With a lot of overlap though. The correlation with sunshine is still helpful.

So that's an European thing? huh. We have this in Romania - a couple years back when the war in Ukraine started just as the green deal took effect, the gov started spending like crazy on subsidizing energy. But they did it in a convoluted way with a layer of intermediaries that basically were allowed to invoice the state for price differences from arbitrary price levels. Almost "I'd like to sell at twice the price but you're not letting me, so gimme the difference" - if not exactly that.

I'm not sure if I'm feeling better or worse that it's a EU invention. Either way, it's hellof a corrupt practice.

I skimmed your posts but they don't blame EU rules. Can you point to EU regulation which caused this?

ARENH looks like a mechanism by which France wanted to entice competition in end customer sales (and distribution?) of electricity.

And I’m generally a nuclear proponent but one of the worst investments the French utility made was investing in the UKs reactor debacle at Hinkley C.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-agrees-issue-...

> I think theres going to be a significant work to push down the costs of re-powering the aging nuclear fleet.

The EPR2 costs just keeps spiraling. They haven't even started building yet or been able to agree on how to finance the subsidies.

This is the same France that less than a month ago had another government collapse due to being underwater in debt with a spending problem and being unable to agree on how to fix it.

A massive handout to the nuclear industry sounds like just the right plan!

It is also funny that you mention Russia. You do know that the EU despite 19 sanction packages haven't been able to agree on sanctions for the Russian nuclear industry. We still are too reliant on it.

Germany was able to quickly phase out Russian fossil gas, while france keeps being EUs no. 1 importer of Russian LNG.

But I do love blaming everything on Germany. So much easier.

> Too much on the line to shut down nuclear for France. It will get subsidized and it provides energy independence.

If the goal is energy independence, renewables will provide that more cheaply. If the goals are the other side effects of nuclear power: isotopes, national pride (Curie!), workforce augmentation for nuclear submarines and nuclear weapons, then these goals also require far fewer reactors than enough to power the entire country.

I do not doubt that there may be some level of nuclear power in the future. But I would take a long bet that in 2050, France is closer to 0% nuclear power than it is to the current level. (That phrasing is confusing, but I think the fraction of nuclear power will be less than half its current amount)

I think this line of thinking comes from a westernized world where all water is controlled.

Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.

In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.

The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.

Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.

We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.

And the environmental impact up and downstream (both for failure cases and regular operation).

In Quebec, most of the dams are in the middle of nowhere, but your point still stands.

There are costs/risks for most forms of power. If you're in an environment where wind and solar can make economical sense, go for it. For reliable base loads, I still think order of preference should be:

- geothermal (very rare and hard to do at scale, though) - hydro

- nuclear

- natural gas

- oil/diesel (at very small, localized levels eg remote villages)

- burning live babies and cute animals

- coal

Did you really just attribute the deaths from a bombing raid on a dam during WW2 to a hydropower incident?

    > I'd still rather see a surge in nuke generation and solar with storage

The linked article doesn't put these emissions in relation to anything. It is hard to imagine it to be a relevant amount of emissions, right?

I really hope nothing bad happens at the three gorges dam. There's nearly half a billion people that would have to be evacuated, and tens of millions who likely wouldn't be able to evacuate in time due to proximity.

I'd rather live near a modern nuclear plant myself.

Long-form storage is inherently unprofitable - a battery that's used daily will make 365x the sales of a battery that's used only once a year.

So inevitably, the first batteries will always prioritize daily arbitrage, and only once that market is capped out will some battery projects target weekly/monthly/yearly arbitrage.

In countries with cold winters, the obvious solution is heat-energy storage systems, which don't output electricity but instead store and output heat directly; they're basically just a big pile of sand/stones/bricks wrapped in a ton of insulation. Thanks to the cube-square law, they scale up unbelievably well and can easily store months worth of heat.

Due to that scale they don't make much sense without district heating, but energy storage is a numbers-game and lots of cold places already have district heating that could be quite easily retrofitted.

You don't need batteries with longer capacity in terms of power:energy ratio, you simply need more batteries.

Getting to France's level of nuclear decarbonization with batteries is cheap and easy with current prices. Using existing thermal plants for a few weeks a year and renewables for the rest is quite similar overall to France's mix.

What's challenging is the final 10%, 5%, and 1%. But it will take 15-20 years of deployment of our current cheap renewables+storage technology before we need to solve those final percents. In that time, technology will have advanced tremendously and we don't know what the cheapest solution will be, just that it will be cheaper than current tech. Plus it would take much longer than 15 years to even build nuclear in any significant quantity! France said a few years ago that they would be building handful of new reactors but I still have not seen progress!

The UK uses far more gas to heat homes than to generate electricity, and uses some for industrial purposes so it seems weird to attribute LNG use to wind, the technology that more than any other has reduced gas usage in the UK.

Normally this would be handled by a wider synchronized network. The EU has a continent wide synchronized network and the UK isn’t part of it.

There are also other ways to store energy. For polar regions sand batteries are capable of storing heat for months. High grade heat to the point they can siphon off that heat for power generation.

The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.

Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.

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 H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed 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!

France doesn't have any new reactors under construction. Its annual nuclear generation peaked in 2005:

    ~/git/iaea-pris % sqlite3 pris_data.db
    sqlite> select year, sum(electricity_supplied_gwh) from reactor_statistics, reactor_operating_history where reactor_statistics.reactor_id=reactor_operating_history.reactor_id and country_code='FR' and year > '1999' group by year;

    year  sum(electricity_supplied_gwh)
    ----  -----------------------------
    2000  395392.3                     
    2001  401256.49                    
    2002  415110.33                    
    2003  421028.62                    
    2004  428040.69                    
    2005  431179.56                    
    2006  429819.63                    
    2007  420129.49                    
    2008  419800.32                    
    2009  391752.97                    
    2010  410086.42                    
    2011  423509.48                    
    2012  407437.88                    
    2013  405898.51                    
    2014  418001.4                     
    2015  419035.02                    
    2016  386452.88                    
    2017  381846.02                    
    2018  395908.34                    
    2019  382402.75                    
    2020  338735.78                    
    2021  363394.15                    
    2022  282093.23                    
    2023  323773.23                    
    2024  364390.78

Renewables are non dispatchable and thus have a hard time picking up variable demand. They’re very good at providing free energy on sunny or windy days and are increasingly forcing nuclear plants to reduce output during those times, directly cutting into nuclear profits.

I'm not sure how you are measuring complexity.

The plant and equipment required to maintain a stable nuclear reaction and extract its heat is far more complex than that required to control a coal or natural gas firebox.

This is reflected in the fact that to run 1GW of nuclear generation, on average (in the US) requires about 700 FTE to operate. The average for coal generation is about a third of that number. And the average for a combined cycle gas plant is about 60 FTE.

And nuclear fission produces low-grade heat - around 320°C - compared to coal (around 550°C) or natural gas (over 1300°C). Thus are less thermally efficient and require huge cooling towers and much larger turbines to extract the thermal energy. Which, of course, are more expensive and complex to build and maintain.

The only reason? Solar constantly getting cheaper is not also part of the reason? Is there any price that solar could decline you to where you would begin to credit solar's low price as being part of the reason?

> Or we could treat nuclear rationally and stop increasing the price three orders of magnitude past diminishing returns

Who is we here? Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing?

In 2022 they lost 18bn because they had to repair widespread "stress corrosion cracking". And it was nationalized.

> Well we're probably going to see flow batteries take over

Its unlikley, they are a massive pain to manage compared to lithium, expensive and have poor round trip efficiency. Oh and terrible energy density.

I'm not saying its impossible, but I'd be surprised.

I think the biggest two factors that play against them is that they round trip efficiency is something like 70-80% compared to 90%+. but the real pain in the arse is the charge managment. From what I understand, you need to charge them to full, and then discharge them fully. I don't believe that you can charge from halfway.

Most power markets work in 30miunute chunks, so managing charging/discharging would be really hard.

I thought the prospects for flow batteries were becoming fairly dire due to the decline in cost of Li-ion cells.

LFP promises better fire behavior than older Li-ion technologies, I think.

"Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today"

Did they test the air or just the soil? You mentioned they imagined the taste of the air but didn’t mention if they actually tested the air. And who tests it?

> CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh.

This got widely reported but there doesn't seem to be any source. I'll reference this video [1] to cover the claim along with a comparison to industry projections. Apologies for the video link but I don't have an article handy that addresses the topic as directly.

[1] https://youtu.be/KjiqqafD_0w?t=861

That's plain wrong, they have not announced that price target anywhere. There is speculation that it could be there target internally for the long term, but there is basically zero chance they'll start at that price and no guarantees they'll ever reach it.

CATL is just dumping

We could have had atomic energy generated right here in the Bay Area (Sonoma). You can actually go visit the “hole in Bodega Head” where PG&E started digging the reactor pit before being made to stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant

PG&E's problems are caused by malcompliance and the rules being written by a public traded company instead of by an accountable government. There are plenty of people living in the woods in other states that aren't causing massive wildfires that cover the US in smoke every season.

It’s a capitalist run power grid in CA. It’s a publicly traded company. Nothing more capitalist than making my own power when the competition sucks ass.

It’s a public company, not run directly by the government. It has a monopoly dictated by the CA government.

They have no interest in doing good service but instead in making money. They don’t have to really answer to anyone. Supposedly the CA government could implement things to improve the lives of Californians that would influence how PG&E operates but CA politicians are bought off by this corporation. So, there we have it

They have worst of both worlds with California-tier corporate culture and Californian politics.

Greed and no competition.

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> they are free-riding on things that PG&E ratepayers bought

Genuinely curious, how is that the case for Silicon Valley Power?

The commenter was right that the correct unit is Wh, then slipped up. Does gasoline contain power? Do "high-power" Li-ion batteries? In common parlance, power and energy are used interchangeably. I believe people writing about science should hold themselves to a higher standard, but there is always something more important.

I do not know why this particular one gets engineers so annoyed. Energy and power are synonymous in conversation with normal people. There is very little real world scenarios where people would be exposed to the precise meanings -of course everyone gets it wrong.

CA also shoots itself in the foot by having all its wealth and population in mild areas so those places run the show and nobody takes it seriously until it's a hot-summer, everyone cranks the AC, the grid keels over and then "how could this have happened". It's literally the stick in spokes meme. Sure there's some guy in the desert who's been screaming about how this stuff matters, but nobody listens to him because they were calling him a dumb yokel the other 364 days of the year.

This is ignorant culture war politics and/or anti-Texasism.

I should point out that cold temperatures place a huge demand on the grid because consumers don't want to winterize for the marginal once-a-decade blizzard any more than utilities; around half our homes have relatively inefficient resistance heaters as opposed to furnaces.

We have a lot more growth in the past few years than most other places, both in relative terms, and in absolute (big state + high growth introduces more absolute friction than small state). Demand is forecast to rise over 20% from 2024 levels vs. an American average under 5%: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.31/main.svg

So no wonder our reserve margins run thinner when we're already having to build at such speed just to keep pace with regular demand.

Texas has been building a ton of wind and solar to supplement generation capacity and is taking some leadership in the next-gen nuclear stuff for a reliable base load, but in the mean time the shortage of CCGTs is going to bite in a state where demand goes up this much, this fast. SB6 passed this summer also should help with reasonable control and oversight.

ERCOT actually does a pretty okay job, all things considered; it's hard to invest heavily in winterization for rare events when you're having to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load.

The large majority of normal people would take the half price electricity than the highly regulated, never-ever-have-an-outage electricity that's way more expensive.

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Leaving otherwise fertile farmland empty to use the lands allocated water on another field is insane, insane problems call for insane solutions

why ? at scale desal water via solar looks to be very reasonable thing ?

Presumably, DaSHacka means 'unfortunately' in the context of transporting power from unused US land to our urban centers.

> By my estimate (GPT5)

You know treating a thing that makes stuff up as a source of truth is the same thing as making stuff up right? You might as well have written By my estimate (as revealed to me in a dream)

> By my estimate (GPT5)

Please don't do this.

It does mention another battery manufacturer, Spark. Where do they fit in to the narrative?

The LA Times famously a left leaning publication and its stories are written and edited by the employees who are likely to be anti Musk, Trump hating woke types. The owner is a business man and will let the editors write for the audience's biases.

> How do you know that's the reason?

Just noticed that their profile basically taunts that they're a troll [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hagbard_c

Not sure why you are downvoted. Theres bot rings everywhere on the internet that downvote anything that mentions Chinese emissions

The US system of decades of environmental review before any energy project can maybe proceed can also be considered a form of oppression.

Much as I have problems with current administration, Chris Wright is doing an outstanding job working with industry to push forward next-gen nuclear. I have a lot of well-founded hope for huge progress assuming the next Secretary of Energy continues with this and the NRC backs off just a little.

Now I just think about where those takes started and all roads always lead back to the same culprits. Your parents and the hillbillies don’t come up with these takes on their own, they always starts somewhere and benefit the person whispering it in their ear.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-piv...

> The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer.

> This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground. (Another hint about Ukraine: Ukraine is sitting on top of over 670 billion cubic metres of natural gas: to the dictator of a neighbouring resource-extraction economy this must have been quite a draw.) The constant propaganda and astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest, those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as stranded assets that can't be monetized, and the land rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of dollars.

Which is meaningless unless they are closing more than they are opening.

Renewables are intermittent and therefore unreliable. Also unless california has gone for lots of redundancy the would also be displacing fossil fuel power plants. Again i'm not trashing renewables, because what's wrong with free energy. What i am doing automatically is wondering why batteries are a better option then traditional power stations.

California does have much more expensive electricity then anywhere else, so it is reasonable for me to scrutinise their energy plans more closely and question whether their current strategy is really the best one.

Historically yes, but tell that to our newest superpower China.