to get SMRs up and running.

https://www.ans.org/news/2025-02-05/article-6744/new-swedish...

We’ll see how it goes.

throw0101a• 10 months ago

A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely

Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

France built 40 in a decade:

* https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...

More recently, Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, but Unit 4 cost 30% less (though still not cheap).

preisschild4• 10 months ago

If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale

You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times

boringg6• 10 months ago

This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

In other words: nuclear is not viable unless the risks are offloaded to the public. Privatize profits, socialize risks.

YeahThisIsMe• 10 months ago

Your rates aren't doing insane shit because you don't have nuclear energy. Renewables are way way way cheaper.

RandomBacon2• 10 months ago

How much of that rate is because China is flooding the market with wind turbine blades and solar panels?

How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?

bryanlarsen3• 10 months ago

A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.

Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.

beeflet5• 10 months ago

It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward

ViewTrick100244• 10 months ago

That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.

zer00eyz2• 10 months ago

I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.

If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.

And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?

Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.

jay_kyburz2• 10 months ago

The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?

Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge.

Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time.

We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.

GloriousKoji• 10 months ago

As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

justahuman74• 10 months ago

At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees

theptip9• 10 months ago

The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.

nicce8• 10 months ago

At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.

bsenftner• 10 months ago

Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action:

and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.

It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."

No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.

Retric17• 10 months ago

Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.

Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.

That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.

gruez• 10 months ago

> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days

Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do.

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...

theptip9• 10 months ago

It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.

See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.

I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.

nicce8• 10 months ago

It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Etc etc.

Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.

lclarkmichalek• 10 months ago

I think if you regulated coal on a linear no threshold risk model, you'd find the costs to be somewhat closer.

quotemstr5• 10 months ago

Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.

You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel.

https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836...

That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.

You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.

small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.

Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.

amarant3• 10 months ago

This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.

Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.

People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Izikiel432• 10 months ago

Regarding fuel:

https://xkcd.com/1162/

godelski3• 10 months ago

  > nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate.

True, but you also get large amounts of electricity in return.

You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99?

The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture.

I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated. Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?

AnthonyMouse3• 10 months ago

Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies.

It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.

Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.

You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.

You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.

Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?

Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.

This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.

But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?

johnebgd• 10 months ago

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250908384960/en/Dee...

Reason0773• 10 months ago

"It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate."

Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1].

Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...

naasking4• 10 months ago

It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.

This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output.

Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.

Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.

llsf3• 10 months ago

Regulation still plays a role in the final cost. Sure it has to be safe. But we need to draw the line. Nuclear is arguably way too safe currently (zero death for a long time). Some regulations could be relaxed to speed up the construction, and make the operations cheaper.

We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.

8bitsrule• 10 months ago

As an expert remarked way back in a time when the nukes were conveniently making plutonium, and kids got free comic books promoting them, and the plans for handling waste seemed sound :

"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."

— C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951.

(Hanford today, sitting on 56M gallons of leaking wastewater, is debating whether that newly-constructed vitrification plant should be allowed to operate, since it'll emit dangerous levels of toxic acetonitrile.)

BrtByte5• 10 months ago

Bottom line: nuclear will never be "cheap and easy," but I think there is headroom to reduce costs meaningfully

m10124• 10 months ago

The comment you reply to talk about regulatory costs but you choose to talk about cost in general. No one thinks its cost is 0.

grafmax2• 10 months ago

Regulations on nuclear power protect us from nuclear waste and meltdowns. Meltdowns are rare but catastrophic when they occur.

wnevets• 10 months ago

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx...

cdavid• 10 months ago

Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK).

E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.

I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).

tstrimple3• 10 months ago

Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.

s1mplicissimus4• 10 months ago

What about long term environmental cost? I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.

unturned3• 10 months ago

if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard

What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.

notherhack• 10 months ago

Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.

Hilift2• 10 months ago

Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.

"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant

kergonath• 10 months ago

Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.

This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.

jayd162• 10 months ago

It's regulation holding back nuclear power...in every country?

gioele• 10 months ago

We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.

Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]

Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.

[1] https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ [2] https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/...

lstodd2• 10 months ago

This is bullshit.

Radioactivity is exponential. If something is very active at start, it will fade quickly. If it is not, it is not dangerous to begin with.

So whatever they do spend, they need to optimize instead of hiding from cost-cutting behind this.

jrk• 10 months ago

Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.

Kon5ole7• 10 months ago

Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant.

Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.

7bit• 10 months ago

People like you believe uranium is growing on trees. Have you actually looked up how it's retrieved? The costs are insane and the ecological damage unrepairable.

zeroq• 10 months ago

I can see a future where everyone can have free access to nuclear power.

I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station".

Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.

GeekyBear• 10 months ago

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

Chernobyl melted down and exploded.

Three Mile Island melted down and the regulatorily mandated containment vessel protected the public.

I wouldn't call that a fake cost.

knorker2• 10 months ago

More people die every single year from the radiation parts of coal power (excluding accidents), than have died from radiation of nuclear power's entire decades long history, including accidents.

Yes, they should be made safe, but we need some perspective here.

deaddodo• 10 months ago

SoCal Edison was as low as .06usd/kwh when the nuclear plants were operating. As soon as they started shutting them down it shot up to ~.25-30usd/kWh.

DarkNova6• 10 months ago

Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US.

China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it.

The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.

llsf3• 10 months ago

A big part of the cost is financing the project. It is capital intensive, and even few interest points more impact a lot the cost over time.

Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy.

This is not true. It might be nice to drive down the cost, but there's no need to do it. Adequate, even preferable, alternatives exist.

BrtByte5• 10 months ago

A lot of the cost isn't the tech, it's the years of delays, endless permitting, and political whiplash

tcfhgj8• 10 months ago

No, we don't really need it though

dmitrygr• 10 months ago

[flagged]

thw_9a83c2• 10 months ago

I see your point but it's not really that simple in this particular case. Nuclear energy production is clean under assumption:

1. You can operate the facility with a zero critical accident over the whole lifespan of the power plant.

2. You know what to do with a nuclear waste (like keep it safely deeply buried for 10'000 years).

However, point 2) is almost irrelevant now because we already have enough depleted nuclear fuel to deal with it.

sealeck2• 10 months ago

Both of these assumptions are true. Obviously these are not trivial problems, and take a lot of work, but they are extremely tractable.

diordiderot2• 10 months ago

1. Only six reactors have had meltdowns, partial meltdowns, serious core damage, or fatalities.

Gen 4 reactors have gravity driven control rods, passive cooling systems, core catchers, safer fuel, and moderators.

If humans were raptured, they couldn't melt down.

2. The entire planets worth of spent nuclear fuel would fit into 15 Olympic swimming pools.

Fast breeder reactors can use almost all of the existing waste and on top of that reduce it's lifespan from 100k+ years to a few hundred.

You'd get more radiation exposure from living in Denver than you would sleeping on a cask in Miami

trentnix• 10 months ago

I had the same response. History has shown that the high-priests of government are the least reliable, least consistent of all we’ve allowed to be the arbiters of truth.

Spivak• 10 months ago

Multiple US states have ruled that natural gas is green energy. I'm sure that's just as obvious and stating a fact.

The white house in all but name, because calling it green is woke, declared that coal is green energy.

tomhow2• 10 months ago

Please don't post sneering, unsubstantive comments like this on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

medlazik4• 10 months ago

Uranium mining isn't clean at all. Between Greenpeace (full of business school hacks) and lobby pressured EU courts, there's a middle ground.

sealeck2• 10 months ago

Uranium mining isn't clean at all.

Nor is mining for coal!

acidburnNSA7• 10 months ago

What do you mean? Modern in situ uranium mining is one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have. It's not perfectly clean, but it's pretty darn good.

medlazik4• 10 months ago

What do you mean?

I mean it's not clean

one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have

Not the point. It's not clean, it shouldn't be called clean end of the story.

ryao3• 10 months ago

Why mine uranium? Only about 4% of nuclear fuel is actually used before the fuel rods need replacement, which makes uranium highly recyclable. Given all of the “spent” fuel rods in storage, mining operations for additional uranium are unnecessary. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for millennia, provided we are willing to begin a recycling program.

Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use isotopes from it. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.

ifdefdebug• 10 months ago

Sure, now show us how to recycle spent fuel rods (and become a billionaire).

ta12432• 10 months ago

Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage

kbelder• 10 months ago

We need to do what we can right now to avoid people saying this exact same thing 20 years from now.

potwinkle• 10 months ago

The oilcorp-funded thinktanks don't like this answer, though.

ta12432• 10 months ago

That renewable and storage is more bang for buck?

20 years ago renewable+storage was orders of magntiude more than nuclear. Today it's not.

jama2114• 10 months ago

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

cosmic_cheese• 10 months ago

Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.

throwaway20372• 10 months ago

Someone pointed out in another comment that Iowa, USA has installed an incredible amount of wind turbines in the last 25 years. There is a whole Wiki page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa

Also, Texas has done very similar.

tomComb• 10 months ago

I don’t think it would cost more.

The real problem with nuclear energy is, and always has been the cost. It always seems to turn into a boondoggle.

9dev2• 10 months ago

If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.

mpweiher63• 10 months ago

This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors.

For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).

beeflet5• 10 months ago

Nuclear waste is a problem caused by activists preventing disposal sites like yucca mountain from being built

alexey-salmin6• 10 months ago

If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today.

Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price.

The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.

mpweiher63• 10 months ago

And the CO₂ difference for electricity production, so the only part of the energy system where nuclear vs. intermittent renewable is currently applicable, is not 2:1. It is 10:1.

bryanlarsen3• 10 months ago

No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T.

Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.

Eric_WVGG• 10 months ago

(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)

1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year

1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.

Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.

Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.

bluGill3• 10 months ago

Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.

Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.

notatoad• 10 months ago

ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space.

Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.

fundatus4• 10 months ago

Nuclear also requires non-infinite resources like uranium.

tcfhgj8• 10 months ago

Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land

Neither, see gas caverns underground

StopDisinfo9108• 10 months ago

The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.

It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.

It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.

hvb24• 10 months ago

You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.

Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.

Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance

yongjik• 10 months ago

As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means.

But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.

It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"

kieranmaine3• 10 months ago

It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"

Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]

The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.

Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]

1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continu...

2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-gene...

4.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-b...

hibikir• 10 months ago

Because fast to deploy in theory fights quickly with permitting systems and NIMBYism. You need more permits, because a typical solar or wind farm doesn't come close to a nuclear plan's output, so the per-project bureaucracy multiplies. By needing more places, you also have more groups opposing projects for typical NIMBY reasons. You need battery facilities too, and more updates to the grid to deal with having less inertia, and the updates cost money, and the battery facilities themselves face more NIMBYism: Minimum distances to places where people live and such. So when you put it all together, slow bureaucracies just move at glacial paces, and the equipment you would have bought when you sent out the permit is already different than what you want to use when the permitting is approved.

Then we have the tariffs, as Europe puts tariffs on Chinese equipment that change the price quite a bit.

A country that took this very seriously and decided to put renewables as a top priority could go quite fast. But if there's anything one should learn about the last few decades is that modern democracies care too much about vested interest and NIMBY complaints to actually get projects like this done. Just look at charts showing power waiting to go online in most countries: You'll find very long lines, even after dealing with the rest of the the bureaucratic gauntlet.

oneshtein11• 10 months ago

Quote: The winters in Germany are often colder and the country's climate is generally more continental. The south of France enjoys warmer Mediterranean temperatures and milder winters.

i5heu2• 10 months ago

There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables.

Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.

And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.

Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.

There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.

xvfLJfx9• 10 months ago

This statement is very uninformed. Other sources are intermittent, nuclear energy is not. The problem about many countries not being able to produce fuel rods themselves is true, but the exact same applies to other energy sources. Most nations depend on very few other nations for imports of oil gas etc.

Nuclear power plants only have a high upfront cost, which is compensated by their long lifetime of 60-100 years. Other energy sources also have high upfront production costs + you need to spend additional money on infrastructure for batteries/storage.

I also don't understand your argument on military targets. A NPP is a target the sane way a solar park, wind-park, geothermal facility or whatever would be a target. And to add to that, wile they are of course not indestrctible they are extremely robustly built. You can literally fly an airplane into them and it wouldnt result in a meltdown.. I do agree on your point on decentralization, yes.

pil0u• 10 months ago

Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

Even with that, renewables are cheaper.

One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures.

And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.

mikepavone2• 10 months ago

You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants).

Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.

Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-s...

gpm4• 10 months ago

Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.

Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.

natmaka40• 10 months ago

Deploying a continental renewable mix (wind, solar...) reduces the effets of 'intermittency' on electricity production.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...

It is possible because interconnecting grids at continental-level is The Way for quite a while, even without any renewable, because it enables operators to optimize (preferring less-emitting and cheaper production units) and also to obtain a better service guarantee (less blackouts!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...

It also enables over-produced electricity to power electrolyzers. 'Green hydrogen' thus obtained can power the backup/peakers (producing electricity to load-follow and also when other intermittent equipment cannot produce enough on-the-spot), further reducing 'intermittency' effects. This isn't sci-fi ( https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydroge... ), many can burn a mix (methane, hydrogen...) and some recent models can be retrofitted into burning hydrogen (no major investment nor need to reform existing heavy resources/organization).

Storage will also more and more prominent in electrical systems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182026

Nuclear will be trounced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196328

Patent holes in the most hyped nuclear-favorable approach show that there is no issue on sight for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182003

The trend is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa... (explore many nations/regions)

He will soon be dead, Jim.

jama2114• 10 months ago

Thank you for this, this along with many other comments have really helped me understand.

This isn’t a simple issue, and I think your basic common sense take now mostly aligns with mine (though correct me if I’m wrong) which is something along the lines of that we don’t have to be anti-nuclear specifically but we do have to be bearish because it has downsides that mean if we are going to use it for some specific use case we’d better be sure that the pros are significant to outweigh the natural cons it brings with it.

rnhmjoj• 10 months ago

in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have.

I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).

tcfhgj8• 10 months ago

Germany sits on storage capacity more than 247 TWh

boringg6• 10 months ago

Different energy product. And it doesn't preclude renewable energy from being deployed alongside.

This pitting of renewables vs nuclear is not helpful for renewables or nuclear. They both work well together.

dalyons4• 10 months ago

They don’t actually. Renewables on the grid make nukes uneconomical.

lucideer2• 10 months ago

Sure, it might cost more

I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will).

However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons:

2. It will take longer

3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles

4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well.

Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.

marcosdumay2• 10 months ago

It will take longer

Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?

Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.

GoatInGrey• 10 months ago

You're wasting your energy on that user, I suspect.

No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts

...is commonly a rhetorical pattern meaning "I've predetermined my conclusion, but I want to save face by appearing rational and casting those I disagree with as biased or incompetent in one fell swoop."

It's the "Aren't there any REAL men anymore?" of contentious topics.

palata• 10 months ago

There are a few things:

1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).

2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.

3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?

4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.

strawhatguy4• 10 months ago

Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system.

What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas.

The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

Renewables and storage have gotten so cheap that the areas where nuclear might still be competitive have greatly shrunk. Right now, the best remaining places for nuclear are in eastern Europe away from coasts. Even there, nuclear is at best competitive with optimistic assumptions.

This also means that, globally, renewables are much cheaper than nuclear in most places. In a global economy, energy intensive industries will migrate to these renewable-rich regions as fossil fuels are phased out. The relative energy ghetto regions will not save their heavy industries by going nuclear.

credit_guy2• 10 months ago

I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear.

People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?

dalyons4• 10 months ago

Solar and wind are extremely simple machines and are thus much more amenable to manufacturing economies of scale than fundamentally complicated nuke plants. I very much doubt we’d get to 10x , 100x seems impossible.

fy20• 10 months ago

One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters.

First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US.

The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.

bluefirebrand8• 10 months ago

I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism

Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you

Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill"

I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself

epistasis21• 10 months ago

It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear.

For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal.

There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...)

You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-ene...

realusername11• 10 months ago

Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers

Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter.

Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.

ZeroGravitas10• 10 months ago

Yes, this is the real answer. Nuclear, which is currently dropping as a percentage of global electricity demand and is now under 10% needs a miracle to reverse that and maybe reach 15% if everything goes well for it.

Meanwhile renewables are surging and every relevant expert suggests they'll dominate the future.

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-is-gettin...

The graph without the relatively flat hydro is even more stark.

The stuff people say about nuclear on this forum is on the level of flat earthism and they seem totally unashamed of this.

LtdJorge3• 10 months ago

projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear

Does that mean you’re expert-er?

aubanel• 10 months ago

The answer to this is just "intermittent" : the higher the share of renewables, the higher the share that you have to make up for when you're at night without wind. This can be done through batteries, water storage, or interconnection, but that's the real cost of renewables.

tcfhgj8• 10 months ago

Or gas (produced using renewable energy) storage

BrtByte5• 10 months ago

In theory, you can replace nuclear with a massive buildout of renewables and storage and grid upgrades and overcapacity to handle intermittency. The challenge is that doing all of that fast enough

jama2114• 10 months ago

Is it faster or slower than building nuclear plants?

procaryote3• 10 months ago

Sure, it might cost more

That.

There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost

Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election

zvrba3• 10 months ago

Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed.

This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.

EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.

yread• 10 months ago

While that's strictly true, there are a lot of people who wouldnt mind living across the fence from a solar farm. Not so many want to live next to a nuclear power plant. Irrationaly perhaps but still.

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

I obviously don't know about Norway, but in most developed countries, the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure. While I can't prove it, it seems too convenient that people suddenly care about "nature" right after they've fucked it up for so many other reasons.

iamflimflam1• 10 months ago

I wish more people would think along these lines: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/may/10/windpowe...

There’s a wind farm being built in your backyard? Demand one of them for free to power your village.

lm284692• 10 months ago

This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.

Really ? They don't mind being one of the top oil exporter in the world though

pqtyw13• 10 months ago

because they want to preserve the nature as it is.

In Norway? Or by nature as it is you mean managed nature "parks" or reindeer herding areas?

Don't Scandinavians generally vehemently support the eradication of native species like wolves (despite much bigger number of them doing just fine in much denser areas like Italy or Poland).

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

Energy density is unimportant. What matters is cost. A source that has higher energy density but also higher cost is a loser.

The whole energy density meme was propagated by Vaclav Smil. He observed in the past that energy sources had become more energy dense, and then took the irrational leap to proclaim this was some sort of iron law of energy development.

pembrook3• 10 months ago

No. It’s as simple as:

A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough

…and…

B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times)

You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear.

Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box.

Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

But you're wrong. Batteries are now fine for diurnal storage, which is their intended use. Batteries are not fine for seasonal storage, but there are alternatives for that when it is needed.

China is installing vastly more renewables than nuclear. Their nuclear builds appear to be just a holding action to preserve their capability to build NPPs; that can't last forever.

m10124• 10 months ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

That, as well as intermittency being difficult to manage.

Nuclear+gas is the cleanest solution.

Erwyn• 10 months ago

in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

Yes in theory, the problem is when you try to apply theory to practice: I don’t want to make a disservice to this discussion and as I don’t have the figures at hand anymore but there have been thought experiments around this and one was to hypothetically have two dams that would pump 2 meters of water out of the sea between France and UK and then release it. If my memory serves well this would only cover 1 week of France’s energy consumption.

Okay, appart from the fact that you would require far more space in term of infrastructure for renewables, the most interesting issue with renewable energies for me is that they are not controllable (I don’t know if this is the correct term in English): basically you cannot command WHEN you produce energy, you are dependent on weather (sun/wind) or water current (tidal power).

What that means is that you cannot aling production with supply and you end up in some cases with acute mismatch: for instance in France, the peak of energy consumption is during winter, a time where there is very few sun, while Japans peak is in summer which could be more convenient.

The Rule when dealing with energy production is that you can’t produce less than demand nor more than demand otherwise you end up with a blackout and potential damages.

To mitigate both the rule of energy production and the non controllable aspects of renewable there are strategies. The two most common ones are buying/selling your energy and storing/unloading it. Those work but they do have their own pitfalls. Buying/selling for instance does work for adjustments but not for peaks because usually during peaks your neighbours are also peaking and thus also looking for selling.

Storing/unloading is its whole set of problems making it hard. You will find a lot of documentation on the subject but here is the gist of it: fist of all it is inefficient meaning you need to produce far more energy than you store and are able to unload in the end. Storing in batteries takes a lot (like really a lot) of place and we are talking nation wide production. Storing using a dam (pumped storage power plants) which is quite a nice way of doing it requires to have places to build them, meaning the correct geographical circumstances. In France for instance we already have quite a large dam network and couldn’t really build more (added to the fact that you usually need to flood a valley which gerenally is not well taken by the inhabitants of the place).

So here you are with your whole lot of space used up to produce renewable energy but you are still confronted to the issue of its non controllable nature. Sure you can store/unload a bit, you can buy/sell another bit, but in the end you still have to face the fact that it is not controllable. So how do you solve the issue ?

Here comes your friend, the controllable energy. A solution to your issue, and the one which is basically always applied is to have a mix of energies, meaning adding a controllable one along your non controllable ones to make up for the highs and lows of the latest. And the king of eco-friendly controllable energies is a nuclear power plant, not only because of the ecological factor but also because of the ratio space/energy produced.

a3w3• 10 months ago

Clean, mostly. With future? No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not.

Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source.

Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding].

And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in storing. Except for costly disasters in how not to intermediately store it, here in Germany.

If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful, why not make future generations happy by preserving it for them, and for now, limiting its use until we learned how to add to the initial price the full cost of long term storage, with further disasters as a learning experience for that?

Saving lives and being cost-effective in the short run might work, but every energy expert says in 50 years, nuclear will have to be phased out anyway. And fusion could provide clean, but also primary heat inducing energy. So even that will not save us.

beeflet5• 10 months ago

Primary heat on this scale isn't nessisarially a bad thing. It has a very small impact on the global power balance with respect to the effect global warming.

There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.

I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.

If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful

It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.

preisschild4• 10 months ago

No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not

Luckily we do need lots of heat. District heating, process heat, thermochemical H2 production, ...

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

Well, good thing that we have no reason to build these reactors as far away from population centers as possible, right?

We already have enough heat for that, from industries. Distribution is the biggest factor, and in that, distance. It's really cool, but it's stupidly expensive up front. Not to mention, you need to require EVERYONE in the area to buy in and stay in to have any hopes of being worth it in the long run. NIMBYism strikes again.

cynicalsecurity• 10 months ago

EU is not so bad at all, in fact, it's really cool.

p0w3n3d• 10 months ago

They had been pushing back the nuclear energy for quite a few years before they came out with this

amanaplanacanal2• 10 months ago

I'm totally fine with people attempting to build new fission plants. More power to them!

I just don't see it happening. They cost too much and take too long. Not holding my breath here.

kgabis• 10 months ago

By some weird accident they stop being that expensive and long to build when you cross the border into China.

amanaplanacanal2• 10 months ago

Maybe Western nations will allow Chinese companies to come build their nuclear plants. That would be something.

peterfirefly7• 10 months ago

Or South Korea. Or just take a short trip to the recent past in your time machine.

more_corn• 10 months ago

Clean but not safe

rallyforthesun• 10 months ago

I read a lot of comments talking about „getting down the operational costs“ but i am missing someone talking about the costs of depositing the nuclear waste until it has no more risks. Am i missing something?!

throwawayffffas5• 10 months ago

Yes the cost of depositing nuclear waste is trivial, it takes a small number of large concrete structures underground in well picked locations.

The US produces about 1250 cubic meters of waste per year. For comparison the empire state building has a floor area of 208000 square meters, assuming a 3 meter floor height you could fit about 500 years worth of spent fuel inside it.

m10124• 10 months ago

Yes. This. Nuclear waste storage is extremely cheap.

Also, we only "use" 3% of the fuel in current nuclear power station designs so we could just reprocess the fuel and vastly reduce the volume of waste too.

Zenst• 10 months ago

Finally, France will be happy after years of being pushed back on this with the drive for solar and wind turbines, which sadly all got supplemented via gas on the back that nuclear was bad.

Sadly, with electricity becoming more reliant on gas and other fossil fuels when it is not so sunny in winter, or on those cloudy days with no wind, means fossil fuel usage ends up higher than if they had stayed and expanded nuclear - instead they closed many plants(Germany a prime example, in favour of....gas).

Then the whole over-dependence on Russian gas and oil really did whammy the energy price market, not just for Europe, but with a knock-on effect across the world. One we still pay for today.

nilslindemann16• 10 months ago

Whatever. No one wants to invest into it anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

preisschild4• 10 months ago

LCOE does not account for the full (system) costs. Nuclear power plants have capacity factors over 90%, while PV/Wind have less than 25%. LCOE does not account for the added costs, such as increased transmission and storage/backup costs.

nilslindemann16• 10 months ago

It does not account for a lot of things, for example insurance.

Quote from https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761... (Google translated):

Berlin – According to a study, comprehensive insurance against the risks of nuclear power would cause electricity prices to explode. According to calculations by actuaries, the premiums to be paid could cause electricity prices to rise more than forty-fold.

"Nuclear energy is ultimately uninsurable," said insurance expert Markus Rosenbaum on Wednesday in Berlin. If an insurance company wanted to build up sufficient premiums for a nuclear power plant within 50 years, for example, the remaining operating life of a reactor, it would have to charge 72 billion euros per year for liability insurance.

The German Renewable Energy Association (BEE) commissioned the "Leipzig Insurance Forums" to conduct the calculations even before the Fukushima reactor disaster. "The true costs of nuclear power are ignored and, in the event of a serious accident, are passed on to the public," said BEE Managing Director Björn Klusmann.

locallost5• 10 months ago

LCOE refers to the price in MWh (produced electricity), so it takes capacity factor into account. Whatever electricity you produce and sell depends on your installed capacity multiplied with the capacity factor.

Similarly, you pay for the electricity you receive and this is priced as say 40$ per MWh. Obviously when you receive nothing the price is 0, you don't pay them to idle, they either produce or not. Thus when storage costs kick in you don't add the costs of both together. You either pay one or the other, not both.

You might average them out taking into consideration what their output is, but you don't stack the costs on top of each other which I often see people do.

m10124• 10 months ago

Well yeah, if you regulate it so it's costly the no one will invest... Unless you deregulated it?

seanalltogether• 10 months ago

I wonder what this chart would look like if wind and solar were required to provide storage in order to handle 24/7 delivery

froh4• 10 months ago

Germany, long a symbol of anti-nuclear politics, is beginning to shift.

err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.

but no: there is no Endlager (permanent spent nuclear fuel waste site) in sight, the costs of dismantling used plants are outrageous and if it were not for nimbyism, we'd be essentially self sustaining on wind and solar within a decade.

matter of fact fossil and nuclear sponsored fud on wind and solar is the single biggest issue we face in Germany.

Atomkraft? nein, danke.

preisschild4• 10 months ago

but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight

The Problem in Germany is that by law the state has to build a repository, while the operators have to pay for it. The operators did pay (~24 bln EUR), but politically either NIMBY parties (such as CDU/CSU/SPD) block it, or the Greens (under Habeck) block progress so they can continue to shout "what about the waste???"

In Finland the operators can build their own repository and they did it cheap and relatively fast.

Also from an even more anti-nuclear country (austria): Kernenergie? Ja bitte!

froh4• 10 months ago

Finland is the world's first and only such facility so far.

the law to build it is pretty universal, the world has essentially agreed to not export nuclear waste.

associating the progressive innovative green party with blocking progress is an interesting turn, there was no progress in the topic for decades, and the reason is rather that nuclear waste is like toddler art: first no one wants to take it, trying to toss it is met with loud and hefty protest, and at the end nobody knows where to take it.

don't the alps have lovely granite areas for the Finnish model?

locallost5• 10 months ago

I propose we store it in your basement. It's really not a flame war, but people that consider themselves rational argue it's no big deal, so they should be prepared to store it in their immediate vicinity. I support renewables and don't have a problem with solar panels on my roof or even a windmill in my backyard.

throwawayffffas5• 10 months ago

State level NIMBYism is what's happening with nuclear. The state decides we won't have that in our back yard in the case of Germany.

Fear uncertainty and doubt is the only thing blocking nuclear power.

The irony is that the fud has been spread by "environmentalists" and has only managed to keep fossil fuels around for the last 20 years greatly exacerbating our climate change predicament.

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

Nuclear is more expensive and more geopolitically dangerous than renewables. For a short time, Germany was even leading in PV technology, it could've been our new sector we dominate in. But, as always, greedy investors and corrupt right wing politicians starved out any possibility of positive change.

And I find it horrendously hilarious that you believe the same people that work tirelessly against renewables would actually EVER build nuclear. It's about milking the status quo for cash as long as possible and then fucking off into retirment with that stolen money.

Btw, what's the german energy companies opinion on building nuclear? RWE a big fan? (They aren't!)

neobrain• 10 months ago

err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.

Is the lobby trying? Last I checked the head of RWE himself said that going back to nuclear in Germany was infeasible. It seems to be conservative politicians who had been keen on it before winning the election and before the industry pointed out that it's a bad idea actually.

froh4• 10 months ago

RWE is not the oil or coal lobby. they pay for coal and gas. never would they ever finance a nuclear power plant. to them .02€/kWh (wind/solar) is _super_ sexy/profitable.

the fossil fuel lobby is in Texas, Middle East, Russia,and likewise uranium. add Siemens and their nuclear shares in other companies, for the plants.

RWE does not manufacture plants or dig coal.

mensetmanusman4• 10 months ago

Glad that the Russian funded Greens were finally defeated. In the end, the green party may have doomed us with this 50 year delay.

Bost• 10 months ago

I think the Russians probably realized, "We don't even need to fund them - they will glue themselves to the roads for free."

roody15• 10 months ago

The EU may have a geopolitical interest in taking another look at nuclear. The dependance on Russian natural gas and expensive imported US natural gas is not good for their economic outlook long term. Honestly I am surprised Germany has not fired back up a couple of its plants considering its difficulties with Industrial output and competing in a world market.

derhuerst• 10 months ago

In case you are in (or IP-geolocated to) the EU: https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/115068-000-A/nuclear-putin-s-d...

peterfirefly7• 10 months ago

We have plenty of uranium in Europe. Australia also has plenty. Lots of countries have plenty, both friendly and not so friendly (that we still buy lots of stuff from anyway). We absolutely don't need Russian uranium. Uranium is also easy to store long-term (years).

There is zero risk of a new stupid energy dependence on Russia.

m10124• 10 months ago

The cheapest form of energy is firing up a recently closed nuclear power plant. What they are doing is beyond reason.

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

This is just utterly and completely wrong. EVEN THE COMPANIES THEMSELVES say it would be stupid to reopen those plants.

And, of course, the idea that "dependence" on Russia is bad, but replacing it with dependence on other states AND with building a bunch of nuclear bombs in my backyard that are PRIME targets to literally take out my entire grid, is laughably bad.

Lightkey2• 10 months ago

Misleading title. The controversial part is that they ruled both nuclear energy AND natural gas plants as clean energy.

eimrine3• 10 months ago

As sh~. Here we go again.

m10124• 10 months ago

That's because nuclear + gas is the climate friendly solution.

aussiegreenie• 10 months ago

Nuclear power is clean but VERY EXPENSIVE.

Dispatble solar and wind are about 1/5 the price of new nuclear.

casey2• 10 months ago

Your comment is just disinformation at this point. If nuclear was very expensive China wouldn't have built 30 in the last 10 years despite massive opposition.

In reality when you take all the costs into account there is no cheaper form of energy generation and there likely never will be, outside of cost decreases in Fission based nuclear itself.

oezi2• 10 months ago

It is hard for humans to work with exponential curves. Solar went from 15 cents per kwh to 5 cents per kwh over the last 10 years.

Anticipating such a rapid decline is hard and a lot of people still are stuck on outdated data.

Sure China commissioned these plants in the past and will plan more, but it won't be due to cost.

dvrj101• 10 months ago

If nuclear was very expensive

you have to start paying interest on loan from first day 1 even if construction starts on 100th day and if safety committee rules some part of approved design needs to change to improve safety it's own to demolish, clean and rebuild the new parts.

The problem is not design regulations but how much difficult on purpose goverment has made it in the west to construct one.

m10124• 10 months ago

It is expensive because we choose to make it expensive. It is regulation pushing safety levels far beyond other industries, and far beyond science (radiation is far less harmful than regulatory models suggest)

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

You do NOT get to constantly taut the low mortality rates of nuclear AND call for less regulation at the same time.

But even from a very matter of fact point of view, I'd rather have 1000 people die every year for 20 years, than have 20.000 people die on a single bad day/week. The economic and social impact is far, far bigger when it can't be "spread out" over multiple years.

locallost5• 10 months ago

This page and organization, WePlanet, is a rebrand of RePlanet. They advertise as a grassroots movement, but are funded by a hedge fund with a significant investment in fossil fuels [1].

I think their whole schtick is prolonging the current situation and betting on slow and expensive nuclear is a good strategy to prevent real change.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/30/climate-...

khalic• 10 months ago

Funny how all the nuclear chills forget the plethora of issues that come with that tech.

- who has access to nuclear power? - what happens to nuclear reactors during war? - where does the Uranium come from? - how long does it take to build a reactor? - how many long term solutions have been developed in the more than 60 years of this technology’s existence?

Not saying nuclear doesn’t have a place, but let’s not be blind to the long list of complications that come with it.

m10124• 10 months ago

You suggest people forget that without considering that perhaps you don't know:

- We killed nuclear power in countries that can be trusted so that is not relevant.

- Nuclear accidents are not as harmful as people imagine.

- We have plenty of access to uranium resources in the west.

- the time to build a reactor is often in large parts regulatory burdens. France built out 10% of its electricity generation needs in a year, for a number of years. That is what is possible.

- Part of the reason there is no innovation in this sector is because regulation has strangled it. There are many innovative ideas in nuclear.

LinXitoW15• 10 months ago

You mean western sources like the USA, that suddenly starts waving it's dick around when the wrong dipshit is elected? The USA that made a nuclear deal with Iran and then scrapped it for no fucking reason?

nickpsecurity• 10 months ago

It's so clean that you can swim in the reactor water. You can even drink it after running it through a water filter. No waste disposal required. It's that clean.

knorker2• 10 months ago

Everything good Greenpeace may have ever done is probably overshadowed by the death and planetary destruction caused by their opposition to nuclear power.

gcanyon• 10 months ago

We still need to overturn national nuclear bans, unlock more funding, and push democratic countries to support clean energy development abroad: especially where it is most needed to compete with Russia’s growing influence.

We also need to figure out how to build reactors in months to years instead of years to decades to failure.

And to build reactors at a cost less than $10 to $20 million per megawatt capacity.

zenmac• 10 months ago

well would being good if they specifically say thorium nuclear energy is clean energy!

Seems like the Chinese are picking up where US left off:

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/thorium-molten-salt-r...

Maybe the EU can pick that up too.

In context of that really makes one think if Nazis was on to something other than toothpaste?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/thorium-toothpaste-als...

nextworddev• 10 months ago

$oklo $ura

panny• 10 months ago

All the smart people of my generation have spent their time working on burning energy. For AI, crypto, etc. Imagine if they worked as hard on making energy instead.

eimrine3• 10 months ago

Rotating some cranks?

lofaszvanitt• 10 months ago

Like Conan.

DoctorOetker• 10 months ago

Does EU still buy fissile fuel from Russia?

eimrine3• 10 months ago

Yes it does, even trans-Ukrainian Druzhba still works.

maxlin• 10 months ago

The problem with all kinds of "green" movements and such is that they only _demand_ solutions without being involved. That also means they might have very little idea if their premise is even valid, they just put all their energy towards organization, making signs n stuff and are very emotion-driven.

People thinking fission reactors might randomly explode like nuclear bombs Simpsons-style and so many green parties in Europe being anti-nuclear has held progress back too much. Minimal climate activism isn't bad, but they really bit hard in to the fork on this one.

herewulf• 10 months ago

Sudden outbreak of common sense.

BrtByte5• 10 months ago

Whether you're pro-nuclear or not, this ruling feels like a turning point. For decades, nuclear has been stuck in a weird limbo. Fascinating how youth climate activists are now some of the strongest voices for nuclear. That would've been unthinkable 10 years ago

Kon5ole7• 10 months ago

It makes perfect sense, they are mostly uninformed about the risks and consequences of nuclear but have heard about global warming all their lives.

wenchu• 10 months ago

Oh well then the Oligarchs have spoken,let the world be green, glowing green. I'm not anti nuclear but the technologies used to date have been seriously flawed. But It is the Idea that people who really have no technical knowledge of this technology its supply chain issues or its real impact on long term health are so arrogant that they believe they alone can dictate to the world, that I find offensive. We look at immediate effect but a study by a Japanese researcher after Fukushima shows the effect of irradiation may not show for multiple generations after exposure.

cakealert• 10 months ago

Nuclear power capital costs should be cheap too.

The incentives of the regulators are not aligned with the public.

Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.

They only care about reducing the risk of an accident however minor happening on their watch while not appearing to completely annihilate the technology because that would open them to political attacks.

So the balance is struck at a point where nuclear power capital costs are absurdly high.

I suspect that trying to make nuclear reactors accident proof has always been the wrong approach. Instead they should have made it so an accident could always be managed - something along the lines of if something happens drown it in concrete and forget about it, because there are 100,000 more reactors. The only safety cost would come from making a meltdown slow enough or happen in a place no one cares about for it to become a balance sheet problem.

Joel_Mckay• 10 months ago

"An American Nuclear Energy Debacle"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kkgg494Ifc

It had problems well beyond the unsolved 34000 year waste stewardship costs. =3

good_vs_great2• 10 months ago

Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.

Of course they do. It's going to feed directly into economic growth in a way that is about as visible as a major accident multiplied by its probability

Luker88• 10 months ago

I am not sure people understand the implications of this.

First, it's not just nuclear, it's also Natural gas.

Second, lots of nations have incentives for "clean" energy. And now magically, all those incentives apply to nuclear and gas.

It's a money grab from nuclear and gas manufacturers. It's not that the courts were involved for nothing.

Still, we should use more nuclear. If only it was less expensive to build...

m10124• 10 months ago

Nuclear + gas is the climate friendly solution.

kpmcc• 10 months ago

What is climate friendly about natural gas?

out_of_protocol• 10 months ago

Nuclear produces constant amount of energy (while consumption is not stable), Solar and Wind are highly unstable, with peaks not matching consumption. Adding gas (which is fast to adjust/turn on/turn off) for maneuvers makes whole system cheaper and more stable

grafmax2• 10 months ago

Gas isn’t climate friendly just because of its debatable attractiveness vs coal. And nuclear comes with catastrophic risks that require large costs to mitigate. Let’s not pretend it’s some panacea. Renewables are better than both.

pqtyw13• 10 months ago

Wasn't gas what killed nuclear in the 80s (in addition to the moral panic)?

tomatocracy6• 10 months ago

The article doesn't really explain what the lawsuit was over. It's about rules for private sector investment fund reporting. What the court ruled on is whether nuclear (and gas) can be classified as "sustainable investments" under the "EU taxonomy" rules[0].

This may mean that more private investment capital will end up in nuclear power, although my guess is that the impact of the EU taxonomy in driving investment decisions on this type of thing is likely quite small (I suspect the few funds which are out there which have hard requirements around EU taxonomy likely wouldn't invest in nuclear anyway).

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_taxonomy_for_sustainable_ac...

spookie2• 10 months ago

Well, nuclear energy will also serve a dual-purpose for Europe. Especially when discussing France and its nuclear deterrent.

natmaka40• 10 months ago

it's not just nuclear, it's also Natural gas

No, it can be a continental renewable mix + storage, with a "backup" made of green hydrogen turbines.

dgellow5• 10 months ago

Not just build, it is expensive to maintain, and insanely expensive and time consuming to dismantle. Still necessary to complement other green energies in the grid

m10124• 10 months ago

I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.

flohofwoe2• 10 months ago

most long lasting

...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason).

Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.

m10124• 10 months ago

When I referenced long lasting I mean that some nuclear power stations are no forecast to keep going for 120 years.

CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?

Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous to stand near for 500 years (without centimetres of concrete), and then dangerous to consume for an further many thousand. It is within our technology to look after the quantities we are talking about indefinitely.

Also, with current plants we could reduce the size of the waste by 30x if we recycled it. Other plant types would burn all the fuel and leave us with very low volumes of radioactive elements.

Wrt Ukraine you choose to focus on the potential for release around Zaporozhzhia Vs the actual destruction occuring from the circumstances of war in the rest of the country?

Paradigma112• 10 months ago

If we already have to take care of a hole in some mountain for the next few hundred years, why not put 100 times the waste in it?

Nobody would notice the difference.

Aachen4• 10 months ago

at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard

Hello, I live in Germany. You can use my backyard free of charge so long as I get a free Geiger counter, thank you!

I'd genuinely be honored to play such an important role in decarbonising Germany's energy supply. Watching the carbon intensity per kWh on electricitymap.com as we creep towards winter is frankly depressing. (I didn't know this site yet last year, so this is the first time I see the dynamics in action.) The coal plant also never turns off, even during negative prices. I presume it takes too long to fire back up and so there's always >100 grams CO2e for every little kWh that 82 million Germans use. The wind turbines / solar panels need to turn off to make space on the grid for the coal plant when there's oversupply. That's what the Germans were made to vote for in fear when electing to shut their nuclear plants earlier than coal. It's like banning airplanes and having everyone drive cars instead due to a national fear of flying, not having considered the safety records of each method. It's so crazy to me as a Dutch immigrant who's new to these people's politics. Anyway, back to storage

I don't see the problem with inert waste under the ground and a good detection system, at least for a few centuries. There's challenges in how to explain the danger to a generation that doesn't speak any of our languages anymore (in 500 years, someone's gonna need to replace the sign), or who lost any translators we've built (imagining some apocalypse, say in 5000 years), but there's research on that as well and it's not an argument why we couldn't find a good storage site for the next century while we deal with this energy transition

the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason

And yet there are nuclear plants all over Europe! People who mind can already choose not to live near them. Expand capacity at those sites and let's go

dvtkrlbs• 10 months ago

The annoying thing is recycling nuclear waste is kind of a solved problem. I've watched this video a while ago but iirc it is just more expensive to build a reactor that can also recycle its own waste. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc

AndyPa32• 10 months ago

I disagree with cheapest. If you factor in twenty years build time and nuclear waste disposal, the whole thing is not economically viable.

Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on.

You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.

freetonik• 10 months ago

Long build times are often the result of constantly changing regulations. Also it’s interesting that build times in Japan are almost 2 times smaller than in US.

m10124• 10 months ago

It is expensive because of the regulatory burdens associated with making it unreasonably safe. By unreasonably safe I mean that harms predicted by radiation models are unscientific, and death rate expectations are far lower than alternative power generation technologies.

Nuclear fuel storage is relatively straightforward, and volumes have potential to be reduced 30x through recycling.

retinaros• 10 months ago

sure state funded solar panel that you need to change every 10 year and batteries with rare minerals are cheaper.

pzo10• 10 months ago

but comparing to solar / wind there you also have to factor batteries production, battery replacement, wind turbine replacement and recycling (they are not easily recyclable), cleaning solar panels etc.

jeroenhd2• 10 months ago

Until we solve the long-term energy storage problem that renewable sources have, we're going to need a backup of some sort. Something you can turn up late at night in the middle of winter.

So far the cleanest solution we've come up with is gas plants, but gas plants made Europe extremely dependent on Russia. The alternatives are oppressive regimes or the US, which has been starting trade wars seemingly out of boredom.

Nuclear fuel, on the other hand, is exported not only by Kazachstan, but also Canada and Australia. In terms of "countries you don't want to depend on", I'd rather have Canada than Qatar.

I'm not sure if the economics still work out if you factor in the ineffective, half-assed Russian sanctions that have Europe fund Russia's war economy. The only alternative is probably coal, but only if you don't hold coal to the same standards in terms of waste disposal and nuclear exposure of the public as nuclear plants.

Nuclear isn't cheap, in part because it's become a niche market only some countries still participate in, but the politics and large-scale economics aren't as bad as the anti-nuclear crowd make them seem. They'd probably be bad for America, because the mighty oil industry stands to lose money and they'd need to import their fuel, but for countries already importing their fuel the balance is completely different.

Infuriatingly, the crowd that wants to do something about global warming also seems to think every nuclear reactor is going full Chernobyl within the decade. All of the parties I even consider voting for are staunch anti-nuclear activists for no documented reason other than "we don't like it".

JackSlateur8• 10 months ago

From a technical point of view, nuclear waste is a solved problem. The issue is political.

Ibidem for the fuel: yes, you can depends on wild countries; You can also depends on Australia, Canada and India, which seems like not-so-bad countries (in my opinion);

dgellow5• 10 months ago

How is it not economically viable given it is actively used since multiple decades in France? I also disagree with saying it is the cheapest, in practice it is actually pretty expensive compared to solar and wind, but economically nuclear makes a lot of sense, it fits a really good role in the grid

kolinko• 10 months ago

So far it was either the cheapest or the safest.

Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.

pzo10• 10 months ago

but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).

And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

yodsanklai• 10 months ago

solar is now both cheaper and safer.

apples and oranges

nilslindemann16• 10 months ago

Yep, the data suggests that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

quentindemetz• 10 months ago

Not at night

UltraSane4• 10 months ago

Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.

tiberius_p2• 10 months ago

I remember the anti-nuclear fever went viral in 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I think the correct lesson to be learned from that experience is not to built nuclear power plants in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters...and not to call for all nuclear power plants around the world to be shut down.

mpweiher63• 10 months ago

Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.

There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima.

Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons.

ZeroGravitas10• 10 months ago

I read that Germans watched their local nuclear experts explain on TV what was happening while Japanese authorities were still in denial.

They had a stereotype of Japanese hypercompetence and seeing them fuck up and then try to cover it up in the middle of a disaster had an impact even on traditional nuclear supporters.

makeitdouble2• 10 months ago

in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters.

And places where they can be damaged by human actions as well.

That leaves so many places to build reactors, right ?

strken• 10 months ago

That's blatantly wrong. Hydro stands out in the data as being the cheapest reliable carbon neutral option (wind and solar aren't reliable, and when you factor in storage to make them reliable then they're not cheap).

Hydro requires large sums of capital to get started, destroys entire valleys, is only viable in a limited number of places, has significant risks if not maintained, and isn't energy dense in the slightest. Nevertheless, it's cheap and it's carbon neutral.

tomatocracy6• 10 months ago

Run-of-the-river hydro in all but a handful of sites tends to be quite dependent on rainfall levels. This means production levels can vary quite meaningfully both seasonally and more importantly year-to-year.

It's definitely reliable in the sense that hydro stations can basically last forever if properly maintained (there are plenty of hydro stations operating today which are more than 100 years old) but it's not quite a silver bullet.

pfdietz48• 10 months ago

I was all for nuclear when it was the best option to displace fossil fuels. It is no longer, so I'm no longer all for it.

lima• 10 months ago

This. The time for new nuclear plants was 20 years ago. Now it's too late, and too expensive, even in purely practical terms without the question of safety.

teamonkey3• 10 months ago

I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place.

The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s.

Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind.

It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks.

Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity.

I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.

jenadine• 10 months ago

Don't judge plane safety from the design of the brothers Wright aircraft

gilbetron• 10 months ago

And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.

Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.

account424• 10 months ago

People fear what the media tells them to fear. I still remember the (publicly funded so not really independent from government) TV here having someone refer to a beech near Fukushima as "possibly one of the most dangerous places on earth" while holding up a Geiger counter that showed radiation levels barely above background levels.

Nuclear accidents have been a nothing-burger compared to all the deaths and health issues caused by coal and gas - but those are more spread out over time and don't make for as exciting news so no one cares. Shutting down nuclear instead of coal was never a rational decision but an emotional one.

s_dev• 10 months ago

Coal kills far more people than nuclear yet you never read about it. I think partly because any nuclear catastrophes are visible and concentrated to a single area.

Coal smoke kills over a much wider area and this impacts that 'newsworthiness' of this fear to spread. It's a class data vs feelings issue and yet again peoples feelings trump the data and undermines what experts familiar with both the danger and the data say.

prinny_2• 10 months ago

I am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?

pera• 10 months ago

This is the main reason why I am, generally speaking, against nuclear as a universal solution.

A question for pro-nuclear folks: Would you be okay with having a highly corrupt low HDI country building nuclear facilities (conversion and deconversion, enrichment, power plants) next to your borders?

southernplaces72• 10 months ago

So you would oppose an entire, globe-spanning branch of deeply necessary technology (clean energy) with all its vast opportunities for improvement, innovation, and management under all kinds of more responsible means, because the government functionaries in your specific part of the world can't get their moral shit together (and given what you describe, wouldn't be able to do it well no matter what kid of large-scale energy is put into their hands)?

mensetmanusman4• 10 months ago

This is true regardless of how the electron potential is generated.

burnt-resistor5• 10 months ago

I was involved in the nuclear industry in the 90's.

Why impose externalities on others when solar and wind are so cheap and less risky? It seems like proponents fall for technological aspirationalism without considering pragmatic consequences and risks of shoveling enormous sums of money for unnecessary risks and inefficient allocations of capital because it's seems just barely unobtainable or blocked by "them" when it's simply economically unviable.

greesil• 10 months ago

It's a bit more nuanced than this, no? It's better to reflect on why we let important things like nuclear energy go to the lowest bidder, or private entities that want to maximize short term profit.

kranke155• 10 months ago

The reason to be against nuclear energy is quite simple - human error.

Unlike flying, we’ve not shown nuclear energy to be sufficiently idiot-proof for many people to be comfortable with it. That and the fact that radiation is invisible, which makes it somehow almost paranormal.

dijit3• 10 months ago

The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered).

But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it.

The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl.

Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven and earth to solve the problem… and if they hadn’t, then the entire continent might be dead today.

MichaelDickens• 10 months ago

The reason I used to oppose nuclear energy is that its proponents would say nuclear waste isn't a problem, but they would never explain why it isn't a problem. I knew the half-life of uranium was 4 billion years; I didn't see how you could possibly make that safe, and nobody on the pro-nuclear side seemed to have an explanation, so I assumed that no explanation existed.

(Turns out the answer is that you can store nuclear waste deep underground at geologically stable locations where tectonics won't cause it to eventually resurface.)

(Also radioactive waste isn't uranium and the half-life is considerably shorter than 4 billion years, although it's still quite long.)

dijit3• 10 months ago

it’s also true that you get better at using (and reusing) what we would consider waste today over time.

The more energy we are able to use, the more inert the waste material becomes, leading to much lower storage timeframes (though still multiple human lifetimes even in the best case).

jerome-jh• 10 months ago

From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad!

Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale.

I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.

adastra226• 10 months ago

Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate.

3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.

quantum_mcts• 10 months ago

Total amount of reactor*years so far is roughly 20000. 3 core meltdowns amounts for 0.015% per reactor per year.

jiehong• 10 months ago

But is very centralised. Solar and wind are less centralised, and I think that’s one advantage they have over nuclear.

alphazard• 10 months ago

Or why there is a "clean" energy distinction that some authority has control over in the first place. If CO2 is the thing we care about, then tax CO2 and let everything sort itself out. The fact there are subsidies instead of carbon taxes is revealing all on its own.

defaultcompany• 10 months ago

How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.

marcyb5st• 10 months ago

Isn't that only applicable for Uranium 235 based reactors? Thorium is converted to Uranium 233 and when split the byproducts have an half life of 10s of years, meaning that the radioactivity drops to safe levels in "only" few hundred years.

This is much more manageable.

Anyway, that is to say that nuclear is a spectrum, and the current mainstream tech I believe it is the one that won because of the military applications (and therefore funding) back in the cold-war era.

nrjames• 10 months ago

We're living in a reality where nuclear waste was not always properly contained and the repercussions of it are long-lasting. While this particular case is related to the Manhattan Project, it's causing all types of issues to this day:

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/11/long-term-effects-nu...

burnt-resistor5• 10 months ago

You're purposefully and deceptively omitting the lack of safety and perpetual waste risks.

cauch• 10 months ago

Probably said somewhere else, but "green" originally means "does not create toxic waste when used". Nuclear is nice and good for the environment, but it does fit in the definition "produce waste", even if this waste can be considered as small or can be somehow treated.

patapong• 10 months ago

Okay, my reflection is as follows. Investing in nuclear power today is a bit akin to betting against solar/wind + battery. In my opinion it is a losing bet.

For a nuclear powerplant to be economically feasible, it first needs to be built (10+ years at this point), and then run for tens of years at consistent output rates. To make this worth it for investors, the state often guarantees the price for energy for tens of years after construction, picking up the difference if the electricity price falls.

So in essence, building a nuclear power plant today is locking in that price of electricity for something like 50 years. Solar is today already much cheaper than nuclear, and is coming down in price very quickly, as are batteries and other storage methods. If this development continues and there are further breakthroughs in storage, the taxpayer would have to keep footing the bill to buy expensive nuclear energy for years in the future.

Therefore, instead of investing in reviving nuclear, I would much rather invest the same amount in upgrading the grid, researching storage methods, and subsidizing grid-scale solar and wind. I think this will be the better choice for the taxpayer in the long run.

wkat42422• 10 months ago

I'm still against nuclear and this ruling didn't change it. For me it's still externalising many of the negative effects to many future generations. And with much more spent fuel comes more proliferation risks.

Of course this stuff is not up to me but the parties I vote for are in part because they're anti nuclear.

ndsipa_pomu• 10 months ago

I'm not convinced that's true about nuclear power when you look at the full lifecycle costs of uranium mining, maintenance and decommissioning. Also, solar is currently a lot cheaper than nuclear power when you exclude all the various subsidies (which applies to both energy sources). I'm not even convinced that nuclear power is that energy dense when you look at the raw uranium mining - most figures cherry-pick the processed uranium fuel which is indeed a very dense energy source.

davidjytang• 10 months ago

I take it you mean well built and well run nuclear plant you.

Also is it most prone to human error?

mastermage4• 10 months ago

Well, its wrong though. Its not the cheapest. Thats solar and by a long shot. Nuclear is literally the most expensive energy source. Also take into account the timeframe to build nuclear powerplants. 9 to 12 Years on average built time and delays often happen.

amai2• 10 months ago

Clean, but not insurable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

m10124• 10 months ago

It is not beyond insurance.

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/nuke_...

Insurance already insures extremely complicated industries.

amai2• 10 months ago

The person who wrote that has a conflict of interest, because he developed a nuclear reactor:

"In 2011, Devanney shifted his attention to nuclear power. He formed a small team to develop a design that combined a high temperature, low pressure, liquid fuel reactor with his background in ship production. This became known as the ThorCon project. Devanney continues to serve as ThorCon's Chairman although the day to day operations of ThorCon have been turned over to younger, more capable hands."

https://gordianknotbook.com/author/

lloydatkinson• 10 months ago

Well duh. Now we must wait and see what next feat of self-defeat Germany invents to prevent itself using it.

andrewgleave• 10 months ago

For anyone interested in the history of Sellafield and its role in reprocessing, "Britain's Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield" on BBC 4 at the moment is worth a watch. Presented by Jim Al-Khalili.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b065x080

hereme8884• 10 months ago

Why would a court decide this vs. an actual team of scientists?

weberer• 10 months ago

Did you even read the article?

The European Court of Justice has now fully dismissed Austria’s lawsuit.

hereme8884• 10 months ago

I read the title, and you indirectly answered my question.

Krasnol2• 10 months ago

This is the actual judgement: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...

One of the reasons they judged this way is the lack of feasible low-carbon alternatives. Which is hilarious because we're talking about EU taxpayer money here. Money that can be spend only once. If you spend it on a nuclear reactor which may or may not be build within 10 years, you can't spend it on those "feasible low-carbon alternatives" which we already have and which would have produced a lot of energy in that construction time.

The court however said also, that the strict regulations, which are often the main argument of nuclear fans, are not to be lowered. Therefore there is no outcome for nuclear where it will get cheaper. The French, which have never stopped building nuclear all over the world, still didn't manage to get it cheaper. There are always cost explosions which cause the energy price to rise over time.

Which brings us back to why we're even talking about this:

France has a fleet which needs more and more maintenance. It is costly and the state already supports every Watt of nuclear energy through their tarif bleu. They desperately need this EU money to support this show. Without it, they'd be forced to innovate and expand on renewables, like the rest of the planet.

...but just like the Germans with their fossil fuel cars, they'll try to keep it alive as long as possible, even though the market comes apart around them.

tsoukase• 10 months ago

Price per Wh plays no role in the coming decades. Solid fuels can become x10 or x100 more expensive as they deplete. So the now extensive nuclear can become relatively cheap.

The globe must change its behavior NOW: electricity prices at night, under shade or without wind must become very extensive because they need extensive tech (batteries, nuclear, fuels).

If I were a regulator for a day I would strive making fossil fuels and night elecricity x10 more expensive and leave the market regulate by itself. In ten years I would make them x10 once more.

xkbarkar• 10 months ago

You know what, let’s turn popular city parks to windmill and solarparks. NY central park for example. Copenhagen has a few beloved open green places we could clean out and replace with solarcells, so does Berlin.

Im unscientifically guessing support for nc energy would rise very quickly and wed have a whole bunch of them within a decade.

Source, I live near a windmill, they are loud as f*k. I drive by solaparks nearly every day.

They remind me of those horrible deforested areas in Sweden called kalhygge. Nothing green about those atrocities.

luckystarr• 10 months ago

Newer wind turbines don't have a gearbox and are almost completely silent. When standing next to one, the loudest components are the electrical inverters/transformers.

wolvesechoes4• 10 months ago

Wings are loud

wolvesechoes4• 10 months ago

You are sarcastic, but seriously I sometimes have an impression that people are so invested in the slogan of green energy that they would be fine with cutting down last tree on this planet to put a solar panel in its place, while believing they save the planet and environment.

spookie2• 10 months ago

Yeah have seen them. Down south of EU, in Portugal, they are buying land used for agriculture for these huge solar farms. And it is as sad as it is here. Surely, food is more important no? If they were placed in some deserts like in Spain... maybe they make sense, but these are very arable lands.

Wind is yeah... a whole other beast, although I do like what they have done in the Baltic and North seas.

goobatrooba3• 10 months ago

Seems like an economics problem? Is farmland cheaper than buying some otherwise less usable land? Or is there now much land available and a huge unmet energy need? And there are also models to use solar that still allow some farming below (e.g. strawberry, beans, greenhouses, ... But maybe not cost effective in this case, or the incentives don't align well.

Have you looked into why this model is chosen?

natmaka40• 10 months ago

Agrivoltaics (dual use of land for solar energy and agriculture) is gaining ground in many nations. This is heavy industry, the pace is slower than in most sectors (IT...).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics

sehansen• 10 months ago

The EU as a whole has a pretty large oversupply of food, so using arable land for other things than agriculture is no big deal.

goobatrooba3• 10 months ago

I don't doubt your experience but this is not at all mine. I live by, cycle by, and work by windmills and there is no notable noise from any of them, even the older ones don't make a noise that I'd hear through a wall.

And the argument you make against PV is absurd, no one suggests that that's the way to use PV. Where I live everyone has PV on their roofs to produce mostly for own consumption. There are also many concepts to use it on otherwise unused spaces more at scale (office buildings and train stations for example, but also in combination with greenhouses, as roof for farm areas, ...

Yes you can do both of them badly but nuclear takes a huge space and makes it unusable for generations, and in addition requires vast infrastructure to actually get the energy safely into the grid. I'm a fan of nuclear power, but the arguments you make renewables are neither actual arguments pro nuclear nor do they seem to me to hold much water.

jandrese• 10 months ago

Why would you turn green space into solar farms when there are hideous and heat island creating parking lots right there?

gpm4• 10 months ago

It's funny how you're proposing this in bad faith as a terrible idea having tried to think of the worst place you could possibly put these things.

And yet we've done it, and everyone around it likes it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExPlace_Wind_Turbine#/media/Fi...

It's not particularly practical of course, because the real estate is expensive and the tall things in a city all fuck with the airflow... but then that's why this is a publicity stunt and not where we usually put them.

dgellow5• 10 months ago

We have wind turbines in the north of Germany, close to cities, it’s a non-issue

whatevaa• 10 months ago

Oil is so green. Oil spills are so beautiful.

Yes, its sarcasm.

geldedus• 10 months ago

Of course it is. Atomic energy is one of the cleanest energy sources we have. But not the cheapest.

mentalgear• 10 months ago

France, heavily invested in nuclear, now has to shut down their reactors each summer as, due to climate change, the cooling water from rivers cant be used any more to cool the reactors. So much about being future proof. And let's not even get into the argument why no private company ever financed a nuclear reactor, but only build them with huge subsidies from states. Hint: it is because they are completely uneconomically. (and dont come with the argument of experimental small scale reactors, they are all just experimental and none proven)

wolvesechoes4• 10 months ago

the cooling water from rivers cant be used any more to cool the reactors. So much about being future proof.

There are more reactor types than water-cooled reactors, and modern energy plants should use cooling towers even if some water reservoir is available, nuclear or not.

it is because they are completely uneconomically

This is why private sector cannot provide infrastructure. State is not a company.

goobatrooba3• 10 months ago

Not all need a river to cool but every single nuclear power plant needs a consistent water source 1) to actually generate the energy (steam!), 2) to cool, 3) as emergency safeguard when things go wrong. If you followed the news about Russia's attack on Ukraine and the risks to Zaporizia much of it was about fear of an incident, among others due to water sources or the energy to bring water to the plant being at risk

pqtyw13• 10 months ago

There are nuclear plants in much warmer places than France. And well.. in hindsight climate change probably wouldn't be as bad as it is if nuclear continued growing at the same pace as in the 60s and 70s.

Hint: it is because they are completely uneconomically

Yes, natural gas and fossil fuels were cheaper than nuclear too. That and the irrational panic is what killed it. At this point its probably too late (and renewables are more feasible option unless there are some significant technological advancements), but if you add up all the long-term costs and externalities nuclear would have turned out to be much cheaper in the 80s and 90s than it seemed on paper.

Just coal alone used to kill (probably still does worldwide) more people every year than Chernobyl ever did... What is the cost of that?

draven• 10 months ago

The water can still be used to cool down the reactors. But the water injected back into the river would then be too hot for the river's ecosystem.

keepamovin• 10 months ago

And the EU are correct. Stop crying about it. Nuclear is the future of human energy on Earth.

No other source provides energy as dense safe and reliable.

Hacker news people believe it’s not the cheapest. But with accounting for environmental and human impact and freeing from unnecessary restrictive regulations it can and will be.

wukongfine• 10 months ago

I personally believe that nuclear energy is clean energy

Ericson2314• 10 months ago

The fact that:

- the French won this

- the Germans won no chat control

Is the best of both worlds!

johnisgood2• 10 months ago

Phew, thankfully I did not need the EU court to know nuclear is clean energy. In any case, any pros of it being considered clean in an official capacity?

ripped_britches• 10 months ago

“EU court rules sky blue”

gusfoo• 10 months ago

Russia is running out of money to pay anti-nuclear activists in Europe, it seems. "Atomkraft? Nein Danke!" should be viewed as what it really is.

isaacremuant• 10 months ago

So funny. After the whole bullshit and hysteria post Fukushima and the German bullshit. But now it's the good narrative because of the war with Russia.

It's so funny to see the shifts of peace or war with eastasia. So obviously propagandistic and so obviously supported by all the psychophants...

Today we're on the right side until it's inconvenient again and then we'll burn the witch of anyone who dares go against the narrative.

mcv• 10 months ago

Ruling nuclear as green is something I can understand (though I still vastly prefer solar), but I've read elsewhere that natural gas has also been ruled green, and that just makes no sense.

Personally I see gas and nuclear as transition technologies until we can go fully renewable, and I can tolerate gas staying around for a bit longer as long as we phase our coal and oil as soon as possible, but that doesn't make it green. Gas is still a CO2 producing fossil fuel.

EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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