I think a lot of Anti Nuclear Power is based off old designs that weren't as safe and had radioactive byproduct I think newer reactor designs take a lot of bite out of that process. Additionally when you look at what is proposed to happen with Fusion reactors in Virginia in the next couple years it becomes a less popular position to be in opposition.
This is complete non-sense. Nothing about what you are saying is factually accurate in any way, scientifically or otherwise. What is happening is that enough people have finally learned that the environmental movement's policies weren't based upon actual science or data. This lost them support. They have finally lost enough support to verge on complete irrelevancy. Now that that has happened, they are trying to reverse that trend.
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
I wish Commonwealth Fusion Systems to sucessed in the plan for commercial fusion electricity production, but they still have many technical problems to solve. They will probably demostrate fusion containment with fusion energy gain factor greater then 1 (more like 10), the primary goal.
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
They also need a way to extract power from 1,000,000C heat. Since we have absolutely no idea how to do that, fusion is still a non-starter...FOR ENERGY PRODUCTION. Fusion can be used for other things but power production won't be one of those things in any of our lifetimes if ever. That being said, we still should do the research and use fusion for what it is useful for. Its just that those uses don't include power production.
My Anti Nuclear Power is not based on the technology, which is awesome, but on the external factors.
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
Such anti-nuclear has some validity, but only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue. Constructing new power plants and central heating systems that rely on burning fuel should be imminently stopped, and all existing plants should have their remaining life time determined and then sunset when they reach it. Any argument of external factors for nuclear are dwarfed by the external factors from burning fuel for energy and heat, double so for profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.
> only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue.
Unless you accidentally left out "fossil", as in "burning fossil fuel", then we at least are unlikely to agree.
I certainly intend to continue to gather tree waste and burn it - and I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement.
Burning wood waste is primarily a green washing method. True tree waste is very minimal today in quantity, and most wood "waste" is actually used for a lot of products like paper and ply wood, and what is left to burn when everything is used are not enough to power a nation for any duration. In term of pollution it reduces air quality, and in term of sustainability there aren't enough forests around to use wood as the main fuel for all the power needs we have when renewables can't deliver.
Burning wood has at best similar environmental impact as beef. In theory it can be produced using just "waste", but we have to extend the word "waste" beyond recognition when production is scaled up and the profit-maximizing locusts become part of the picture. The world is suffering from deforestation.
We are not talking about using garden waste to burn a log in a open fire place, but rather grid sized power plants and central heating plants. I should however mention that there are air quality reports that points to issues with individual homes burning wood inside cities. Open air fireplaces do not scale well with dense population areas.
> Cutting down massive amount of forests just for the purpose of burning it up is harmful to the environment
Err, lets perhaps stick with
* Cutting down massive amount of old growth forest is harmful to the environment ( whether it's for burning or bauxite )
and
* Cutting down forest faster than regrowth rate is harmful to the environment (as that's net loss wrt surface sequestration)
and perhaps examine "harmful to bio diversity" (is it? checker-boarded plantation forest has about the same biodiversity as it ever has - it's not old-growth but it's not devoid of life or diversity), "dangerous to humans" (really? with modern logging machines on plantation forest? - the deaths in logging largely come from non plantation clearing on steep slopes and happen to humans aware of the risks)
> True tree waste is very minimal today
Is it? Many people hereabout heat their homes from limb lopping, dead fall, and tree deaths.
> not enough to power a nation for any duration
I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The harm from deforestation comes from multiple sources. It increase the harmful effect of storms, flooding, and perhaps counter intuitively also forest fires.
Modern plantation forest involve draining of water, and that causes green house gases to be released. After logging, the area also release more green house gases during the first 20 years then they pick up. Logging also changes the level of ground water, and how much of the ground water get filtered, which in turn reduces quality of the water downstream. Logging also increase erosion, which has it own set of risk to humans.
> I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The article is about nuclear power plants, in the context of the UK green party. In order for wood to be an alternative it would need to be able to provide energy in a green, sustainable, and national independent way. Power plants that burn wood pellets do exist, but how green and how sustainable they are is debatable. It also questionable if they will just use wood, or if they mix it in with other even less green and less sustainable fuels, but sells the energy as green energy produced on waste products.
> I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement
It does not scale. That’s how they are cutting down ancient pristine forest in Central Europe. It’s useful as a supplement to use wood waste; it cannot be a major source of energy.
It is good to recycle tree waste and it's already done on industrial scale. But there are not enough forests in the word to replace our consumption of fossil fuels.
For example Denmark is importing lot of wood from Baltics, UK lot of wood from Canada.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Just like commercial aviation companies then, right?
> Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
On average or what?
> Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
> Nuclear waste ...
Let me stop you right there. Head on over to https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/fifteen_minutes and look at how much coal&gas waste (no, not just CO2) we are dumping into the atmosphere at this very moment.
Now go ahead and tell me again that we need to badly find a solution to the huge problem of inert, solid, compact nuclear waste that's just sitting there.
> What if an accident happens?
Idk, what if an accident happens with anything else that's already 99.999% safe, like aviation? Odd question to ask about the objectively safest power source we have.
> Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Right. You're getting attacked by hypersonic missiles and your priority is your nuclear power plant safety.
Empirically, somehow Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland despite their nuclear power plants being very much under threat of attack by not so sane people.
> What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
Do you think the concrete to build an NPP doesn't require a crazy amount of fossil fuel? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive by the time the NPP is actually completed?
I can have solar now, with batteries next year, and great batteries in 3 years. Or badass nuclear in 7 to 10 years with an average cost overrun of 102% (https://www.bu.edu/igs/2025/05/19/investment-risk-for-energy...), just in time for solar and batteries to be so good that nuclear will be irrelevant.
BTW, Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland because Putin doesn't think it is worth making it a wasteland, because Russia actually attacked the Chernobyl sarcophagus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...), thus showing everyone that Putin is not scared by the nuclear fallout taboo. That genie is out of the bottle now, the madmen have shown that they are not mad enough right now.
The carbon payoff for the average NPP is 6 weeks. The idealized payoff for a solar panel is 5 years, in practice its 10 in the tropics trending to 20 on a line about where SF or Barcelona is. And a solar panel on average only lasts 20 years.
The point of the hypersonic missile catastrophe was something I had not considered and is an excellent point. I think that is true with all critical infrastructure to some extent but a nuclear reactor would certainly have more fallout. I wonder if any designs have thought about that situation.
Nuclear conrainment buildings are the strongest non-military structures build, you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them.
Under the current aircraft protection rules, the containment building has to survive impact of a fully loaded large civilian airplane moving at speed of sound.
For example testing of samples of containment building was done using acceleration of F-4 Phantom mounted on rocket sledge towards the wall. The wall survived the impact without problems.
> you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them
Which already exists. For example, India (so that you cannot say "this is something only available to USA) has the Agni-V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni-V) that supports a 7.5 ton bunker buster with Mach 24 terminal velocity. It costs $5 million each (like a battle tank).
Your squishy 747 moving at Mach 1 is nothing in comparison.
What other countries do already have something similar, or will have something similar, let's say, in the next 5 years?
I could see this maybe working using a standardized sensor reporting system that goes into some third party/government/public analysis. Full sensor array stream, and whatever is used internally to make decisions, up for scrutiny.
Repeat after me:
Technology solutions don't fix human problems.
Your sensor reporting system will be forced to report whatever is needed - regardless of the reality of the situation - as soon as the right manager demands more uptime to an engineer, or otherwise they get fired because leadership demands more profit.
Thank you for confirming my point that technology fixes technological problems and not human problems.
The Middle ages had effectively more technology than the Romans (all the stuff that was invented til the Romans, plus the stuff that was invented later), yet they fared worse, mostly because of religion and feudal lords sabotaging what the Romans managed to achieve.
Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure. Every single time they manage to integrate, they all turn into worse versions of Mr. Burns. Our economic system is setup to reward corner cutting and a race to the bottom. If an nuclear plant ends up melting down, our publicly funded nuclear insurance steps in to clean up the mess and the LLC goes bankrupt. Meanwhile, everyone that invested walks away with all the wealth they've siphoned, which they siphoned more of by cutting corners.
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
If we look at mining companies, we kind of know that society will carry most of the risk and negative externalities, so regulations must exist to limit how and to what degree companies can operate.
If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.
In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.
> Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure.
I am in the same boat. Companies will optimize for profit and rent-seeking, all else be damned. A nuclear meltdown would be a negative externality, if line goes up it would have been worth.
> We need reform
Any reform needs to account for corporations being machines optimized to generate profit. Regulations should ensure "negative externality" is not really externalized.
Corporations only understand profits, and investors should be understood as entities willing to leech from society. The only way to heandle corporations is by having failures threatening the money that investors can leech through this pipeline.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
After reading GPs comment, I almost started thinking about systemic issues of our current economic structures. Good thing you are here to remind us that any problems under capitalism must be accepted without a critical thought, because COMMUNISM!
The only real (ie large) nuclear accident happened under communism. And the reason why we don't have even safer nuclear designs is because of regulation. This entire discussion is entirely backwards and isn't looking at the data. Look where and why incidents happened. When you do, you will find various causes, none of which are fixed by political ideology. They are fixed by engineering and insurance costs.
Chernobyl happened because the son of a central committee member needed data from a dangerous experiment that was conducted at the powerplant. They literally disabled safety systems with wrenches. Both the design itself would have never allowed in the west nor would the experiment that caused the accident. Also, the HBO movie was very inaccurate so please don't bring up something you saw there, many of the things in the movie aren't even scientifically possible.
Yeah, this might well not be any individual human being changing their mind, but rather new human beings less inclined to be anti-nuclear-power now forming a critical mass within the UK Green Party.
Oposition to nuclear is much older, it started is oposition to nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon tests and in generation was part of the global peace movements and anti-cold war and anti-Vietnam war movements.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
Degrowthers just believed climate scientists that there is a problem and then believed climate deniers when they said none of the solutions work.
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
The solution was, is and always will be nuclear power. Electrification is a misdirection so you won't support actual solutions. For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear. And without ammonia in industrial quantities we can't feed everyone because its used to make fertilizer. This is one of several things we get from fossil fuels (and could get from nuclear) but we can't get from electricity alone. Then there is the extra inefficiencies from electricity for things we do with power that aren't kinetic.
Basically, converting from one form of energy to another usually can be done at 50%. The lone exception is voltage potential (electricity) where we can get 90% for motion but 10% for anything else. And when you use motion for transport you have all the problems of a heavy battery reducing efficiency. This is why we can make an EV but not an electric plane. Then there are the problems to do with storage (remember 2 conversions so 25% efficiency there unless you use a battery). Finally, remember that capitalism is really good at efficiency. When people started trying to find energy uses to cut, this was easy in less developed places but in the US it was nearly impossible. Every cut caused problems elsewhere (even for something as minor as an HVAC fan). Ironically we learned this during COVID when the older "inefficient" buildings were healthier than the newer ones because they moved less air.
Yes this is an extremely bad thing. Degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less are enemies of human progress and flourishing. I do not want people like that to have any political power.
Less doesn't have to mean less comfort. There's a lot of unnecessary consumption these days. People buying stuff they never use. Stuff that breaks and can't be repaired even though the owner would prefer that.
And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.
It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.
It really does. You can live without clothes, that's less. You can live on 1500 kcals a day. You would be at the brink of starving all the time but you would be alive. I could lock you in a cage and just give you the bear minimum of bread and water. Just enough heat so you don't freeze and never let you out. That's certainly less. Just how much less do you want?
PS Young people almost always use more resources than the old. When my kid isn't here, our trash and recycling containers are pretty empty. When he is here, they overflow. And he is only a 50% increase in the house's population.
It's not objectively bad, but so unpopular that it would require tyranny to implement. Living fully cleanly and like a monk makes a few people very happy with a sense of purpose, but it gets in the way of everyone else's priorities, which is to survive day-to-day.
Living without AC in a warm summer is one example. It feels like a first world inconvenience to the Green types, that we should all learn to accept. Good luck with democratically convincing everyone else - you'd need authoritarian for a true success in keeping everyone "living with less."
It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
> if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
> I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
It's perfectly understandable, if you allow that most peoples' understanding of nuclear safety is not perfect. Chernobyl and 3 mile island, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki- atomic power's dangers get a lot more press than when it works quietly and reliably.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
It was part emotional response to Chernobyl, part is was full on Russian propaganda infiltrating parliaments in Europe.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.
Much earlier. The early nuclear industry, which was shared military and civilian, was incredibly nasty. While also covering up issues. Leaving us with enormous clean up bills to this date.
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.
Hanford could be handled for far less (no idea about the UK's sites but probably the same situation). Its the result of making the atomic bombs during WWII. The acids could be neutralized and the uranium separated out. However, a contract that just keeps putting the material in new containers every few years is much more profitable. The idea it should take hundreds of billions to do is pretty much about an nearly infinite time horizon of maintenance instead of just cleaning up the site.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
It was absolutely not almost a second Chernobyl. Saying this proves you understand very little of what happened in the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents.
Correct, because they managed to prevent it from becoming a second Chernobyl. At Chernobyl they failed to prevent it from becoming a first Chernobyl. But we don't want to keep rolling the dice just because the last time we got a 6.
No it was never possible for Fukushima to become a Chernobyl style disaster because it has a containment structure and the biggest difference is that Fukushima was basic overheating while Chernobyl was a complex power excursion of over 100GW. There was never a runaway nuclear explosion at Fukushima; it was a severe thermodynamic failure of cooling.
The end result can be the same. The disaster at Chernobyl wasn't the uncontrolled chain reaction - if that had been all that happened, the town of Chernobyl would still be considered inhabitable. The ionisation plume was pretty, but not dangerous to anyone who wasn't in it. The disaster at Chernobyl was that the building blew up (because of the chain reaction) and the explosion spread radioactive stuff for miles. Fukushima was also going to blow up, due to hydrogen gas IIRC, but they prevented it from blowing up.
You keep proving you don't understand what actually happened at Chernobyl or have a sense of scale of the energies involved. Hydrogen gas exploding is a completely different thing than a badly designed reactor instantly generating over 100 times its designed output and exploding. The hydrogen gas did explode at Fukushima and this damaged the outer building. Fukushima was a firecracker compared to Chernobyl being an actual nuclear bomb.
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
Even if Fukushima killed tens of thousands of people, nuclear would still kill order of magnitute less people per kWh of energy produced than fossil fuels.
There was no need for a mass evacuation because of Fukushima, it was a overreaction caused by irrational fear of nuclear power. The evacuation itself caused much harm. It is pretty silly to hype an incident that caused ZERO deaths as some kind of horrible nuclear disaster.
I oppose nuclear for a very simple reason: there is no way to deal with the long term waste. Not just the small amount of waste from the fuel, but the reactor components.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
Again, simple ignorance. The reason it lasts so long is that we aren't allowed to reprocess it for rather illogical reasons. Also, most of the "waste" from the reactor are either rare earths or silver (which is stable from the moment it is created) or valuable and useful gases. It can also be reprocessed and the nuclear fuel can be put into another reactor. We don't do this because of the absurdly small chance someone could get some Pu-239 (which would still require very advanced and noticeable processing). Basically things that only happen in James Bond movies and because some politician without any scientific knowledge can imagine it, it gets banned.
I don't think it accumulates enough solid waste to worry about. I'm Aussie, and I'm in favour of a proposal I heard a while ago to let other countries export their concentrated nuclear waste to the middle of Australia. Just bury it in one spot, on the oldest, most geologically stable landmass on the planet. It's far from bodies of water, it's far from population centres (excepting Alice Springs).
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
Mt Isa Mines when done is a good spot, and as a bonus you largely get to avoid issues with indigenous opposition since the area is already suitably dug up.
Reading down through that, there are exceptions built in already for research waste, medical waste, waste from "a nuclear vessel" (ie. submarines), and generic "waste that needs to buried for safety reason".
Would indigenous Australians living near proposed sites object to this plan? Are there areas of Australia with no human population? My impression is that nomadic indigenous groups used a lot of land in Australia even far from permanent settlements.
I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
If the numbers worked out the way you imagine, there would have been a gold rush to do it. NV is actually pretty low elevation and dusty and is surprisingly bad for solar even if it seems like it should be great. You know where is great for solar? New Mexico, Central Mexico and the northern part of the Andes range. Those are places at high elevations with low cloud cover and lower latitudes. That's where solar does well. I know it seems like it should just work in the desert...it doesn't however. The critical factors for solar are latitude, altitude and cloud cover.
>there is no way to deal with the long term waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
Well, if we extract the energy from the spicy rocks today through fission then on a time scale of over hundreds of millennia you actually end-up with less radioactivity on earth! (After 300 000 years to be accurate, and the figure I have is based on low enriched uranium based fuel as typically used in a light water reactor).
You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?
I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…
Coal waste will be a larger problem to deal with for future generations than nuclear waste will be. The burning coal of course has shortened the lives of millions and been a major contributor to green house gases. If you oppose both coal and nuclear, how should the world have generated electrical power from say 1950 to 2000?
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Climate change is a consequence of fearmongering against cleaner solutions. We have methods for handling radioactive waste safely- whether it's vitrification and dropping it in subduction zones, or just putting it deep underground in wastelands, there are lots of solutions that are infinitely better than the status quo.
It wouldn't be any better, because if plants had been built decades ago, they wouldn't be able to be competitive anymore, would keep running a deficit, and would depress the economy and public finances like the white elephants they are, and take away means to transition to renewables.
Why is war never a factor in the nuclear power debate? Like nuclear is great, until you have missiles dropping on your territory. You can ask Ukraine about that. Zaporizhia has been held hostage since the early days of the war. Should the Russians have a manic moment they can make a Chernobyl volume 2 with conventional explosives.
Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.
The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded over 500 square kilometres and carried a significant death toll, caused major damage to the surrounding area and impacted over a million people.
Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.
Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.
A nuclear strike on a larger fission reactor could create an awful result unlike any other power plant. There were some studies during the cold war (something about the effects in West Germanyin the early 1980s, IIRC).
As opposed to a nuclear strike directly on a populated civilian area with no nuclear power plant nearby which also creates an awful result?
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
Scale of fallout would be huge. People were kind of shocked by the analysis (trying to remember what came out then... Fetter, early 1980s, Scientific American?).
Nuclear ICBMs generally make this a moot point. An advanced enemy can explode a "nuclear reactor" anywhere in your country at any time.
Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.
There is a very very strong pro-nuclear contingent on HN and in tech in general, and most of the tech pro-nuclear support comes from viewing nuclear as environmentally positive compared to alternatives, so I'm not surprised at all to see this. It hits all the right "this is good" receptors, even if UK Greens are a tiny party. (I personally view nuclear as completely infeasible, economically, while also being environmentally friendly, so I've had few allies on any grounds when it comes to public debate on nuclear.)
The best time to build up nuclear power was 4 decades ago - when the supply of fossil fuel was obviously fraught, and things like solar and wind power were nonviable.
Whether it makes any sense to push for nuclear power now is unclear. Nuclear was quite expensive even back then - but decades of NIMBYism, "environmental" activism and overregulation have damaged the industrial capability and eroded supply chains to the point that getting a buildout going at scale, on a sane budget and a sensible timetable would be an uphill battle. At the same time, renewables aren't anywhere near as opposed, the economic outlook for solar, wind and grid storage is better than it ever was, and the situation is likely to improve even further.
I'm not so sure I agree. A big turning point in my thinking was reading a mid 1980s Forbes piece that investigated several other factors that stopped more US nuclear builds. Perhaps most of all was lack of need, there were too many starts resulting in a glut of nuclear power. Second, construction projects were frequently over budget, meaning the power wasn't as cheap as everybody anticipated. Third, yes, there were mid-construction design changes but that was only on a fraction of projects that were already way behind.
Look over at France, frequently touted as a "successful" buildout. But reactors got more expensive the more they built, not cheaper, and they never met their initial goals for number of builds.
And look at the one place with modern-day "successful" builds: China. They like to tout the reactors as great successes, and they are on time and on budget, or at least as on budget as we can tell in an economic system like that. But they missed their 2020 and 2025 five year plan goals for deployment, and will miss their 2030 goal too. Meanwhile, they deploy 20x-30x as much wind and solar each year, each tech. That's after adjusting for capacity factor! So the best nuclear builders in the world are only building enough of it to be low single digits of their energy mix.
Nuclear was always oversold as a technology, always underdelivered, and has not seen a positive learning curve that a normal technology would. It was doomed from the start, IMHO.
But 4 decades ago is exactly when nuclear was being built up in the UK - indeed, most of the AGR fleet came online between 1985 and 1989.
And "quite expensive" vastly understates it - high temperature gas-cooled reactors are in theory more efficient in operation at the expense of increased construction cost. In reality, construction costs far, far outweigh the raw cost of fuel (reprocessing is a different matter!) so we landed ourselves with all the extra expense for very little benefit (probably actually a negative benefit since the much-vaunted ability to refuel whilst at full power turned out not to work in practice).
So they were late, hideously expensive, completely failed to be sold to other countries, and now have an availability factor no higher than that of offshore wind.
We knew that they would be unlikely to live up to their promise as early as 1964 and yet still went ahead despite several opportunities to change course. The nuclear industry never learns.
The background here is that people didn't really trust the individuals or institutions involved with nuclear power, and those same individuals and institutions weren't exactly enthusiastic about a new form of energy.
Pretty much, especially with their latest mess with “Zionism is racism” entryism, a leader who can’t lead, and a split between those interested in green subjects and rump Corbynites
We're familiar with the Green point of view, your niche parties are like NGOs in the US. I think the larger context might be the conversation about technology we've been having in the US since the atom bomb. Articles about nuclear power, GMO, AI, and other advances will trigger similar interest. The timeliness of this article isn't a factor, it's an interesting event and a chance to broach a few topics.
There are three Green Parties in the UK. The SGP members have had a supply agreement with the ruling SNP in the Scottish Parliament for years. There was even talk of them being in coalition for a while.
They were, but the current popularity of the 2 main parties (in recent times) has led to this or a couple of right wing ones as a popular protest vote.
I'm happy they're doing this, and it's good and admirable to see people be able to change their minds on something they once believed so strongly, but this should have happened 30 years ago.
>People only "change their mind" when it becomes an existential crisis.
If only. There's people and parties (not in the UK) who would rather see the rest of the country suffer than admit they were wrong, so they feel compelled to die on that hill and take everyone with them, because defending their principle is more important.
Which means new nuclear is about the worst thing we can spend our limited resources on since it won't be coming online until the 2040s, and then at a ruinosuly expensive price.
Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.
We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.
We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.
Unlike fossil fuel power plants, NPPs don't depend on a steady supply of a high volume of costly consumables just to keep running. Reactor fuel loads last months to years, naturally buffering any price shocks or supply chain issues. And you can maintain an "energy security" stockpile of nuclear fuel that would add you even more years of runaway.
To have your nuclear power disrupted, you have to face an adversary that's both capable and willing to hit targets on your soil, and on top of that, is willing to target NPP infrastructure specifically.
A random rogue state lobbing mid-range drones over a strait wouldn't cut it. Neither would a war halfway around the world.
We're talking about Germany shuttering their nuclear power plants despite USA warning them repeatedly that Russia was going to weaponize the Nord Stream gas dependence against them. Which is ultimately exactly what happened.
Nuclear power replaced coal in Germany, not gas. A big dependence exists because people heat their homes with gas and lots of industry needs gas, nuclear doesn’t help with either.
That is not really the case. Germany certainly wanted cheap gas, but there was also the theory that integrating Russia economically will prevent conflicts. While ultimately a wrong decision, it was not entirely stupid.
But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
I also would like people realize that many nuclear plants in Europe and elsewhere still depend on fuel from Russia. So energy dependence is a bit more complex.
> But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
You know that homes can be heated with electricity from nuclear power? The reason why Germany uses gas for heating is because it was historically very cheap compared to electricity, because it came from Russia. Good, while the attached strings could be ignored..
Sure, but we are talking about what was the reality in Germany. And gas was and is needed mainly for heating (and also industry), so shutting down the nuclear plants did not increase dependency on Russian gas despite what people repeatedly claim. Also gas usage for power production did not increase afterwards, while Russian gas imports were stopped. Both simple facts contradicting this myth.
It's a bit more complex, I think. When gas imports started from the USSR, nuclear power plants were still being built in Germany, for example. There were gas imports for a long time.
if the germans want to shoot themselves in the foot they are allowed to do this, yes. what is the point of your comment? it's not even remotely relevant.
I was trying to point out that societies make and are free to make decisions that others don't like or that aren't great for them by some metric - and that there is nothing wrong with that. Why is that not relevant when it comes to energy?
so your point is that it's fine that germany ceeded energy independence and gave power to russia, because they're a country and countries have the 'right' to make bad decisions?
we have the right to criticise countries too right?
If Germans don't want energy independence - you can criticize that but that's how nation states work or is there some UN Charter violation in there, for example?
im still so confused what your point is. it's like talking about the consequences of someone's alcoholism, and someone chiming in "well they have a right to die of the booze if they want" like...ok???
So any nation state needs to be energy independent? Is that your point? Or have cheap energy and energy independence? If people want low growth, expensive energy etc., why is that like alcoholism? What is intrinsically bad there? Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
> So any nation state needs to be energy independent?
It is obviously a good thing if a democratic nation state is independent from a totalitarian dictatorship.
> Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
It's not about life expectancy. They now have to make a choice between supporting an aggressive totalitarian state vs. suffering damage to their economy due to higher energy prices. That is obviously a bad position to be in.
Or more probably, it's imputable to biology and the natural replacement of the "old guard" by adults who didn't grow up during nukes schizophrenia. Or in other words, I doubt that those folks reasoned themselves out of the irrational fear for nuclear energy that they did not reason themselves into.
I'm not sure it's irrational. It's perhaps oversensitive. There are dozens of nuclear power incidents rated at levels of 5+, affecting the wider region.
In the UK, Sellafield was a nightmare. Lots of less serious slip ups and malfunctions punctuated by a few critical incidents, between 1954 and 2003. You might understand why yesterday's Green Party might think it an issue worth pursuing.
As other people have mentioned, it's very likely not the same people; but rather more anti-nuclear people leaving the organization or dying, and more pro-nuclear people joining.
I believe more recently there was an expose about some other politicians at that time having links to Russia, although don’t have them to hand right now.
Wow when nuclear power was the answer why we’re against it, but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar they are for it.
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
Nuclear power is not too expensive, it's expense is artificial. Also - renewables can't provide base load energy to replace mos of carbon stuff. You need a powerful base load to support most renewables in the mix
The 1990s called. They want their energy economics back.
Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.
On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
You really are a time traveler from the 1990s. In your comment below you say "Batteries are far too expensive, we're still a couple of decades out for that." Even excluding battery chemistry that are designed for bulk use like sodium ion, solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power. Today.
You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.
Energy costs, of course, vary by location - so that linked report is the Australian national science (both theory and very much applied) body determining that conditions in Australia are such that the economics of nuclear power here have costs greater than that of grid scale solar + batteries + other storage technologies on horizon and being firmed up.
It would be less expensive if every 20 years some idiots wouldn't blow one of them up and render a sizable swath of land uninhabitable by doing something regarded. The cost is in making sure they don't and unfortunately it's probably here to stay.
It's actually 100% worth it even with 1 fukishima every 20 years.
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
I think "baseload" has almost lost its meaning in these discussions.
Renewables have been displacing traditional baseload generation for years. What grids actually need is reliable dispatchable capacity, peaking power and firming.
People keep bringing up winter cold spells and claiming we need "baseload" to handle them, apparently without realizing that nuclear never solved those demand peaks either.
Historically that's been the job of dispatchable generation.
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh. Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
Interesting claims. Where are you getting those numbers?
And do you actually believe they are comparable?
German nuclear plants were producing for less than 2 cents/ kWh. Firm, day + night, summer + winter, profitable.
Intermittent renewables cost multiples of that and require massive subsidies on top and are allowed to place the burden of their intermittency on the firm producers on top of that.
So you claim as representative, not the average and not the median of nuclear power plants.
But the most expensive nuclear power plants ever produced.
Even without knowing any details about those plants, that's either statistical illiteracy or malpractice. Take your pick.
And it doesn't get better when you know the details:
- The ones you picked were all First of a Kind build (FOAK). So prototypes. It is well-documented that FOAK builds typically are 50% more expensive and longer to build than serialized builds (Nth of a Kind, NOAK). These were more around 100% longer than NOAK, for a bunch of reasons.
- A number of these were the EPR. The EPR has since been discontinued, because the manufacturer found it too hard to build. It has been replaced by the highly simplified EPR2. How is a discontinued reactor type representative of future builds?
- All of these builds were in countries that had a long hiatus in nuclear construction, so had to build up experience in the workforce, supply chain and regulators, so FOAK on steroids. Even the most experienced, France, had a gap of 18 years between the start of the previous build and the start of FV3.
- All of these builds had regulatory changes during the construction process. Sometimes massive changes, for example over 4000 changes for HPC in the UK. And not trivial things: the concrete of the outer protective shell had to be increased by 40% or something. Which has knock-on effects, because now things inside don't quite fit any longer. etc.
- New construction techniques such as modularization, factory production etc. all decrease the cost of serialized builds, but vastly increase the risk during First of a Kind builds.
And of course you are comparing installed capacity, which is an almost completely irrelevant metric. In the UK, capacity factors for solar are between 9-12%. So you have to multiply your solar numbers by 10 just to get equivalent output on average. Except average is not good enough. There is winter, there is night, there are clouds. 4h of battery are not going to get you through winter.
And you "forgot" that nuclear power plants last much, much longer than solar installations, at least twice as long, more likely 3 times and possibly 4 times. All of the plants in the US that have applied have been approved for 80 years of operations, they are now looking at 100 years and see no significant problems.
So without even taking into account new developments, you have to divide the nuclear numbers you gave by 2 and multiply the numbers for PV you gave by at least 20-80 (and that's not covering winter yet).
So $8B/GW vs. $20-80B/GW without any firming.
And which is why the price for installed capacity is not the right metric at all.
The cost of a kWh delivered reliably 24/7 is the right metric. And there nuclear shines.
And intermittents are simply not up to the job. Which is why pretty much the entire world is giving up on the fantasy of supplying an advanced industrial society using only intermittent renewables. And even the most hard-core anti-nuclear greens are coming around, as TFA reports.
As I wrote: Germany's nuclear power plants delivered reliable electricity at below 2 cents per kWh.
If you can point me to an NOAK-build that was built with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain.
Otherwise, you are just making the circular argument that because we haven't built we shouldn't build. That makes no sense.
And yes, nuclear for all capacity makes a lot more sense than intermittent renewables for all capacity. But a more balanced mix tends to work out better.
> How many hundreds of billions in subsidies and decades wasted until we reach "NOAK with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain"
None. Nuclear is cheap and quick and investments in nuclear not wasted.
We have wasted decades going down the wrong path. As an example, Germany has spent almost 25 years on the failed "Energiewende" and we haven't even completed the easy half. Nuclear did not require subsidies. Intermitten renewables anywhere from €30-50 billion just in subsidies. Per year.
France converted its electricity grid to nuclear in 15 years. For a total of €228 billion in 2011 money. Not "per year", not "subsidies". But total investment.
The estimate for six French EPR2s rose from €51.7 billion to €67.4 billion between 2022 and 2023. EDF’s later estimate is €72.8 billion, about 41% above the 2022 figure, before the reactors have been built.
I’d bet you the cost will be $140B when it’s all said and done, but this website won’t be around in 2044 (assuming no delays, good luck with that). You can bet regulations won’t stop changing over the span of decades either.
I’d rather have 70GW of solar and batteries deployed in a few years, and replace them with even cheaper ones in a number of decades.
For 6 EPR. Each EPR has 1.67 GWe. So 10.02 GW for €72.8 billion or €7.2 billion per GWe. Less than what I wrote. Versus €20-80 billion/GW for solar without firming.
Not sure why you're restricting yourself to only solar and batteries in northern european climate.
We also have, wind, firming and you know. Relying on fossil fuels for the once a decade emergency.
There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test when we still have agriculture, aviation, shipping, construction, chemicals, heavy industry and so on to decarbonize.
System studies from Australia to Denmark are converging on finding that new nuclear makes the system vastly more expensive. Even when assuming your "NOAK" costs. Because no one would be stupid enough to build new nuclear at Vogtle or Flamanville prices.
Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability. It always relied on fossil fuels to solve the hard times.
You raise the floor, but that's quite meaningless when the hard times are far far above the yearly baseload requirement. Even when factoring in scheduling maintenance around it. And theen adding that your nuclear fleet may be like the Swedish or French one and have half the capacity offline when it is needed.
Yep, and renewables + batteries are only getting cheaper. Nuclear takes a long time to build. A new plant planned today will be obsolete before construction ends.
Nuclear fans on HN don’t get that nuclear was the answer in the 90s, but is not today.
The problems in the U.K. specifically are more about grid capacity (both long distance and local substation level) and nonsense regulations (why can’t I have pluggable battery to go with my pluggable solar) than in generation.
Citation needed. For example Flamanville 3 (France) was estimated to cost around €3.3 billion, costs ballooned to over €13-19 billion. There are other similar examples such as Hinkley Point C (UK). Also maintenance is much more expensive and don't forget the cost for storing nuclear waste + decomissioning. Compare that to renewables...
One of the useful policies mentioned in the article is:
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.
Why is it that almost every top comment or top reply on HB loves to pretend they know what they're talking about while making almost no fucking sense.
You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?
It loses on accounting if you assign zero cost to the million+ lives that carbon emitting power generation takes every year, and the long term, possibly irreversible damage it does to the planet. If you factor in those two things even 1%, nuclear wins hands down
Cost of recent nuclear power in the UK comes in at $130/mwh at best. Where wind and solar are coming in at $50-80/MWh.
So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.
Well actually given the free fall in prices of renewables and batteries, not really.
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh.
Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
They were never were in control of the government, so it seems a conspiracy theory that the greens somehow did "a lot of damage". I think a conspiracy needed by people who can not deal with the fact that nuclear is simply not economical, and therefor fails on the market.
Fair, but public opinion did not stop the governments in the past. In fact, England has nuclear power plants and is even building one, Hinkley Point C. In 2010 there were plans to substantially expand nuclear, but industry largely walked away. The reality is that not greens killed nuclear, but terrible economics.
As Joe Kaeser (Chairman, Siemens Energy) observed "There isn't a single nuclear power plant in this world that makes economic sense.“
Or as Steven P. Nesbit (former Chair of the ANS) said <<The “Nuclear Renaissance” foundered when advanced light water reactors turned out to be much more expensive than their marketing claimed, while alternatives—primarily natural gas—plummeted in price. We tend to point to impediments to nuclear technology, such as overly restrictive licensing requirements and adverse public opinion, but these matter only to the extent of their impact on the bottom line. Again, it comes down to the money.>>
There are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.
If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.
Or renewables. I remind you that nuclear power is completely economically unviable today because it is the single most expensive way to generate power. Even with Trump rolling back safety regulations, it's still too expensive when solar panels are 10 cents per watt, nuclear is 50, and the amount of backup storage to offset the unreliability does not bridge that gap.
Gas is dispatchable, nuclear is not. It’s enormously expensive, and that expense is locked in whether you need the power or not.
We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.
Also France is around 7c (euro) per kwh from nuclear generation. If the whole west was all in on nuclear for last 50 years it would have resulted in lower per kwh costs.
What would solar's cost per kWh be? GP means the cost of the asset per peak generation power. 0.1/W seems about right, to an order of magnitude at least.
and i remind you that this framing is completely misleading outside the world of simulations and calculations.
Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.
I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
> I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
Nuclear fans across the internet seems to have adopted this talking point recently and none of them have noticed it doesn't make any sense.
You think.. I heard some antinuclear guys opposing fusion because the vessel for fusion reactor would get radioactive, and that is "nuclear waste" (of course, it's not the dangerous, long-term kind).
The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.
Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.
In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.
In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.
I've commented before on this, but I don't think it ever becomes financially viable.
Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;
Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.
Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.
All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.
It was ultimately a conservative government that was responsible for exiting nuclear in Germany. But also nobody wants nuclear back, not even the industry - as it is too expensive.
Between shameless scientific fraud from last century still affecting and harming nuclear policy to this day [0], and masses of idiots being easily influenced and swindled by foreign powers [1] (example specifically about the UK's case), I don't know why any such parties haven't been forcefully disbanded or put in the same category as terrorists, along with other organizations such as "Green"-"peace". They have at large done immeasurable damage to their countries and the world at large, and most of them started out explicitly as being anti-nuclear, that being their only mission for the longest time, only becoming relevant through the most disgusting fearmongering. Most importantly, they've achieved nothing but ensure the continued, worldwide permanent reliance on oil states and the terrorism that derived from it.
I find it fairly amusing that "green" parties were ever opposed to nuclear power. It was clearly lobbying by fossil fuel energy interests. If we're gonna generate electricity at night without burning coal, oil or gas, we need nuclear. Storing solar and wind overnight is an even more absurd proposition than nuclear power plants. Burning more fossil fuels is even more absurd than nuclear power plants.
This is a bit too cynical. It's impossible to understand the history green parties' opposition to nuclear energy without the context of their opposition to nuclear weapons. The argument went that "civilian" nuclear infrastructure was deeply interconnected with nuclear weapons. They share infrastructure. The existence of a civilian nuclear fuel cycle brings into existence a latent nuclear capability (you may recognize this theme from such films as the United States vs the Islamic Republic). Creating fissile material while avoiding diversion and proliferation requires the secrecy, security, and centralized technocratic control of what activists sometimes called the Atomic State, which they argued was incompatible with liberal democracy. I think these were quite serious arguments, though of course they'd persuade only if you're already bought in on unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Once upon a time, there was also the Soviet propaganda effort in the West. Many of the Cold War reactors could be used to produce not just electricity, but fission material for nuclear warheads. Meaning that if you could persuade big countries to give up nuclear energy for good, you'd also reduce your adversary's capability to build and maintain their nuclear arsenal, or preempt its future acquisition in the first place.
Soviet Union (and later Russia) enacted the propaganda effort against nuclear mainly to prevent the west from ditching their fossil energy. Less western nuclear warheads was secondary goal at best.
Correct, but it still was framing that would be useful to have. If nothing else, because civilian reactors mean there's also a civilian program, an educational program, and the military would like to have that around.
I think a lot of Anti Nuclear Power is based off old designs that weren't as safe and had radioactive byproduct I think newer reactor designs take a lot of bite out of that process. Additionally when you look at what is proposed to happen with Fusion reactors in Virginia in the next couple years it becomes a less popular position to be in opposition.
This is complete non-sense. Nothing about what you are saying is factually accurate in any way, scientifically or otherwise. What is happening is that enough people have finally learned that the environmental movement's policies weren't based upon actual science or data. This lost them support. They have finally lost enough support to verge on complete irrelevancy. Now that that has happened, they are trying to reverse that trend.
> Fusion reactors in Virginia
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
[1]: https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
I wish Commonwealth Fusion Systems to sucessed in the plan for commercial fusion electricity production, but they still have many technical problems to solve. They will probably demostrate fusion containment with fusion energy gain factor greater then 1 (more like 10), the primary goal.
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma-facing_material
They also need a way to extract power from 1,000,000C heat. Since we have absolutely no idea how to do that, fusion is still a non-starter...FOR ENERGY PRODUCTION. Fusion can be used for other things but power production won't be one of those things in any of our lifetimes if ever. That being said, we still should do the research and use fusion for what it is useful for. Its just that those uses don't include power production.
The technology absolutely exist, and CFS are proving it.
Please note the date. This is the reactor being built. CFS has come a long way since inception. DEMO is a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
My Anti Nuclear Power is not based on the technology, which is awesome, but on the external factors.
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
Such anti-nuclear has some validity, but only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue. Constructing new power plants and central heating systems that rely on burning fuel should be imminently stopped, and all existing plants should have their remaining life time determined and then sunset when they reach it. Any argument of external factors for nuclear are dwarfed by the external factors from burning fuel for energy and heat, double so for profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.
> only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue.
Unless you accidentally left out "fossil", as in "burning fossil fuel", then we at least are unlikely to agree.
I certainly intend to continue to gather tree waste and burn it - and I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement.
Burning wood waste is primarily a green washing method. True tree waste is very minimal today in quantity, and most wood "waste" is actually used for a lot of products like paper and ply wood, and what is left to burn when everything is used are not enough to power a nation for any duration. In term of pollution it reduces air quality, and in term of sustainability there aren't enough forests around to use wood as the main fuel for all the power needs we have when renewables can't deliver.
Burning wood has at best similar environmental impact as beef. In theory it can be produced using just "waste", but we have to extend the word "waste" beyond recognition when production is scaled up and the profit-maximizing locusts become part of the picture. The world is suffering from deforestation.
We are not talking about using garden waste to burn a log in a open fire place, but rather grid sized power plants and central heating plants. I should however mention that there are air quality reports that points to issues with individual homes burning wood inside cities. Open air fireplaces do not scale well with dense population areas.
> Cutting down massive amount of forests just for the purpose of burning it up is harmful to the environment
Err, lets perhaps stick with
* Cutting down massive amount of old growth forest is harmful to the environment ( whether it's for burning or bauxite )
and
* Cutting down forest faster than regrowth rate is harmful to the environment (as that's net loss wrt surface sequestration)
and perhaps examine "harmful to bio diversity" (is it? checker-boarded plantation forest has about the same biodiversity as it ever has - it's not old-growth but it's not devoid of life or diversity), "dangerous to humans" (really? with modern logging machines on plantation forest? - the deaths in logging largely come from non plantation clearing on steep slopes and happen to humans aware of the risks)
> True tree waste is very minimal today
Is it? Many people hereabout heat their homes from limb lopping, dead fall, and tree deaths.
> not enough to power a nation for any duration
I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The harm from deforestation comes from multiple sources. It increase the harmful effect of storms, flooding, and perhaps counter intuitively also forest fires.
Modern plantation forest involve draining of water, and that causes green house gases to be released. After logging, the area also release more green house gases during the first 20 years then they pick up. Logging also changes the level of ground water, and how much of the ground water get filtered, which in turn reduces quality of the water downstream. Logging also increase erosion, which has it own set of risk to humans.
> I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The article is about nuclear power plants, in the context of the UK green party. In order for wood to be an alternative it would need to be able to provide energy in a green, sustainable, and national independent way. Power plants that burn wood pellets do exist, but how green and how sustainable they are is debatable. It also questionable if they will just use wood, or if they mix it in with other even less green and less sustainable fuels, but sells the energy as green energy produced on waste products.
> I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement
It does not scale. That’s how they are cutting down ancient pristine forest in Central Europe. It’s useful as a supplement to use wood waste; it cannot be a major source of energy.
It is good to recycle tree waste and it's already done on industrial scale. But there are not enough forests in the word to replace our consumption of fossil fuels.
For example Denmark is importing lot of wood from Baltics, UK lot of wood from Canada.
https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...
> not enough forests in the word to replace our consumption of fossil fuels.
I certainly didn't claim that there was, but thank you for rebutting a point not made.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Just like commercial aviation companies then, right?
> Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
On average or what?
> Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
> Nuclear waste ...
Let me stop you right there. Head on over to https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/fifteen_minutes and look at how much coal&gas waste (no, not just CO2) we are dumping into the atmosphere at this very moment.
Now go ahead and tell me again that we need to badly find a solution to the huge problem of inert, solid, compact nuclear waste that's just sitting there.
> What if an accident happens?
Idk, what if an accident happens with anything else that's already 99.999% safe, like aviation? Odd question to ask about the objectively safest power source we have.
> Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Right. You're getting attacked by hypersonic missiles and your priority is your nuclear power plant safety.
Empirically, somehow Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland despite their nuclear power plants being very much under threat of attack by not so sane people.
> What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
Do you think the concrete to build an NPP doesn't require a crazy amount of fossil fuel? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive by the time the NPP is actually completed?
I can have solar now, with batteries next year, and great batteries in 3 years. Or badass nuclear in 7 to 10 years with an average cost overrun of 102% (https://www.bu.edu/igs/2025/05/19/investment-risk-for-energy...), just in time for solar and batteries to be so good that nuclear will be irrelevant.
BTW, Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland because Putin doesn't think it is worth making it a wasteland, because Russia actually attacked the Chernobyl sarcophagus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...), thus showing everyone that Putin is not scared by the nuclear fallout taboo. That genie is out of the bottle now, the madmen have shown that they are not mad enough right now.
The carbon payoff for the average NPP is 6 weeks. The idealized payoff for a solar panel is 5 years, in practice its 10 in the tropics trending to 20 on a line about where SF or Barcelona is. And a solar panel on average only lasts 20 years.
The point of the hypersonic missile catastrophe was something I had not considered and is an excellent point. I think that is true with all critical infrastructure to some extent but a nuclear reactor would certainly have more fallout. I wonder if any designs have thought about that situation.
Nuclear conrainment buildings are the strongest non-military structures build, you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them.
Under the current aircraft protection rules, the containment building has to survive impact of a fully loaded large civilian airplane moving at speed of sound.
For example testing of samples of containment building was done using acceleration of F-4 Phantom mounted on rocket sledge towards the wall. The wall survived the impact without problems.
> you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them
Which already exists. For example, India (so that you cannot say "this is something only available to USA) has the Agni-V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni-V) that supports a 7.5 ton bunker buster with Mach 24 terminal velocity. It costs $5 million each (like a battle tank).
Your squishy 747 moving at Mach 1 is nothing in comparison.
What other countries do already have something similar, or will have something similar, let's say, in the next 5 years?
I could see this maybe working using a standardized sensor reporting system that goes into some third party/government/public analysis. Full sensor array stream, and whatever is used internally to make decisions, up for scrutiny.
Repeat after me: Technology solutions don't fix human problems.
Your sensor reporting system will be forced to report whatever is needed - regardless of the reality of the situation - as soon as the right manager demands more uptime to an engineer, or otherwise they get fired because leadership demands more profit.
No technology is without drawbacks, but technology is the reason we don't live like in Middle ages.
If you want to try live without technology, try living in Somalia for few months. Average Somalian would change for you at any moment.
Thank you for confirming my point that technology fixes technological problems and not human problems.
The Middle ages had effectively more technology than the Romans (all the stuff that was invented til the Romans, plus the stuff that was invented later), yet they fared worse, mostly because of religion and feudal lords sabotaging what the Romans managed to achieve.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny.
I am as pro nuclear (actually pro anything not fossil fuel), but this was actually the best counter argument I came across:
Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure. Every single time they manage to integrate, they all turn into worse versions of Mr. Burns. Our economic system is setup to reward corner cutting and a race to the bottom. If an nuclear plant ends up melting down, our publicly funded nuclear insurance steps in to clean up the mess and the LLC goes bankrupt. Meanwhile, everyone that invested walks away with all the wealth they've siphoned, which they siphoned more of by cutting corners.
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
If we look at mining companies, we kind of know that society will carry most of the risk and negative externalities, so regulations must exist to limit how and to what degree companies can operate.
If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.
In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.
> In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants.
That is not correct. Vattenfall has nothing to do with Oskarshamn, and had nothing to do with Barsebäck.
Forsmark
- Vattenfall: 66.0 %
- Mellansvensk Kraftgrupp (essentially Fortum): 25.5 %
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 8.5 %
Ringhals
- Vattenfall: 70.44 %
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 29.56 %
Oskarshamn
- Uniper (through Sydkraft): 54.5 %
- Fortum: 45.5 %
Barsebäck
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 100 %
> Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure.
I am in the same boat. Companies will optimize for profit and rent-seeking, all else be damned. A nuclear meltdown would be a negative externality, if line goes up it would have been worth.
> We need reform
Any reform needs to account for corporations being machines optimized to generate profit. Regulations should ensure "negative externality" is not really externalized.
Corporations only understand profits, and investors should be understood as entities willing to leech from society. The only way to heandle corporations is by having failures threatening the money that investors can leech through this pipeline.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
After reading GPs comment, I almost started thinking about systemic issues of our current economic structures. Good thing you are here to remind us that any problems under capitalism must be accepted without a critical thought, because COMMUNISM!
The only real (ie large) nuclear accident happened under communism. And the reason why we don't have even safer nuclear designs is because of regulation. This entire discussion is entirely backwards and isn't looking at the data. Look where and why incidents happened. When you do, you will find various causes, none of which are fixed by political ideology. They are fixed by engineering and insurance costs.
Chernobyl happened because the son of a central committee member needed data from a dangerous experiment that was conducted at the powerplant. They literally disabled safety systems with wrenches. Both the design itself would have never allowed in the west nor would the experiment that caused the accident. Also, the HBO movie was very inaccurate so please don't bring up something you saw there, many of the things in the movie aren't even scientifically possible.
It's admirable they changed their stance but good Lord they are slow learners...
Sometimes it takes the older generation of members and leadership to die out for these beliefs to shift.
Yeah, this might well not be any individual human being changing their mind, but rather new human beings less inclined to be anti-nuclear-power now forming a critical mass within the UK Green Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
"Science progresses one funeral at a time".
Good point, good chance very few individual minds actually changed their stance.
It's hard to convince people to change a stance they made a part of their political and personal identity.
I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power. Was this a reaction to Chernobyl or did it start earlier?
Oposition to nuclear is much older, it started is oposition to nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon tests and in generation was part of the global peace movements and anti-cold war and anti-Vietnam war movements.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace
Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
Degrowthers just believed climate scientists that there is a problem and then believed climate deniers when they said none of the solutions work.
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
The solution was, is and always will be nuclear power. Electrification is a misdirection so you won't support actual solutions. For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear. And without ammonia in industrial quantities we can't feed everyone because its used to make fertilizer. This is one of several things we get from fossil fuels (and could get from nuclear) but we can't get from electricity alone. Then there is the extra inefficiencies from electricity for things we do with power that aren't kinetic.
Basically, converting from one form of energy to another usually can be done at 50%. The lone exception is voltage potential (electricity) where we can get 90% for motion but 10% for anything else. And when you use motion for transport you have all the problems of a heavy battery reducing efficiency. This is why we can make an EV but not an electric plane. Then there are the problems to do with storage (remember 2 conversions so 25% efficiency there unless you use a battery). Finally, remember that capitalism is really good at efficiency. When people started trying to find energy uses to cut, this was easy in less developed places but in the US it was nearly impossible. Every cut caused problems elsewhere (even for something as minor as an HVAC fan). Ironically we learned this during COVID when the older "inefficient" buildings were healthier than the newer ones because they moved less air.
You say "degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less" like it's a bad thing
Yes this is an extremely bad thing. Degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less are enemies of human progress and flourishing. I do not want people like that to have any political power.
Less doesn't have to mean less comfort. There's a lot of unnecessary consumption these days. People buying stuff they never use. Stuff that breaks and can't be repaired even though the owner would prefer that.
And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.
It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.
"Less doesn't have to mean less comfort."
It really does. You can live without clothes, that's less. You can live on 1500 kcals a day. You would be at the brink of starving all the time but you would be alive. I could lock you in a cage and just give you the bear minimum of bread and water. Just enough heat so you don't freeze and never let you out. That's certainly less. Just how much less do you want?
PS Young people almost always use more resources than the old. When my kid isn't here, our trash and recycling containers are pretty empty. When he is here, they overflow. And he is only a 50% increase in the house's population.
> Less doesn't have to mean less comfort.
In a perfect world, perhaps. In the real world, it very often does.
Yeah you drank it baby!
It's not objectively bad, but so unpopular that it would require tyranny to implement. Living fully cleanly and like a monk makes a few people very happy with a sense of purpose, but it gets in the way of everyone else's priorities, which is to survive day-to-day.
Living without AC in a warm summer is one example. It feels like a first world inconvenience to the Green types, that we should all learn to accept. Good luck with democratically convincing everyone else - you'd need authoritarian for a true success in keeping everyone "living with less."
It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
> if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
I completely agree. That still doesn’t make degrowth a sensible position.
Nuclear power for example
> I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
It's perfectly understandable, if you allow that most peoples' understanding of nuclear safety is not perfect. Chernobyl and 3 mile island, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki- atomic power's dangers get a lot more press than when it works quietly and reliably.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
The safety improvements in newer plant designs happened largely because of this opposition to the earlier less safe designs and their level of risk.
I suspect it's coal lobby sponsoring "green" iniviatives. Then the "green" initiatives sponsored by coal are anti-nuclear.
It was part emotional response to Chernobyl, part is was full on Russian propaganda infiltrating parliaments in Europe.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Business... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer#Business_activ...
Chernobyl did deposit radioactive material over Germany. Fukushima also happened, btw., and that led to an acceleration of the exit then.
Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.
Much earlier. The early nuclear industry, which was shared military and civilian, was incredibly nasty. While also covering up issues. Leaving us with enormous clean up bills to this date.
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.
Hanford could be handled for far less (no idea about the UK's sites but probably the same situation). Its the result of making the atomic bombs during WWII. The acids could be neutralized and the uranium separated out. However, a contract that just keeps putting the material in new containers every few years is much more profitable. The idea it should take hundreds of billions to do is pretty much about an nearly infinite time horizon of maintenance instead of just cleaning up the site.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
Already memory-holed Fukushima?
Which killed zero people
Barely. You know it was almost a second Chernobyl, right? If you read about what happened that day it is clear.
It was absolutely not almost a second Chernobyl. Saying this proves you understand very little of what happened in the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents.
Correct, because they managed to prevent it from becoming a second Chernobyl. At Chernobyl they failed to prevent it from becoming a first Chernobyl. But we don't want to keep rolling the dice just because the last time we got a 6.
No it was never possible for Fukushima to become a Chernobyl style disaster because it has a containment structure and the biggest difference is that Fukushima was basic overheating while Chernobyl was a complex power excursion of over 100GW. There was never a runaway nuclear explosion at Fukushima; it was a severe thermodynamic failure of cooling.
The end result can be the same. The disaster at Chernobyl wasn't the uncontrolled chain reaction - if that had been all that happened, the town of Chernobyl would still be considered inhabitable. The ionisation plume was pretty, but not dangerous to anyone who wasn't in it. The disaster at Chernobyl was that the building blew up (because of the chain reaction) and the explosion spread radioactive stuff for miles. Fukushima was also going to blow up, due to hydrogen gas IIRC, but they prevented it from blowing up.
You keep proving you don't understand what actually happened at Chernobyl or have a sense of scale of the energies involved. Hydrogen gas exploding is a completely different thing than a badly designed reactor instantly generating over 100 times its designed output and exploding. The hydrogen gas did explode at Fukushima and this damaged the outer building. Fukushima was a firecracker compared to Chernobyl being an actual nuclear bomb.
"Hey, I shot at you but I missed this time, that means this gun is perfectly safe! Let's do it again"
Thanks to the inherent safety of nuclear? Or that the wind was, by chance, blowing to the sea when the worst happened?
https://www.ianfairlie.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/fukush...
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2011/...
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
Even if Fukushima killed tens of thousands of people, nuclear would still kill order of magnitute less people per kWh of energy produced than fossil fuels.
Lies, dann lies and statistics.
Don't quote my ancestor's line. He never meant it to be a rejection of science that you are using it as.
Also, you can't spell.
There was no need for a mass evacuation because of Fukushima, it was a overreaction caused by irrational fear of nuclear power. The evacuation itself caused much harm. It is pretty silly to hype an incident that caused ZERO deaths as some kind of horrible nuclear disaster.
I oppose nuclear for a very simple reason: there is no way to deal with the long term waste. Not just the small amount of waste from the fuel, but the reactor components.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
Again, simple ignorance. The reason it lasts so long is that we aren't allowed to reprocess it for rather illogical reasons. Also, most of the "waste" from the reactor are either rare earths or silver (which is stable from the moment it is created) or valuable and useful gases. It can also be reprocessed and the nuclear fuel can be put into another reactor. We don't do this because of the absurdly small chance someone could get some Pu-239 (which would still require very advanced and noticeable processing). Basically things that only happen in James Bond movies and because some politician without any scientific knowledge can imagine it, it gets banned.
I don't think it accumulates enough solid waste to worry about. I'm Aussie, and I'm in favour of a proposal I heard a while ago to let other countries export their concentrated nuclear waste to the middle of Australia. Just bury it in one spot, on the oldest, most geologically stable landmass on the planet. It's far from bodies of water, it's far from population centres (excepting Alice Springs).
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
Mt Isa Mines when done is a good spot, and as a bonus you largely get to avoid issues with indigenous opposition since the area is already suitably dug up.
May need to work on this bad boy, first:
https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/c...
And of course have a chat with the traditional custodians of the land, and see if they're keen.
Reading down through that, there are exceptions built in already for research waste, medical waste, waste from "a nuclear vessel" (ie. submarines), and generic "waste that needs to buried for safety reason".
Would indigenous Australians living near proposed sites object to this plan? Are there areas of Australia with no human population? My impression is that nomadic indigenous groups used a lot of land in Australia even far from permanent settlements.
They're generally not fans of being bulldozed out of the way so a mine can get slapped in wherever Kartiya want to put one.
( eg: Noonkanbah - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/30/the-d... )
They do make agreements and keep them when they are part of the discussion from the outset and consulted for advice.
ie: find a place to make a hole that is both stable and not a significant site.
It doesn't help that more recent good faith agreements have been torpedoed by, say, Rio Tinto not keeping their word going forward.
( in recent follow up news from an epic Rio FUBAR - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-25/juukan-gorge-archaeol... )
I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.
It was Chuck Schumer who torpedoed Yucca mt. Vegas had nothing to do with it.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
If the numbers worked out the way you imagine, there would have been a gold rush to do it. NV is actually pretty low elevation and dusty and is surprisingly bad for solar even if it seems like it should be great. You know where is great for solar? New Mexico, Central Mexico and the northern part of the Andes range. Those are places at high elevations with low cloud cover and lower latitudes. That's where solar does well. I know it seems like it should just work in the desert...it doesn't however. The critical factors for solar are latitude, altitude and cloud cover.
>there is no way to deal with the long term waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
What do you base that on?
There is no place on earth that is geological stable for the required time periods
We have no way to communicate the danger of the waste to people 55,000 years in the future
That greed, yours and mine, could create that dangerous pile of rubbish, that will be deadly to people who will never know of our existence
What astounding recklessness and hostility to the future
For current consumption
Unbelievable
That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
You are being silly!
You cannot predict t that any place on Earth will be stable, or stay local, over hundredsof millenia
Wishful thinking so you can make future generations pay for your consumption
Well, if we extract the energy from the spicy rocks today through fission then on a time scale of over hundreds of millennia you actually end-up with less radioactivity on earth! (After 300 000 years to be accurate, and the figure I have is based on low enriched uranium based fuel as typically used in a light water reactor).
You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?
I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…
Coal waste will be a larger problem to deal with for future generations than nuclear waste will be. The burning coal of course has shortened the lives of millions and been a major contributor to green house gases. If you oppose both coal and nuclear, how should the world have generated electrical power from say 1950 to 2000?
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Oh great because the practical alternative, fossil fuels, definitely doesn't burden anyone after us.
Ten generations, maybe.
Nuclear: hundreds
Climate change is a consequence of fearmongering against cleaner solutions. We have methods for handling radioactive waste safely- whether it's vitrification and dropping it in subduction zones, or just putting it deep underground in wastelands, there are lots of solutions that are infinitely better than the status quo.
Don't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.
I wish this happened decades ago because I'm not so sure fission can compete with renewables anymore given cost and time to build.
Nuclear power runs at night.
Yeah so does wind which is where the UK gets most of its power
It’s not windy 24/7, there are many days of low wind. You still need to take that into account, which luckily the govt are.
https://storelectric.com/dunkelflaute-energy-storage/
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/677bc80399c93...
It wouldn't be any better, because if plants had been built decades ago, they wouldn't be able to be competitive anymore, would keep running a deficit, and would depress the economy and public finances like the white elephants they are, and take away means to transition to renewables.
Why is war never a factor in the nuclear power debate? Like nuclear is great, until you have missiles dropping on your territory. You can ask Ukraine about that. Zaporizhia has been held hostage since the early days of the war. Should the Russians have a manic moment they can make a Chernobyl volume 2 with conventional explosives.
Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.
The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded over 500 square kilometres and carried a significant death toll, caused major damage to the surrounding area and impacted over a million people.
Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.
Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.
I’m going to assume shelling solar and batteries isn’t environmentally friendly in a war either.
There's not much point to it, you achieve incremental damage because they're so spread out.
A nuclear strike on a larger fission reactor could create an awful result unlike any other power plant. There were some studies during the cold war (something about the effects in West Germanyin the early 1980s, IIRC).
As opposed to a nuclear strike directly on a populated civilian area with no nuclear power plant nearby which also creates an awful result?
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
Scale of fallout would be huge. People were kind of shocked by the analysis (trying to remember what came out then... Fetter, early 1980s, Scientific American?).
Nuclear ICBMs generally make this a moot point. An advanced enemy can explode a "nuclear reactor" anywhere in your country at any time.
Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.
The threat of damaging a nuclear reactor is grey zone, it’s unlikely to elicit the same response as a nuclear ICBM detonation.
The probability of an attack on a UK nuclear facility outside WW3 scenario is almost 0.
If we come to that state of things, then almost anything we do isn't safe.
It was a great peacetime technology during the cold war
Strange to me this is high on HN. #1 The Greens are a niche party in the UK. #2 this is from Mon 5 Oct.
There is a very very strong pro-nuclear contingent on HN and in tech in general, and most of the tech pro-nuclear support comes from viewing nuclear as environmentally positive compared to alternatives, so I'm not surprised at all to see this. It hits all the right "this is good" receptors, even if UK Greens are a tiny party. (I personally view nuclear as completely infeasible, economically, while also being environmentally friendly, so I've had few allies on any grounds when it comes to public debate on nuclear.)
It's a sad case of "too little too late".
The best time to build up nuclear power was 4 decades ago - when the supply of fossil fuel was obviously fraught, and things like solar and wind power were nonviable.
Whether it makes any sense to push for nuclear power now is unclear. Nuclear was quite expensive even back then - but decades of NIMBYism, "environmental" activism and overregulation have damaged the industrial capability and eroded supply chains to the point that getting a buildout going at scale, on a sane budget and a sensible timetable would be an uphill battle. At the same time, renewables aren't anywhere near as opposed, the economic outlook for solar, wind and grid storage is better than it ever was, and the situation is likely to improve even further.
I'm not so sure I agree. A big turning point in my thinking was reading a mid 1980s Forbes piece that investigated several other factors that stopped more US nuclear builds. Perhaps most of all was lack of need, there were too many starts resulting in a glut of nuclear power. Second, construction projects were frequently over budget, meaning the power wasn't as cheap as everybody anticipated. Third, yes, there were mid-construction design changes but that was only on a fraction of projects that were already way behind.
Look over at France, frequently touted as a "successful" buildout. But reactors got more expensive the more they built, not cheaper, and they never met their initial goals for number of builds.
And look at the one place with modern-day "successful" builds: China. They like to tout the reactors as great successes, and they are on time and on budget, or at least as on budget as we can tell in an economic system like that. But they missed their 2020 and 2025 five year plan goals for deployment, and will miss their 2030 goal too. Meanwhile, they deploy 20x-30x as much wind and solar each year, each tech. That's after adjusting for capacity factor! So the best nuclear builders in the world are only building enough of it to be low single digits of their energy mix.
Nuclear was always oversold as a technology, always underdelivered, and has not seen a positive learning curve that a normal technology would. It was doomed from the start, IMHO.
But 4 decades ago is exactly when nuclear was being built up in the UK - indeed, most of the AGR fleet came online between 1985 and 1989.
And "quite expensive" vastly understates it - high temperature gas-cooled reactors are in theory more efficient in operation at the expense of increased construction cost. In reality, construction costs far, far outweigh the raw cost of fuel (reprocessing is a different matter!) so we landed ourselves with all the extra expense for very little benefit (probably actually a negative benefit since the much-vaunted ability to refuel whilst at full power turned out not to work in practice).
So they were late, hideously expensive, completely failed to be sold to other countries, and now have an availability factor no higher than that of offshore wind.
We knew that they would be unlikely to live up to their promise as early as 1964 and yet still went ahead despite several opportunities to change course. The nuclear industry never learns.
The background here is that people didn't really trust the individuals or institutions involved with nuclear power, and those same individuals and institutions weren't exactly enthusiastic about a new form of energy.
>The Greens are a niche party in the UK
Are they really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
Pretty much, especially with their latest mess with “Zionism is racism” entryism, a leader who can’t lead, and a split between those interested in green subjects and rump Corbynites
They don't seem to be terribly interested in the environment for a 'green' party.
UK is a First Past the Post system. It doesn't matter what their national polling is, if it's going to result with exactly 0 seats in the parliament.
Whatever info you’re working from is out of date. The Greens currently have 5 MPs: https://members.parliament.uk/parties/commons
We're familiar with the Green point of view, your niche parties are like NGOs in the US. I think the larger context might be the conversation about technology we've been having in the US since the atom bomb. Articles about nuclear power, GMO, AI, and other advances will trigger similar interest. The timeliness of this article isn't a factor, it's an interesting event and a chance to broach a few topics.
The Greens, under Polanski, have never been less "niche".
There are three Green parties in the UK. There isn't a "UK Green Party" as such. Polanski's is England and Wales.
Sorry, you're right; I was referring tpnthe Greens of England and Wales, under Polanski.
There are three Green Parties in the UK. The SGP members have had a supply agreement with the ruling SNP in the Scottish Parliament for years. There was even talk of them being in coalition for a while.
> The Greens are a niche party in the UK
Possibly, but I vote for them and here in Bristol, they control the council and we have a Green Member of Parliament.
They've been around for decades, but they're grabbing more attention and headlines (especially the whole "Zionism is racism" declaration).
Not any more, they may be forming a coalition government as early as next year
They were, but the current popularity of the 2 main parties (in recent times) has led to this or a couple of right wing ones as a popular protest vote.
Because HN loves nuclear power plants aka complicated steam machines.
Green Party of England and Wales.
Both Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own Green Parties. There is no single UK Green Party.
I'm happy they're doing this, and it's good and admirable to see people be able to change their minds on something they once believed so strongly, but this should have happened 30 years ago.
People only "change their mind" when it becomes an existential crisis. And energy security in Europe has reached that stage 10x.
>People only "change their mind" when it becomes an existential crisis.
If only. There's people and parties (not in the UK) who would rather see the rest of the country suffer than admit they were wrong, so they feel compelled to die on that hill and take everyone with them, because defending their principle is more important.
also in the UK
I vaguely remember a quote that said:
“People act reasonably when left no other choice”
It stuck with me.
Which means new nuclear is about the worst thing we can spend our limited resources on since it won't be coming online until the 2040s, and then at a ruinosuly expensive price.
Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.
We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.
We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.
Nuclear power plants ate quite the opposite of energy security especially with a foreign threat
How?
Unlike fossil fuel power plants, NPPs don't depend on a steady supply of a high volume of costly consumables just to keep running. Reactor fuel loads last months to years, naturally buffering any price shocks or supply chain issues. And you can maintain an "energy security" stockpile of nuclear fuel that would add you even more years of runaway.
To have your nuclear power disrupted, you have to face an adversary that's both capable and willing to hit targets on your soil, and on top of that, is willing to target NPP infrastructure specifically.
A random rogue state lobbing mid-range drones over a strait wouldn't cut it. Neither would a war halfway around the world.
Russia already showed it‘s willing to hit targets on German soil. Of course not openly.
To attack you just need an inside man and an USB stick to fake an accident.
And with the AfD they get the information about critical infrastructure free of charge
We're talking about Germany shuttering their nuclear power plants despite USA warning them repeatedly that Russia was going to weaponize the Nord Stream gas dependence against them. Which is ultimately exactly what happened.
Nuclear power replaced coal in Germany, not gas. A big dependence exists because people heat their homes with gas and lots of industry needs gas, nuclear doesn’t help with either.
Russian gas replaced Germany's own nuclear power. That's where the risk was and why the Nord Stream pipelines were so controversial.
But Germany wanted the cheap gas, so they ignored the risks and Russia ultimately invaded Ukraine.
That is not really the case. Germany certainly wanted cheap gas, but there was also the theory that integrating Russia economically will prevent conflicts. While ultimately a wrong decision, it was not entirely stupid.
But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
I also would like people realize that many nuclear plants in Europe and elsewhere still depend on fuel from Russia. So energy dependence is a bit more complex.
> But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
You know that homes can be heated with electricity from nuclear power? The reason why Germany uses gas for heating is because it was historically very cheap compared to electricity, because it came from Russia. Good, while the attached strings could be ignored..
Sure, but we are talking about what was the reality in Germany. And gas was and is needed mainly for heating (and also industry), so shutting down the nuclear plants did not increase dependency on Russian gas despite what people repeatedly claim. Also gas usage for power production did not increase afterwards, while Russian gas imports were stopped. Both simple facts contradicting this myth.
It's a bit more complex, I think. When gas imports started from the USSR, nuclear power plants were still being built in Germany, for example. There were gas imports for a long time.
That’s BS, Gas is used for heating and industry ovens not for energy production.
Germany runs gas-fired power plants for electricity production.
If Germans don't or didn't want, e.g., nuclear power plants, or fracking, or transmission lines, or ... then they are allowed to decide that way, no?
if the germans want to shoot themselves in the foot they are allowed to do this, yes. what is the point of your comment? it's not even remotely relevant.
I was trying to point out that societies make and are free to make decisions that others don't like or that aren't great for them by some metric - and that there is nothing wrong with that. Why is that not relevant when it comes to energy?
so your point is that it's fine that germany ceeded energy independence and gave power to russia, because they're a country and countries have the 'right' to make bad decisions?
we have the right to criticise countries too right?
If Germans don't want energy independence - you can criticize that but that's how nation states work or is there some UN Charter violation in there, for example?
im still so confused what your point is. it's like talking about the consequences of someone's alcoholism, and someone chiming in "well they have a right to die of the booze if they want" like...ok???
So any nation state needs to be energy independent? Is that your point? Or have cheap energy and energy independence? If people want low growth, expensive energy etc., why is that like alcoholism? What is intrinsically bad there? Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
> So any nation state needs to be energy independent?
It is obviously a good thing if a democratic nation state is independent from a totalitarian dictatorship.
> Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
It's not about life expectancy. They now have to make a choice between supporting an aggressive totalitarian state vs. suffering damage to their economy due to higher energy prices. That is obviously a bad position to be in.
Why is using domestic energy sources much more not another choice now or in the recent past?
are you german?
Are you? Trying to understand your position... the only good policy is energy independence?
Edit: what is your point? Being able to criticize? Sure, but so what?
there is no position, you're imagining arguments people aren't making.
And yet, Germany did quickly stop importing gas from Russia, while various other countries still depend on nuclear fuel from Rosatom.
Or more probably, it's imputable to biology and the natural replacement of the "old guard" by adults who didn't grow up during nukes schizophrenia. Or in other words, I doubt that those folks reasoned themselves out of the irrational fear for nuclear energy that they did not reason themselves into.
I'm not sure it's irrational. It's perhaps oversensitive. There are dozens of nuclear power incidents rated at levels of 5+, affecting the wider region.
In the UK, Sellafield was a nightmare. Lots of less serious slip ups and malfunctions punctuated by a few critical incidents, between 1954 and 2003. You might understand why yesterday's Green Party might think it an issue worth pursuing.
"the environment is improved one funeral at a time" -- Planck principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
As other people have mentioned, it's very likely not the same people; but rather more anti-nuclear people leaving the organization or dying, and more pro-nuclear people joining.
It really does feel a day late and a dollar short for Europe, especially Germany.
This is such a bummer. Russia still has good long term energy plans for Germany. (if you are European this is sarcasm).
Now by selling them uranium!
I believe a lot of uranium comes from Australia?
Definitely risks in the supply chain there, but probably less than Russia?
I bet they are happy about it. Only need to sabotage one big power plant to get chaos.
Or the panic when the next drones appear near a power plant
> Russia still has good long term energy plans for Germany
What do you mean?
There are suspicions that German energy policy was effectively controlled/influenced by Russia in the early 2000s.
E.g the ex chancellor is now paid handsomely https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
I believe more recently there was an expose about some other politicians at that time having links to Russia, although don’t have them to hand right now.
It’s sarcasm. Russia does not have good long term energy plans for Germany.
Wow when nuclear power was the answer why we’re against it, but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar they are for it.
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
Nuclear power is not too expensive, it's expense is artificial. Also - renewables can't provide base load energy to replace mos of carbon stuff. You need a powerful base load to support most renewables in the mix
The 1990s called. They want their energy economics back.
Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.
On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?
No, this is not true.
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
Ontario does is quite well.
This should have happened decades ago.
You really are a time traveler from the 1990s. In your comment below you say "Batteries are far too expensive, we're still a couple of decades out for that." Even excluding battery chemistry that are designed for bulk use like sodium ion, solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power. Today.
You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.
> solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power
Grid-scale solar plus batteries is cheaper? Citation needed.
No worries: https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2025/july/2024-25-genc...
Energy costs, of course, vary by location - so that linked report is the Australian national science (both theory and very much applied) body determining that conditions in Australia are such that the economics of nuclear power here have costs greater than that of grid scale solar + batteries + other storage technologies on horizon and being firmed up.
Nuclear can’t provide dispatchable energy when supply is low and demand is high, same problem as renewable.
That's what batteries are for
Batteries are far too expensive, we're still a couple of decades out for that.
Renewables are a long way off from covering the base load.
They are only now crossing the threshold into 'key supply factors'.
It would be less expensive if every 20 years some idiots wouldn't blow one of them up and render a sizable swath of land uninhabitable by doing something regarded. The cost is in making sure they don't and unfortunately it's probably here to stay.
It's actually 100% worth it even with 1 fukishima every 20 years.
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
I think "baseload" has almost lost its meaning in these discussions.
Renewables have been displacing traditional baseload generation for years. What grids actually need is reliable dispatchable capacity, peaking power and firming.
People keep bringing up winter cold spells and claiming we need "baseload" to handle them, apparently without realizing that nuclear never solved those demand peaks either.
Historically that's been the job of dispatchable generation.
Baseload is the minimum level of demand.
What's your take on why every hyperscaler is getting into nuclear if the economics are actually as you suggest?
Vague non-binding promises of cheap power in 10 years is cheaper than building clean power today.
For existing nuclear, stealing it from the other grid users is cheaper than building clean power today.
Sure, they may all be colluding together in a cynical bid to rob our future.
Or.... the full-system economics of renewables may not actually be as good as advocates claim.
They don’t have to be colluding, just lying.
By the time they build one the kids will be asking what's a hyperscaler?
Have we seen a single deployment?
> but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar
Brit here: we need renewables and storage and nuclear.
> compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
We need this x100.
> ... but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables
It's not.
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh. Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
Interesting claims. Where are you getting those numbers?
And do you actually believe they are comparable?
German nuclear plants were producing for less than 2 cents/ kWh. Firm, day + night, summer + winter, profitable.
Intermittent renewables cost multiples of that and require massive subsidies on top and are allowed to place the burden of their intermittency on the firm producers on top of that.
Vogtle plant and the recent french rebuild cost that much for nuclear.
Batteries: https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design Solar: just google 1gw solar cost
As I thought.
So you claim as representative, not the average and not the median of nuclear power plants.
But the most expensive nuclear power plants ever produced.
Even without knowing any details about those plants, that's either statistical illiteracy or malpractice. Take your pick.
And it doesn't get better when you know the details:
- The ones you picked were all First of a Kind build (FOAK). So prototypes. It is well-documented that FOAK builds typically are 50% more expensive and longer to build than serialized builds (Nth of a Kind, NOAK). These were more around 100% longer than NOAK, for a bunch of reasons.
- A number of these were the EPR. The EPR has since been discontinued, because the manufacturer found it too hard to build. It has been replaced by the highly simplified EPR2. How is a discontinued reactor type representative of future builds?
- All of these builds were in countries that had a long hiatus in nuclear construction, so had to build up experience in the workforce, supply chain and regulators, so FOAK on steroids. Even the most experienced, France, had a gap of 18 years between the start of the previous build and the start of FV3.
- All of these builds had regulatory changes during the construction process. Sometimes massive changes, for example over 4000 changes for HPC in the UK. And not trivial things: the concrete of the outer protective shell had to be increased by 40% or something. Which has knock-on effects, because now things inside don't quite fit any longer. etc.
- New construction techniques such as modularization, factory production etc. all decrease the cost of serialized builds, but vastly increase the risk during First of a Kind builds.
And of course you are comparing installed capacity, which is an almost completely irrelevant metric. In the UK, capacity factors for solar are between 9-12%. So you have to multiply your solar numbers by 10 just to get equivalent output on average. Except average is not good enough. There is winter, there is night, there are clouds. 4h of battery are not going to get you through winter.
And you "forgot" that nuclear power plants last much, much longer than solar installations, at least twice as long, more likely 3 times and possibly 4 times. All of the plants in the US that have applied have been approved for 80 years of operations, they are now looking at 100 years and see no significant problems.
So without even taking into account new developments, you have to divide the nuclear numbers you gave by 2 and multiply the numbers for PV you gave by at least 20-80 (and that's not covering winter yet).
So $8B/GW vs. $20-80B/GW without any firming.
And which is why the price for installed capacity is not the right metric at all.
The cost of a kWh delivered reliably 24/7 is the right metric. And there nuclear shines.
And intermittents are simply not up to the job. Which is why pretty much the entire world is giving up on the fantasy of supplying an advanced industrial society using only intermittent renewables. And even the most hard-core anti-nuclear greens are coming around, as TFA reports.
As I wrote: Germany's nuclear power plants delivered reliable electricity at below 2 cents per kWh.
So you can point to a nuclear plant built in the last 10 years in the west which is massively cheaper?
If nuclear is cost effective it makes sense to build it for all capacity - in the U.K. that’s about 50GW.
If you can point me to an NOAK-build that was built with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain.
Otherwise, you are just making the circular argument that because we haven't built we shouldn't build. That makes no sense.
And yes, nuclear for all capacity makes a lot more sense than intermittent renewables for all capacity. But a more balanced mix tends to work out better.
How many hundreds of billions in subsidies and decades wasted until we reach "NOAK with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain".
The real question is cumulative emissions. Cheap and fast, even if imperfect in the shorter timeframe wins the day.
The question to answer is: Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?
> How many hundreds of billions in subsidies and decades wasted until we reach "NOAK with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain"
None. Nuclear is cheap and quick and investments in nuclear not wasted.
We have wasted decades going down the wrong path. As an example, Germany has spent almost 25 years on the failed "Energiewende" and we haven't even completed the easy half. Nuclear did not require subsidies. Intermitten renewables anywhere from €30-50 billion just in subsidies. Per year.
France converted its electricity grid to nuclear in 15 years. For a total of €228 billion in 2011 money. Not "per year", not "subsidies". But total investment.
The estimate for six French EPR2s rose from €51.7 billion to €67.4 billion between 2022 and 2023. EDF’s later estimate is €72.8 billion, about 41% above the 2022 figure, before the reactors have been built.
I’d bet you the cost will be $140B when it’s all said and done, but this website won’t be around in 2044 (assuming no delays, good luck with that). You can bet regulations won’t stop changing over the span of decades either.
I’d rather have 70GW of solar and batteries deployed in a few years, and replace them with even cheaper ones in a number of decades.
> €72.8 billion,
For 6 EPR. Each EPR has 1.67 GWe. So 10.02 GW for €72.8 billion or €7.2 billion per GWe. Less than what I wrote. Versus €20-80 billion/GW for solar without firming.
Not sure why you're restricting yourself to only solar and batteries in northern european climate.
We also have, wind, firming and you know. Relying on fossil fuels for the once a decade emergency.
There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test when we still have agriculture, aviation, shipping, construction, chemicals, heavy industry and so on to decarbonize.
System studies from Australia to Denmark are converging on finding that new nuclear makes the system vastly more expensive. Even when assuming your "NOAK" costs. Because no one would be stupid enough to build new nuclear at Vogtle or Flamanville prices.
Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability. It always relied on fossil fuels to solve the hard times.
You raise the floor, but that's quite meaningless when the hard times are far far above the yearly baseload requirement. Even when factoring in scheduling maintenance around it. And theen adding that your nuclear fleet may be like the Swedish or French one and have half the capacity offline when it is needed.
> Not sure why you're restricting yourself to only solar and batteries in northern european climate.
I didn't. The post I was responding to compared solar + batteries to nuclear.
Completely incorrectly, it turns out.
Realistic studies show that grids including nuclear are a LOT cheaper.
> There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test
The only ones who are doing this are the anti-nuclear ideologues.
> Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability.
That is just comically wrong. Intermittent renewables are not dispatchable. Nuclear is.
As far as I'm aware, it indeed is.
Yep, and renewables + batteries are only getting cheaper. Nuclear takes a long time to build. A new plant planned today will be obsolete before construction ends.
Nuclear fans on HN don’t get that nuclear was the answer in the 90s, but is not today.
The problems in the U.K. specifically are more about grid capacity (both long distance and local substation level) and nonsense regulations (why can’t I have pluggable battery to go with my pluggable solar) than in generation.
Citation needed. For example Flamanville 3 (France) was estimated to cost around €3.3 billion, costs ballooned to over €13-19 billion. There are other similar examples such as Hinkley Point C (UK). Also maintenance is much more expensive and don't forget the cost for storing nuclear waste + decomissioning. Compare that to renewables...
Do you think FV3 is a representative sample?
One of the useful policies mentioned in the article is:
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.
It's a protest vote. Anti-fascist eco-fascism isn't a viable basis for the coherent governance of anything larger than an ecovilliage.
That said, it seems neither pragmatism nor ideological coherence is really necessary to hold power these days.
Why is it that almost every top comment or top reply on HB loves to pretend they know what they're talking about while making almost no fucking sense.
You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?
too little too late
It would have been a lot more green to have replaced all coal and gas electricity with nuclear.
Or the 2026 version. Get massively more results per dollar invested, in a shorter timeframe with renewables and storage.
It's depressing how much stuff is based on vibes.
Nuclear loses on pure accounting and time to build.
It loses on accounting if you assign zero cost to the million+ lives that carbon emitting power generation takes every year, and the long term, possibly irreversible damage it does to the planet. If you factor in those two things even 1%, nuclear wins hands down
Cost of recent nuclear power in the UK comes in at $130/mwh at best. Where wind and solar are coming in at $50-80/MWh.
So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.
Finally, but useful idiots already caused a lot of damage. Best time for European nuclear power buildout was 30 years ago.
Second best time is now.
Well actually given the free fall in prices of renewables and batteries, not really. Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh.
Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320897
They were never were in control of the government, so it seems a conspiracy theory that the greens somehow did "a lot of damage". I think a conspiracy needed by people who can not deal with the fact that nuclear is simply not economical, and therefor fails on the market.
Antinuclear pressure groups had a lot of sway with public opinion, so even if not directly in control, they influenced western politics.
Fair, but public opinion did not stop the governments in the past. In fact, England has nuclear power plants and is even building one, Hinkley Point C. In 2010 there were plans to substantially expand nuclear, but industry largely walked away. The reality is that not greens killed nuclear, but terrible economics.
As Joe Kaeser (Chairman, Siemens Energy) observed "There isn't a single nuclear power plant in this world that makes economic sense.“
Or as Steven P. Nesbit (former Chair of the ANS) said <<The “Nuclear Renaissance” foundered when advanced light water reactors turned out to be much more expensive than their marketing claimed, while alternatives—primarily natural gas—plummeted in price. We tend to point to impediments to nuclear technology, such as overly restrictive licensing requirements and adverse public opinion, but these matter only to the extent of their impact on the bottom line. Again, it comes down to the money.>>
Too little, too late.
There are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.
If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.
Or renewables. I remind you that nuclear power is completely economically unviable today because it is the single most expensive way to generate power. Even with Trump rolling back safety regulations, it's still too expensive when solar panels are 10 cents per watt, nuclear is 50, and the amount of backup storage to offset the unreliability does not bridge that gap.
Nuclear is great at replacing gas-fired power stations, which has a few costs that are not included in the price.
Gas is dispatchable, nuclear is not. It’s enormously expensive, and that expense is locked in whether you need the power or not.
We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.
Gas is used as backup in a grid dominated by cheap renewable. High capex sources like nuclear are a poor replacement.
Do you mean kwh? Your per Watt is way off.
Also France is around 7c (euro) per kwh from nuclear generation. If the whole west was all in on nuclear for last 50 years it would have resulted in lower per kwh costs.
What would solar's cost per kWh be? GP means the cost of the asset per peak generation power. 0.1/W seems about right, to an order of magnitude at least.
France has big wind farms too.
and i remind you that this framing is completely misleading outside the world of simulations and calculations.
Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.
I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
So you’re saying that nuclear has to be running 100% of the time at its highly expensive price per MWh (“base load”)
And that you can’t scale nuclear to provide all the power as the peaks are only needed rarely.
Which means that when other sources are cheaper (renewables), those must be banned to ensure nuclear gets paid more?
> I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
Nuclear fans across the internet seems to have adopted this talking point recently and none of them have noticed it doesn't make any sense.
What are you even claiming here?
I mean if nuclear fusion ever becomes commercially viable, you'd be nuts not to support it.
You think.. I heard some antinuclear guys opposing fusion because the vessel for fusion reactor would get radioactive, and that is "nuclear waste" (of course, it's not the dangerous, long-term kind).
> it's not the dangerous, long-term kind
For now this is only a desire, not a fact.
The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.
Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.
In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.
In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.
I've commented before on this, but I don't think it ever becomes financially viable.
Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;
Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.
Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.
All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.
now the german greens.
Our energy is expensive enough as is, we don't need to spend many billions on expensive nuclear power.
It was ultimately a conservative government that was responsible for exiting nuclear in Germany. But also nobody wants nuclear back, not even the industry - as it is too expensive.
Where in Germany could one build a new nuclear powerplant without noticeable local opposition (or opposition to new power lines)?
Fuck yeah.
Between shameless scientific fraud from last century still affecting and harming nuclear policy to this day [0], and masses of idiots being easily influenced and swindled by foreign powers [1] (example specifically about the UK's case), I don't know why any such parties haven't been forcefully disbanded or put in the same category as terrorists, along with other organizations such as "Green"-"peace". They have at large done immeasurable damage to their countries and the world at large, and most of them started out explicitly as being anti-nuclear, that being their only mission for the longest time, only becoming relevant through the most disgusting fearmongering. Most importantly, they've achieved nothing but ensure the continued, worldwide permanent reliance on oil states and the terrorism that derived from it.
0. https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/LNT-and-NAS-En...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_Nuclear_Disarmame...
"everyone who disagrees with me is an easily influenced idiot" is not going to win you any arguments, friend. Try a different tactic.
I find it fairly amusing that "green" parties were ever opposed to nuclear power. It was clearly lobbying by fossil fuel energy interests. If we're gonna generate electricity at night without burning coal, oil or gas, we need nuclear. Storing solar and wind overnight is an even more absurd proposition than nuclear power plants. Burning more fossil fuels is even more absurd than nuclear power plants.
This is a bit too cynical. It's impossible to understand the history green parties' opposition to nuclear energy without the context of their opposition to nuclear weapons. The argument went that "civilian" nuclear infrastructure was deeply interconnected with nuclear weapons. They share infrastructure. The existence of a civilian nuclear fuel cycle brings into existence a latent nuclear capability (you may recognize this theme from such films as the United States vs the Islamic Republic). Creating fissile material while avoiding diversion and proliferation requires the secrecy, security, and centralized technocratic control of what activists sometimes called the Atomic State, which they argued was incompatible with liberal democracy. I think these were quite serious arguments, though of course they'd persuade only if you're already bought in on unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Once upon a time, there was also the Soviet propaganda effort in the West. Many of the Cold War reactors could be used to produce not just electricity, but fission material for nuclear warheads. Meaning that if you could persuade big countries to give up nuclear energy for good, you'd also reduce your adversary's capability to build and maintain their nuclear arsenal, or preempt its future acquisition in the first place.
Soviet Union (and later Russia) enacted the propaganda effort against nuclear mainly to prevent the west from ditching their fossil energy. Less western nuclear warheads was secondary goal at best.
Military forces never had any problem running extra reactors to acquire their material.
Correct, but it still was framing that would be useful to have. If nothing else, because civilian reactors mean there's also a civilian program, an educational program, and the military would like to have that around.