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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself

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

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

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

Or gas (produced using renewable energy) storage

> It will take longer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even with that, renewables are cheaper.

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

Nuclear also requires non-infinite resources like uranium.

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

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

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

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

Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

>It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  > nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate.

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

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

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

Regarding fuel:

https://xkcd.com/1162/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

France built 40 in a decade:

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see how it goes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is bullshit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its multifold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>SVP vs PG&E

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not with a tech that needs 15 years to be build

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

France is sabotaging France on nuclear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the Söder Challenge is Legend:-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>What do you mean?

I mean it's not clean

>one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then why did Fukushima happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of this happens to be true.

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

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

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

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

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

Here the Finnish environment minister:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lol at wind though. that's not real.

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

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

The (authoritarian?) nation of Finland has already solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

I watched a very interesting documentary about Onkalo, which happens to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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