DarkNova6
2 days ago
So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe.
Look, I love nuclear technology. But time has moved on. The costs to rebuild this industry is astronomical and means we lose out on key-future technology like batteries.
Edit: But then there are bombs. And especially French love their nukes due national security. This is the only reason to keep pushing for nuclear, since Russia, the US and China are not gonna change direction on this either. But the very least we could do is be honest about it.
Edit 2: Changed from "World has moved on" to "time has moved on", since evidently China has invested for a good 2 decades to build their own fully functional nuclear-industry. Proving my point that it takes dedicated investment, network effects and scale to rebuild this industry. After all, they too want to mass produce nukes.
sailingparrot
2 days ago
> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired.
This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?
DarkNova6
2 days ago
If you are so smug about this, answer me:
1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
sailingparrot
2 days ago
Yes, very few new NPP have been built in Europe recently. Quite a few have been built by Europe however. The french company Framatome alone, with 18k employees, is actively building 2 EPR reactors in the UK (+ preliminary studies for 8 more), one reactor has been finished last year in France and recently multiple were built or being built in China, India, Russia (although I guess that might be canceled).
Its also already operating the 57 french reactors as well as operating reactors in South Africa, China, Korea, Belgium, Finland.
Sure, the industry will need to grow, but claiming it basically has to start from 0 is ludicrous.
pyrale
2 days ago
> 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
> The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
The only reasonable conclusion from your logic is that it would have felt like an even worse idea to build nuclear reactors in the 1970's. Yet, using today's hindsight, it was a great idea.
Airbus would have been a terrible idea: no one had built commercial airliners before, and only the US had the know-how. Today, we know otherwise.
etc.
b3orn
2 days ago
> Airbus would have been a terrible idea: no one had built commercial airliners before, and only the US had the know-how.
That's just plain false, Airbus started as a cooperation between a lot of european aerospace companies, which had different a lot of know-how in different fields. For example Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale, now Airbus) was the French part of the Concorde, they also had the Caravelle.
Aloha
2 days ago
Plus there was a significant contribution from England - VC10, deHavilland Comet, etc.
England also made what I consider to be the prettiest bomber ever made - the Handley-Page Victor
okanat
2 days ago
Well it made sense for France for multiple reasons even in 70s. France didn't trust / like Anglophone dominance in the world. They brutally kept their colonies, sometimes to the bitter end. The mistrust to US/UK hegemony and the strong sense of nationalism is the reason we have Ariane and Airbus programs. Henceforth, they also invested in their own nuclear program. To make small and cheaper nuclear weapons, you need plutonium which can only be created in reactors. Even with that knowledge they burned fossil fuels majorly before 70s.
France built majority of their nuclear reactors after 70s oil crisis. So it made sense to have independent resources for them. So they won't need to rely on other nations, some of which were their former colonies that hated them. They had two strong reasons to keep a nuclear base electricity generations.
fulafel
a day ago
> The only reasonable conclusion from your logic is that it would have felt like an even worse idea to build nuclear reactors in the 1970's. Yet, using today's hindsight, it was a great idea.
Consider opportunity costs. If all the public money that Europeans invested to nuclear (it started way before the 70s of course) was put into renewables/storage r&d, we would have had great renewables decades earlier, and by now would be swimming in it.
ViewTrick1002
2 days ago
> The only reasonable conclusion from your logic is that it would have felt like an even worse idea to build nuclear reactors in the 1970's. Yet, using today's hindsight, it was a great idea.
If the competition was renewables and storage rather than plants running on imported oil during the oil crisis it would have been.
75% of all new capacity in TWh (I.e. adjusting for capacity factor.) globally are renewables and storage. There’s no need to swim against the river.
mpweiher
2 days ago
Intermittent renewables have capacity factors in the 10-20% range. So divide by 5.
34 nations have committed to tripling nuclear capacity, including the US, China, France, the UK and many others. And they are acting on this as well.
The tide is nuclear, no need to swim against it.
And no, countries also doing renewables in no way negates this.
godelski
21 hours ago
Both you and ViewTrick have it wrong.
The tide is neither nuclear nor renewables.
The tide is "we've become advanced enough to know that there is no one-size fits all solution for energy generation and are taking a more nuanced approach to address the local and different energy needs of differing regions/grids".
I hate these online debates that frame things like "renewables vs nuclear" when the reality should be "zero-carbon emission sources vs carbon emission". The only part of nuclear is in that is if it should be on the table or not. But it is absolutely idiotic from that framework to take nuclear off the table because you're not saying "nuclear everywhere" you're saying "if nuclear makes more sense for this setting, then use nuclear".
Don't oversimplify things, it makes everything too complicated.
ViewTrick1002
20 hours ago
The problem is that we can’t be wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc on handouts from tax money to new built nuclear power.
As soon as zero fuel cost renewables enters the picture the mix of extremely high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX for new built nuclear makes it the worst companion imaginable.
The problem is that the setting nuclear power makes sense in is for the people living north of the arctic without abundant hydro or a transmission grid.
We’re now down to a handful communities in Russia, the US and Canada and Svalbard.
If these communities pertaining a few hundred thousand people keep running on fossil fuels while we achieve larger impact elsewhere that’s perfectly acceptable.
godelski
17 hours ago
> The problem is that we can’t be wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing
> on handouts from tax money to new built nuclear power.
1) You don't seem to be applying this same measure to other energy sources like renewables, storage, and so on.
2) "Government money" works differently than "people money". I am not the best person to explain this but I'll summarize what my girlfriend and her dad constantly say, both having PhDs in economics (who teach this stuff and work with governments) "An economist can only tell you how much something costs, not if you should do it or if the results are worth the cost." Like a economist can tell you how much a hospital will cost and how many lives it might save, but at the end of the day they can't tell you if that's the right choice or not.
# Costs
You really should check out the Lazard report[0]. They get pretty detailed.
Jump to page 8 and you'll see a table like this (let's see how well I can format this here lol. Won't look nice on mobile)
Solar (Comm & C&I) $81----------------------$217
Solar (Util) $38----$78
Solar + Stor (Util) $50-------------$131
GeoTherm $66-------$109
Wind (OnShore) $37--------$86
Wind+Stor (On) $44------------$123
Wind (OffShore) $70----------------$157
Gas $108^5 $149-----------------------$251
Nuclear $34^5 $141--$169^6--$200 $228^6
Gas Comb Cyc $31^5 $48-----$107^7-$109
^5: Reflects cot of opperating fully depreciated facilities, includes decommissioning, salvage, restoration
^6: Based on Vogtle nuclear power plant with "learning curve" being ~30% between units 3&4. Based on 70 year lifespan
1) *Existing Nuclear* is the cheapest zero-carbon source
2) Vogtle is Lazard's *ONLY* source of data for new nuclear
2.1) Removing the "Learning Curve" costs from Vogtle puts competitive with renewables ($118-$160)
2.2) Including the "Learning Curve" Vogtle is already competitive with rooftop solar
3) (Page 9) Renewable prices are much cheaper thanks to subsidies.
3.1) Solar
$81-$217 --> $51-$178
$38-$78 --> $20-$57
$50-$131 --> $33-$111
3.2) Same for wind but you can look
3.3) *NOTE* Trump is ending subsidies
> The problem is that the setting nuclear power makes sense
There's no free lunch!
# "[Costs] can't tell you if that's the right choice or not"
And that's the reason I said what I said! You both are vastly oversimplifying things to the point where you think there's one right answer. THERE ISN'T. The whole point of the renewables movement isn't to make cheap electricity, it is *to make the environment better* while still producing the energy we need and at affordable prices. If this was just a price discussion then we wouldn't be where we are and gas and coal would be the cheapest option. *BUT we care about the environment*. Not just the carbon in the air, but the carbon in the ocean, the animals it impacts, the forests and lands (both of which are also a vital part of natural carbon sequestration!), and making the planet a better place not just for humans but all life.
Get out of your internet armchair and go find out what actual experts are saying. Not the dumb science communicators on YouTube. Not the clickbait like "IFuckingLoveScience". Go watch lectures online. Go watch lectures in person! I don't know how to tell you this, but you can straight up email any professor at any university. People respond! Not only that, but you can go sit in on their classes (I'd suggest you ask first, but nobody fucking takes attendance). Go grab actual books (those people will recommend those books to you too!).
Take your passion for arguing on the internet and make sure it is at least equal to the passion you have for learning about the actual subject matter. If your love of arguing is greater than your love of the actual subject then I promise you, you are harming the very community you believe you are fighting for. You can even go ahead and ask those same people I'm requesting you reach out to and I'm sure plenty will tell you the same. I mean for Christ's sake, you got so caught up in me calling you out that you didn't even recognize I called out the person you were arguing with and instead put me into the same bucket! Clearly putting me in the same bucket as mpweiher is a categorical mistake!
[0] https://www.lazard.com/media/eijnqja3/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
ViewTrick1002
a day ago
It is quite telling that you are spamming this entire submission with extremely strong opinions about how amazing nuclear power is, ignoring any contrary facts. Taking any mention of renewables close to a personal insult.
Then turning around and not understanding that ”TWh” is already adjusted for capacity factor.
In my eyes it is hard to take you seriously when you don’t comprehend even basic physical properties of our grid and energy systems. Let alone economics, timelines, opportunity cost etc.
mpweiher
a day ago
Strangely enough, I happen to be one bringing facts, whereas you bring the strong opinions backed by...your strong opinions.
ViewTrick1002
a day ago
You mean facts like that capacity factor is 10-20% of the produced TWh which is a physical measure already adjusted for capacity factor?
sigmar
2 days ago
These questions are inane. No, "all existing experts" did not retire. not making new plants was a decision made by politicians.
Europe has never stopped working on creating new and better nuclear reactor designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
hvb2
2 days ago
Iter is a research project that Europe is a part of, along with the rest of the world. That has nothing to do with building power plants, at least not anytime soon.
We haven't built a reactor in a long time. So those EPRs being built are all way behind schedule and thus costing substantially more.
You can design whatever you want. Building one is a whole different story. That's not an opinion that's just what happened at the first 2 EPRs and Hinckley point isn't going great either
laurencerowe
2 days ago
Yup. Europe can absolutely still build reactors, just not at a price that is economically competitive.
Olkiluoto 3 started regular production in 2023, taking 18 years to build at a cost of €11 billion (3x over budget).
Flamanville 3 started regular production in 2024, taking 17 years to build at a cost of €13.2 billion (4x over budget) or €19.1 billion including financing in 2015 prices.
Hinkley Point C (two reactors) is currently estimated to have its first unit come online around 2030, taking 14 years with total costs now estimated at £31-35 billion / €36–41 billion (2x over budget) in 2015 prices.
golem14
2 days ago
I found an interesting set of charts + explanation for China:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1ijcocq/chine...
It would really be great to understand (rather than me guessing) China's rationale to build these plants, and also their safety.
They generate about 5% of their electricity with nuclear. That's a lot, but is it enough to power the country if other alternatives stop being viable (war, shortages, ...?) Maybe it's OK for them that in such a situation, they just turn off enough residential power to last through the night with nuclear and storage. z
Do they see the nuclear research as dual use? My understanding is that nuclear subs and ships do use entirely different nuclear plants. Maybe research into small modular reactors is more dual use. There's also use for those reactors if they really want to build moon bases.
Maybe at their cost of the plans (I heard ≈3B for a 1+GW plant), this is actually competitive with solar+storage. It's definitely competitive with western nuclear power plants, if they want to export in other developing markets.
laurencerowe
2 days ago
Rather than being dual use I think it’s more that countries want to keep their strategic industrial capacity around in terms of the nuclear engineering expertise in firms and universities that can potentially be redirected if needed.
mikestorrent
2 days ago
The problem is that we insist on building nuclear plants like cathedrals, when we need to build them like Model T Fords.
Small modular reactors need to be rolling out of a factory ready to go, so we can do large redundant arrays of them, put them on trains to transport them around, etc.
A nuclear power station making a couple MW should cost maybe a few million tops once we have the ability to make hundreds of them a year from a factory instead of creating these 20 year projects for gigantic facilities that are all bespoke
laurencerowe
a day ago
It’s far from certain that SMRs will end up having lower costs than large nuclear reactors. Maybe they will work out but there is a huge amount of hype.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-30/silicon-v...
mpweiher
2 days ago
Funny, the Finns are super happy with their "uneconomic" nuclear reactors. Current approval rating for nuclear is now 81%, up from 77% last year.
The UK is so disappointed by their HPC project (which is the most expensive nuclear reactor project in history, AFAIK), that they just completed the investment decision for the follow-up Sizewell-C, which will also be 2 UK-EPRs.
Oh, the guarantee price for HPC is the same as that for various off-shore wind-projects. So obviously economically uncompetitive. At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion. Which does put the cost of £41 billion into perspective, despite that being the most ridiculously over-time and over budget nuclear project in history.
Actually, Flamanville 3 did not start "regular" production in 2024, they were just given go-ahead to go to full power a few days ago. It was first grid-connected in 2024 and then started a lengthy ramp-up phase. It slowly coming online was the time for the Cour des Comptes to give its verdict, which was pretty damning.
Flamanville 3 was probably the worst run nuclear project in French history. And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
EDF is often accused of receiving heavy state subsides, with the implication that this is to keep the nuclear power plants going or subsidize nuclear electricity. It is true that EDF gets state subsidies. For their intermittent renewable projects. Ba-da-dum-tss. The nuclear party of their business is tremendously profitable, despite being forced to subsidize industry through the ARENH program.
laurencerowe
2 days ago
Existing nuclear reactors produce incredibly cheap power. The German decision to stop theirs before coal should be considered an environmental crime.
Finns should be super happy with Nuclear since the cost overruns were overwhelmingly born by Areva (majority owned by the French state) which accumulated losses of €5.5 billion and went bust!
As a nuclear weapons power the UK has a national security interest to keep its nuclear industry around. It needs to build some reactors to do that, but given the prices of new nuclear I don't expect it to build more than the minimum necessary.
Hinkley Point C comes in at £92.50/MWh in 2012 prices (£128.90 in 2024 prices). At the last auction wind prices were £54.23/MWh in 2012 prices (£75.68/MWh 2024 prices).
Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas but that is still much cheaper than nuclear.
Mawr
a day ago
> Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas
Yes, let's just handwave those concerns away, it's not like the grid needs power 100% of the time or anything. Two weeks without wind? No problem, just burn gas :) It's so cheap, independent of foreign supply, doesn't leak out of pipes and isn't a huge environmental hazard at all.
hvb2
a day ago
But then also be honest that nuclear can't solve that problem either. It's extremely slow to ramp up and down so it cannot keep the grid stable either.
So the only way to power your grid with all nuclear is to produce at the daily peak load + margin all day. Every day
mpweiher
19 hours ago
This is completely false. Nuclear plants can and do ramp up quickly, thought not from/to 0, but that's generally not necessary.
And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.
hvb2
a day ago
> At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion.
2 things, 10 pence is a lot. Not for retail but no power plant gets anywhere near that. It's mostly like 6 or 7.
Aside from that, the money you put in today is not spent on other things so there's an opportunity cost there too. That 40 billion at 2% interest is 60 after 20 years for example
> And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
What do you mean? Plenty of renewables are built without any government backing..
sigmar
2 days ago
>We haven't built a reactor in a long time.
France finished Flamanville 3 in 2024. Finland finished Olkiluoto 3 in 2022. Are those not recent enough? both were EPR designs
hvb2
2 days ago
Have you looked when they started construction and what their projected end date was?
Yes there are new ones but both of those are perfect examples of the lack of knowledge [1].
I'll quote: > Many of the organisations chosen to work on the different parts of the plant did not have any experience in nuclear, and little understanding of the safety requirements.
We'll get there. But yes, we're rebuilding a lot of lost knowledge and paying for the teething issues.
1: https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-nuclear-finlands-cautionary-...
t_tsonev
2 days ago
Those are not really great construction examples, are they? Both projects took 15+ years to complete with huge cost overruns. And for those two "successful" projects, you can find 2 or 3 that failed.
llsf
2 days ago
It takes time between the plan and putting it online. It is mostly due to regulations. Relax the regulations and it would be cheaper and faster.
hvb2
a day ago
The Finnish reactor had one delay because the concrete used for the containment building wasn't of the 'nuclear grade'. That's why those regulations thankfully exist.
Building more will help though. This whole thread started about how we had lost important knowledge
ZeroGravitas
4 hours ago
Another possible conclusion is that it's only possible to build them in societies where they can be secretly subsidized and the EU has passed out of this phase.
There's an awkward middle phase where they lie about how long and how much they will cost because the transparency will kill them before they start if real figures are used. But you only get a few chances to pull that trick.
nine_k
2 days ago
France in particular connected a new nuclear power station to the grid as late as 2024 [1]. But the previous reactor was put online in 1999 or so.
Three more were built in EU since 2000: one in Finland (Swedish/Finnish design) and two in Slovakia (Soviet/Russian design).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
laurencerowe
2 days ago
The Finnish reactor is the same French EPR design used at Flamanville and Hinkley Point C.
godelski
2 days ago
> If you are so smug about this, answer me:
But I'll answer what I can, assuming your are genuine.
> 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
I think this is a more American-centric comment than you realized... France had a bigger rollout in the 80's and a few from the 90's so there's another decade (*making this time key!*) before a slow decline. Also remember that France is a lot smaller than America so needs less power.
Not to mention, France exports a lot of electricity[0]. I want you to look pretty closely at that graph again. It says they exported 81.8TW this year. What's France's nuclear capacity? 380TW[1]. France exports about 15% of its total energy, more than all its hydro (it's next biggest source). You may be interested to see where that electricity goes....[2]
France can lose those reactors and be fine, Europe is a different story...
> 2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
> 3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
> the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist
Besides, I'm not sure this fear even makes sense. What, China could "start from scratch" but "France" (or anywhere else) couldn't? What would make China so unique that such things couldn't be replicated elsewhere? This is a fallacy in logic making the assumption that once skills atrophy that they can never be restored or restore more slowly. If anything we tend to see skills restore far quicker from atrophy than from scratch! So why paint a picture of "give up"? Isn't that just making a self-fulfilling prophecy?
[0] https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/exchanges/import...
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
mikestorrent
2 days ago
End of the day, it's just a big boiler; we invented it from scratch once, and it should be significantly easier to do it over again even if we do lose some knowledge. That said, the time to accelerate the industry really is now, before the situation gets any worse.
godelski
21 hours ago
I think you're over simplifying things to the point far beyond what is useful to this conversation. While I disagree with the parent who is saying it is essentially a lost cause to restart the industry you go too far in the other direction suggesting it is a trivial endeavor, which misses all the complications that make them take years to build. Might as well say "End of the day, Google is just a text processor"
tokai
2 days ago
>If you are so smug about this, answer me
Is this satire?
nosianu
2 days ago
I don't know how reliant France is, but they do seem to rely quite a bit on Rosatom (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/03/12/french...).
They also rely on imports of uranium - e.g. from Niger, which recently had quite the fallout with France.
It does not look to me at even a casual glance that French nuclear tech could fully work on its own. Similar for the UK.
It is not just about the experts, the supply chain too. Although, of course how much that matters in comparison is the question, since pretty much everything nowadays depends on some faraway place.
dadoum
2 days ago
Uranium is very power dense. If there is a supply chain disruption, it is problematic but France keeps around at least 5 years worth of nuclear production, which gives it some time to react and adapt. Also, Uranium is not very rare nor expensive, so reliance on one producer is not that worrying I think. Enrichment facilities are rarer, but there is also one in France, so I can see French nuclear tech work on its own.
mikestorrent
2 days ago
Canada is a significant producer of uranium and we have a fine relationship with the French, I don't think this is a serious concern at all
StopDisinfo910
a day ago
France isn't reliant on Rosatom at all for Uranium. Russia is one possible part of the supply chain mostly used for retreatment.
Most of the French uranium is produced by Orano which is quite close to being a public company (95% owned by France). It comes from Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger.
Greenpeace is not a reliable source when it comes to anything having to do with the nuclear industry by the way.
locallost
2 days ago
If you had followed the crisis from 2022 when a quarter of the reactors were out of service, you wouldn't ask that question. They had to fly in welders from the US because they were not able to fix the problem... Also, every new nuclear project done by the French in this century has been a complete disaster. Flamanville, Olkiluoto and now Hinkley Point C.
BigTTYGothGF
2 days ago
> But the world has moved on.
China's got 27 reactors under construction right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
DarkNova6
2 days ago
You are naturally correct and I have corrected my statement. I intended to refer to the West but my wording was factually incorrect.
China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology that they now have the industry which Europe once had. And to rebuild the same type of industry would take the same amount of effort that China had to do. Meanwhile, the US can't even build their own warships anymore.
bigbadfeline
2 days ago
> China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology... And to rebuild the same type of industry in the EU would take the same amount of effort.
You're factually wrong.
China started from 0 but the EU has kept building reactors, the French Areva/EDF finished three advanced 1600 MW reactors just 6 and 2 years ago. They are also building two reactors of the same type in the UK as we speak. The EU has never lost the expertise necessary for building nuclear reactors, they have actually advanced the state of the art since the end of the initial European wave.
Don't be confused by the lack of finished reactors in the EU, 2 of the completed Areva plants are in China and were built for a third of the time and cost of the same type reactors currently under construction in the UK. Therefore:
1. Looking at completed reactors in the EU cannot be used for judging the level of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) expertise in the EU.
2. Cost overruns in Europe are due to politics and civil engineering chaos there while the EU's NPP expertise is the best in the world.
3. Technology-wise, a new EU buldout of NPPs won't start from zero but from the the very top of the NPP technology ladder.
ViewTrick1002
2 days ago
China has been scaling back and delaying their nuclear program in favor of renewables since Fukushima.
At saturation, given current nuclear build out based on actual construction starts and China’s grid size, China will end up with 2-3% nuclear power in the grid mix.
Enough to sustain a civilian industry to complement any military ambitions, but it does not move the needle.
In terms of electricity China is all in on renewables and storage with a backstop of locally sourced firming coal.
mpweiher
2 days ago
> China has been scaling back and delaying their nuclear program in favor of renewables since Fukushima.
Not "has". "Had". The whole world held their breath after Fukushima.
Now that everybody knows that nothing really consequential happened apart from state overreaction, Japan, China and the rest of the world are no longer holding their breath.
China has been approving 10 or more nuclear power plants per year the last couple of years. Given the lifetime of 80 years of modern nuclear reactors and Little's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law) that implies an expected fleet size of 800 reactors. At 1.2 - 1.4GW per reactors, that would be slightly above 1 TW of generating capacity, which is enough for 90% of current Chinese electricity production.
derriz
2 days ago
In the first 5 months of this year, China added 198 GW of solar PV and 46 GW of wind. Nuclear is a small side-hustle for them.
pyrale
2 days ago
nameplate capacity of different generation sources can't be compared, if only because capacity factor is not comparable.
derriz
2 days ago
China's plan is to add 100GW of nuclear by 2040.
In 2024 alone, it added 360GW of wind and solar and the trajectory for renewables is steepening, not declining so this year's number looks like it will exceed this number - 450GW or more.
Capacity factors are just noise when you're dealing with nearly 2 orders of magnitude of difference in scale. Apply whatever adjustment for capacity factor differences that you like but 100GW of nuclear over 15 years is not going to catch up with 450GW of wind and solar per year.
bigbadfeline
2 days ago
China has 1,000 GW installed solar and 26 GW of wind which generate 2k TWh/yr. The total installed nuclear in China is a mere 60 GW which generate 450 TWh/yr. Therefore, the capacity factor of solar is 2 TWh/GW and that of nuclear is 4 times higher at 8 TWh/GW.
Calling an 4 times higher capacity factor "noise" is actual noise.
Besides, nuclear provides uninterrupted energy supply, no need for storage or special convenient places for installation. That's why China is building capacity of both types as fast as they can.
Europe is in a colder geographic area with less sunshine and more needs of energy during the cold/rainy days, nuclear is an absolute necessity there.
derriz
a day ago
The scales of rollout are so vastly different, it is just noise.
China will add 450GW or more renewables this year alone.
Even after dividing by 4 this represents more additional energy production capacity in ONE year than their 15 year target for nuclear. This is after your capacity factor adjustment.
Nuclear’s contribution to Chinese electricity production at the end of their 2040 nuclear plan is likely to be below 5%. Even less than nuclear’s current global share of about 9% - down from just under 20% in the mid 1990s.
ViewTrick1002
a day ago
Unless half the fleet is offline like happened in France during the energy crisis and twice in Sweden in the last year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
> That's why China is building capacity of both types as fast as they can.
Nuclear power as a percentage of the Chinese grid mix is backsliding. Will likely land somewhere in the 2-3% range when their grid is fully built out.
China is building renewables and storage as fast as they can and provide a token investment (in terms of their grid size)for new built nuclear power.
t_tsonev
2 days ago
But you can compare generated power, right?
> In the 12 months to June 2025, wind and solar (2,073 TWh) generated more electricity than all other clean sources (nuclear, hydro and bioenergy) combined (1,936 TWh). Just four years ago, wind and solar generated half as much electricity as other clean sources combined.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
bigbadfeline
2 days ago
So, both types generated approximately the same amount of power and it still isn't enough, one type cannot replace the other, they complement each other, that's why China is building more of each type, they know what they're doing.
StopDisinfo910
a day ago
China strategy is clearly a mix of renewable and nuclear, renewable for bulk and nuclear for baseload.
At the moment, they are quickly building gaz-fired capacity to supplement the renewable during peak demand and when production is low. Their base load is mostly coal. Nuclear will allow them to phase out most of that. They are clearly targeting zero coal and are gaz poor anyway so nuclear allows them to limit their exposure to imports. That's basically France strategy in the 70s except France went all in while China can use renewable for bulk capacity as they produce a ton of the required mineral themselves
The opposition between intermittent and nuclear doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to run a grid purely on intermittent sources.
A lot of the discussion on statistics here don't make sense. China wants to switch off coal and gaz. You are looking at transition numbers focusing on current shares when you should be considering trajectories.
yongjik
2 days ago
These kind of "all the experts are retired" take are getting tiresome.
When you think about it, until recently there were no experts in stabilizing the electric grid on a continental scale using renewables, because it was literally never needed before! Didn't stop experts from sprouting out when it became necessary.
There were no experts in building continental scale EV charging frameworks, either, until we needed them, and then there were.
Same thing all over again.
What we can say about nuclear is that it's been continuously supplying a non-negligible part of Europe's energy need for generations, and there are people who've been maintaining that. That's more than what we can say about a lot of our industrial needs in 2025.
nixass
2 days ago
> Look, I love nuclear technology. But the world has moved on.
Come again?
derriz
2 days ago
The technology of electricity production has advanced since nuclear peaked in the mid 1980s.
We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator.
Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part.
All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive.
Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.
iknowstuff
2 days ago
We deploy 10x the capacity in renewables and batteries than we do in nuclear and its only accelerating. We are trending towards 1/10th the cost of nuclear per GW. There is no going back just due to the sheer scale of mass manufacturing renewables.
We are below $1B/GW for solar. China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year.
Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years
solarengineer
2 days ago
I am a small-time investor in renewable energy businesses, but I am also a believer in nuclear energy.
Consider a city like Mumbai that needs about 3.8 GW per day. One would need lots of windmills and large solar farms that would need to be positioned in a different state having more sunlight throughout the year. Mumbai often experiences cloudy weather and intermittent wind. I cannot imagine only wind and solar supporting the needs of Mumbai.
There are countries other than the US who do not take 20 years to build a reactor. Out-dated regulations, punitive paperwork, and perhaps poor project management are the reasons for the oft-cited delays in the US. Other countries complete their builds in 6 to 7 years. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
mpweiher
2 days ago
The US delays with the Vogtle AP-1000s (the only recently completed US build) were extremely atypical.
First, it was a FOAK design. Which always takes longer to build, it is a prototype.
Second, the nuclear build know how in the nuclear engineers, construction workers, and supply chain was not really there any longer.
Third, they used a new permitting system, which in theory should have been better and probably will be better in the future: instead of ongoing individual checks and modifications, which made every nuclear power plant in the US a unique unicorn, you are now allowed to submit a master design and once approved you can build that over and over. Without changes.
Alas, Westinghouse wasn't actually done with the design when they submitted. So when they started building, they noticed that they had submitted plans that could not actually be built. Oops. That cause massive delays. And delays = cost.
And the suppliers fought each other, one went bankrupt etc. COVID also didn't help.
So how can we guarantee that the same won't happen in the future and that NOAK builds will be better? Well, for one they now have plans that are obviously buildable, because a bunch of AP-1000s have been built. So that exact thing absolutely can't happen.
Also, we can look to China. Turns out, China also built 2 FOAK AP-1000s. These also took about 10 years, despite China usually building in 5. And it turns out, China built some more AP-1000s after that. NOAK builds. And these took 5 years to build with buildable plans, experience building that reactors and a mature nuclear industry to back them.
So there is good reason to believe that future NOAK builds of the AP-1000 and of comparable reactors will be much faster and much cheaper than what we've seen so far.
_aavaa_
2 days ago
> were extremely atypical.
Delays and cost overruns for nuclear are absolutely not atypical. Pick anywhere in the world you want and you’ll find them building reactors easy 50% over time and budget, and many >100%.
solarengineer
2 days ago
Someone did the homework on the time that it takes (Japan does it in 5 years): https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
One observation is that Small Modular Reactors could take much less time: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/111356564/modular-...
Edited to add: China estimates 10 new reactors at 27 billion in total: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
nixass
2 days ago
Use case: Germany
It's going great!!!11
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
nuxi
2 days ago
We need more Kohl, that'll do the trick...
notTooFarGone
2 days ago
Ok let's link Germany when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
Thanks for cherry picking and not linking averages.
nosianu
2 days ago
That's what this is for, in general: https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/infrastructure/trans-euro...
Also, Germany currently has the problem of much more and more reliable wind generation in the north, but not enough network capacity to send it all south when needed. It is being addressed, but as expected, it is very complicated because infrastructure across the whole country touches the interests of a lot of groups with very different interests.
We might need much better tunnel building equipment and a deep sub-terranean network... (useful sci-fi idea, needs to be able to cope with mild earth quakes in some regions).
Phil_Latio
2 days ago
Then look at the the average and compare with France. Germany causes 6 times more Co2 stemming from energy production.
The energy mix in Germany leads to a situation where electric cars are dirtier than diesel (for the first ~200000 km / 125000 miles driven).
derriz
2 days ago
> The energy mix in Germany leads to a situation where electric cars are dirtier than diesel (for the first ~200000 km / 125000 miles driven).
Renewable share of electricity production is about 56% so this claim is not at all credible.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-covers-nearly-5...
Archelaos
2 days ago
Citation needed. I don't belief a word of this.
lawn
2 days ago
You still need electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing you know?
Archelaos
2 days ago
Gas-fired power plants are planned for load balancing, and these are already being built in such a way that they can be converted to hydrogen operation at a later date.
lawn
a day ago
Gas... How "great" for the environment.
ViewTrick1002
a day ago
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. We still need to decarbonize construction, agriculture, aviation, maritime shipping etc.
Let’s not stare us blind at perfect in one sector wasting money and opportunity cost which needs to be spent on harder to abate industries.
lawn
a day ago
Seems weird to say that while arguing against nuclear.
nixass
2 days ago
You can move slider for last 24hrs, there were sunny bits in Germany. CO2 is constantly shit over here. And yeah.. what am I supposed to do when it's not sunny or no wind? Fart into windfarm?
Archelaos
2 days ago
This! Don't be disappointed by the downvotes. The fussile+nuclear energy lobby is desparte because of Germany's success. This industry is the equivalent of the tabacoo and pestizide industry of the past. Everything is fine, cheap and under control -- until it isn't ...
mpweiher
2 days ago
Since the capacity factor is so much lower, 10x in capacity just about matches the energy production of nuclear. Never mind the dispatchable power.
And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time.
So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.
iknowstuff
2 days ago
Ugh. One of us is living in an alternate reality. If the share of energy produced is not growing increasingly more renewable, then it’s me.
mpweiher
2 days ago
An initial much stronger increase in renewables is a logical an unavoidable consequence of what I described.
The increase in renewable production needs to be 4x greater initially, because of the longer life of nuclear plants. Queueing theory/Little's Law. So this is entirely expected if you are targeting (a) a fairly constant fleet and (b) fairly constant production rate, both of which are desirable.
Under the Messmer plan, France ignored this and built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Which means that they were pretty much done after 15 years, their nuclear industry had basically nothing to do for the next 40 or so years and withered. Bad idea.
The current rate of new construction starts in China implies a build rate of at least 10 reactors per year. With an expected life of 80 years, that implies a target fleet size of around 800 reactors if the rate remains constant.
nine_k
2 days ago
The problem is that much of Europe lies pretty far north. Certainly, Spain can deploy solar power with high efficiency, but Netherlands can't grab as much sunlight no matter what, to say nothing of Sweden or Norway. Wind power helps, but it's way more expensive than solar.
laurencerowe
2 days ago
Wind is still much cheaper than new nuclear with an LCOE in the UK under half that of new nuclear.
Surprisingly it seems worthwhile to build solar in places like the UK/Netherlands/Denmark since solar production is negatively correlated with wind.
Norway and Sweden have large hydropower resources too.
jandrewrogers
2 days ago
That cost is a property of the regulatory environment, it isn't intrinsic.
You can buy a floating nuclear power plant in the form of an aircraft carrier for a lot less than $16B. The US Navy builds these things as a matter of course in a few years using standard designs they crank out by the dozens.
hvb2
2 days ago
Those carriers have 700MW thermal output reactors. The new generation EPRs built now are about 6x that.
And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)
Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
goatlover
2 days ago
That's great, but what percentage of decarbonization will it stall at due to lack of energy density and relying on the wind/sun?
iknowstuff
2 days ago
How is it stalling anything if it offers a cheaper and faster build than nuclear? If you need to build 1GW and want it anytime in the next 2 decades, you sure as hell don’t choose nuclear. You either do natural gas or renewables these days. Those are the only competitive sources of energy.
mpweiher
2 days ago
You actually need energy even when the sun doesn't shine.
And you are incorrect: renewables are not competitive without heavy subsidies and preferential treatment, such as being allowed to shift the cost of their intermittency onto the reliable producers.
DarkNova6
2 days ago
The problems lies in the lack of storage. Which is why you need efficient and scalable battery technologies. This is the true key technology that yields much more promise than anything nuclear.
mpweiher
2 days ago
Since you use China as a comparison for solar: China builds 1.4GW nuclear power plants in 5 years for $3.5 bn.
And of course the capacity factor for PV is about 10%, so you need 10x the capacity to get the same output even on average. Never mind that you get nothing at night, and very little in winter.
g8oz
2 days ago
Not 10%. It's a 25% capacity factor for utility scale solar in the US. I'm assuming it's a similar number for China.
mpweiher
2 days ago
In Germany it has now dropped to 8%.
g8oz
2 days ago
>>It is important to note that within Germany’s generation data, Ember’s analysis has identified an unusual trend of declining solar irradiance-adjusted performance over the past several years. We do not yet have a definitive explanation for why this is, but it could be related to challenges in measuring behind-the-meter solar generation, exacerbated recently by high levels of residential battery storage. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that there is under-reporting of German solar generation.
- European electricity review 2024 by Ember
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
mpweiher
a day ago
It was 10% before, the recent drops in fleet capacity factors are explained by cannibalization/curtailment and the best locations already gone.
ViewTrick1002
a day ago
Which will be immediately unlocked as storage gets built.
In Germany 51 GW is already approved with another 400 GW/661 GWh in interconnection queue.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/11/12/german-network-operators...
DarkNova6
2 days ago
Look at the boom of nuclear in the 70s. The industry wide and deep expertise from production, to planning, to logistics. Particularly the french did this par excellence. But nuclear has first languished and is now almost non-existent in Europe.
Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective.
We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.
nunobrito
2 days ago
Plenty of comments here are disproving that baseless argument.
scythe
2 days ago
>So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe.
You could say most of the same things about batteries. There is a little lithium in Europe. But Europe doesn't have a battery industry. It's in China. And you could buy batteries from China, but we aren't doing that and the political trends don't support more energy dependence on China. You could also buy nuclear reactors from China, but of course Europe doesn't want to do that either.
What they are proposing is that Europe is going to pivot from not making batteries to not building nuclear plants. They will, however, write lots of papers about the reactors (neé batteries) they would like to build, if only the prevailing wage or regulatory regime or other economic excuse du jour wasn't stopping them.
It has increasingly become my impression after watching these debates unfold that the core technology is not the real problem. The problem is a lack of political will to encourage the growth of new industries in green energy, failing both at regulatory and industrial policy. Solar is succeeding, not because it is the best form of energy (though it is) but because it is mostly paid for and installed by individuals and small businesses (with a little capital you can own your own solar farm!).
belorn
2 days ago
Sweden had a major company try to make lithium batteries but it was not economical viable without major and continuously infusion of government subsidies. The company Northvolt is the largest bankruptcy in modern Swedish industrial history.
scythe
2 days ago
>The deal with BMW was cancelled in June 2024 because of Northvolt not being able to deliver on time. [Wikipedia]
Certainly this is some kind of failure. But this is Hacker News. Surely we can appreciate that you can't just blame the core technology when a company fails. History is full of companies that failed. Japan and the USA have battery companies despite high wages. There is something to be learned here, but I don't have the determination to figure out exactly what it is.
belorn
a day ago
We should definitively attribute some blame to the company and those who ran it. It is very similar to the nuclear projects in UK and Finland that went over budget and got delayed, except that those at least did finish and are predicted to create profit in the near future. Northvolt ended with nothing to show, and all the government subsidies it already received just went into the ether.
ViewTrick1002
a day ago
Their only profit is coming from in the UKs case tax payers and French tax payers by shouldering the fixed price contract costs in the Finnish case.
The UK case is even looking like it won’t be making profit as per recent cost overruns. Not sure how else to interpret:
> The French government has unsuccessfully tried in recent years to convince the UK government to help finance the nuclear plant.
And that is starting with an already unfathomably expensive CFD.
DarkNova6
a day ago
> The problem is a lack of political will to encourage the growth of new industries in green energy, failing both at regulatory and industrial policy
100% this, no doubt about it. There is a collective lack of investment into the future and I'd say we are witnessing managed decay more than anything else.
goatlover
2 days ago
But that means it's not a completely new industry since the French already have nuclear power plants and working experts.
mpweiher
2 days ago
Er...what?
There is a massive nuclear renaissance in-progress.
According to the following tracker:
https://globalenergymonitor.github.io/maps/trackers/nuclear/
There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively.
Note that both the numbers are pretty large compared to the installed base (more than doubling the installed base), that they are increasing for the earlier stages (indicating more is in the pipeline than is currently being built), and that all the pipeline stages are increasing over time.
Which is of course consistent with the fact that 34 countries have now signed the international pledge to triple nuclear output that was first agreed at COP28. These countries include: France, the United States, China, Japan, Poland, Sweden, etc. India has plans and is on track to triple by 2032, but hasn't signed the pledge.
I am also not sure why you think that "all existing experts" have retired and there is no nuclear industry. The World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris November 4-6 of this year had over 1000 exhibitors, and more than half of those were from Europe.
https://www.framatome.com/en/evenements-clients/world-nuclea...
Even phase-out-Germany still has substantial nuclear engineering capacity, there's even a nuclear fuel factory in Lingen. And of course the actual nuclear component of a nuclear power plant is only around 20%. About the same effort/cost goes into the steam turbines, of which Siemens is a major worldwide supplier.
And of course civil nuclear programs have next to nothing to do with military nuclear programs. There are many more users of civil nuclear power than there are military nuclear powers, and the military nuclear powers invariably got the bomb first, and added a civil program later, with some like Israel only having a military nuclear program, not a civilian one.
In fact, there's a fun anecdote from the beginnings of the French nuclear program, since you mention France: when the Messmer plan got started, the military wanted to deploy an indigenous type of reactor for the civilian program that was more suitable for military uses, but in the end the government decided to standardize on a US Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that was not useful for military purposes.
rstuart4133
a day ago
> There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively.
At about 1 GWatt per reactor, thats about 500 GWatt total new nuclear built over what must be decades, if it is built at all. A fair chunk of the existing 419 reactors will be retired in that time.
Meanwhile, Gemini tells me the planet added well over 100 GW renewable generation in 2024. That 100 GW is dispatchable. It was over 500 GW peak. Almost no renewables were retired in 2024. The rate new renewables are being added is growing at least quadratically.
Maybe Europe sunshine and wind resources mean they have no choice, it's nuclear or nothing. But renewables are being added at the pace they are for a reason. In the places that do have the renewable resources, they are far cheaper. If Europe is forced to go down the nuclear path, they are going to be paying far more than other places on the planet for their energy.
7bit
a day ago
There's a German documentary called "Yellow Cake". It is about the cost of mining uranium. It really was eye opening and I have seen it like ten years ago when I was about thirty. It took thirty years for someone to show me how incredibly devastating the mining of Uranium is to the environment. That's how good of kept secret it is. Because once you see it, you would never ever want nuclear energy ever again. And you finally understand how bad people are lying when they say, it is clean energy. It destroys entire landscapes for generations to come! It is extremely expensive and it is very finite.