tony_cannistra
7 hours ago
I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.
This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones.
Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additional radars on and within the turbine farms themselves.
So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
beembeem
7 hours ago
Result first (kill anything not carbon-based), find rationale later.
Same applies to how this admin forced layoffs at the green energy (hydro + nuclear) behemoth BPA [1] (which was funded entirely by ratepayers, not the federal government) then claimed an energy emergency to keep open coal plants serving the same geographies, coal plants that were already uneconomical and planned for shut down (or re-tooling to gas in the case of TransAlta's plant in WA). [2] Oh and they already re-hired some of the laid off staff at BPA because they overcut.
There is no point in taking these arguments at face value. It's an excuse generated after-the-fact, and in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy.
[1] https://www.columbian.com/news/2025/mar/12/letter-cuts-at-bp...
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/doe-or...
pbhjpbhj
3 hours ago
>in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy.
Also killing all humans, what idiots.
brandensilva
3 hours ago
Boggles my mind a bit given much of the oil companies own the new renewable tech too. Why not keep investing in the future.
benregenspan
3 hours ago
They might be the "wrong" oil companies. (In the case of Empire Wind, the administration is probably at best indifferent about screwing over the Norwegian state oil company.)
gregbot
7 hours ago
BPA is a federal agency. The Trump administration has been very supportive of zero carbon nuclear i believe they have promised $80 billion dollars to build new nuclear plants. Staff cuts dont mean they oppose using those energy sources.
gardncl
7 hours ago
US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage which means they are deployed for roughly the same cost as natural gas (so, direct competitors).
Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly.
Good news? Net new solar and wind plants can come "online" in less than two years. Net new natural gas takes four years. Part of why 95% of new energy deployed last year were renewables in the US, not just the subsidies.
vablings
7 hours ago
Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.
It is important for base load power and overnight power and should always be the backing of the grid frequency. Total loss of grid frequency is much more difficult to recover from with synthetic inertia.
A healthy grid should have all of the following - Nuclear base load that keeps the grid stable and pick up from low solar
- Gas plants for surge power and base load when nuclear/solar/wind cannot take up the slack
- Battery storage for surge/storage during off peak
- Solar for very low-cost cheap energy during peak usage hours
- Wind for other power source ie when the sun isnt shining as much
source: https://grid.iamkate.com/
bayindirh
7 hours ago
> overregulation.
Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).
Some things needs to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.
So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.
vablings
6 hours ago
> We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.
I think this is vastly overstated by the media. Boeing is still heavily regulated and has a pretty good safety record compared 20 or 30 years prior. The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
> Some things need to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.
I absolutely agree. I am not for the removing ALL regulations from nuclear energy but there is a whole political servitude cycle that has taken place for a number of years to make nuclear "safer" when in actuality it has little to no influence on the technology and just adds burden and overhead especially in the new construction of a nuclear power plant
Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine. Despite us being regularly exposed various levels of radiation in our lives most people are completely unaware of. Some people are terrified of dental x-rays but will happily jump on an intercontinental flight without any second guess.
I think arguing in the opposite of "you can never be too safe" is kind of like the whole double your bet every time you lose at the casino yes, its technically true but you need an infinite pool of chips for it to work.
piva00
5 hours ago
> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
Meaning they tried to skirt around the regulations, including regulatory capture by pushing self-certification because competition caught up to them while they spent money on buybacks instead of investing in R&D, perhaps even investing in absorbing some costs of certification of pilots into a new type they could develop into the future instead of relying on a design from 60 years ago.
Mismanagement is what created Boeing's issues, not regulation.
mlinhares
4 hours ago
Its also bullshit to say the EU has less regulation on developing planes than the US. Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.
It became a private equity managed business without ever being bought by private equity.
janc_
2 hours ago
Arguing the EU has less regulation than the USA on anything is 99.9999% always wrong.
Forgeties79
2 hours ago
> Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.
>cutting costs at every corner
Costs like those incurred when adhering to safety standards set by regulations?
seg_lol
3 hours ago
> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
Lost me right here, MCAS may have been motivated by losing type certification (as it should), but everything they did was not a result of regulations. Including upcharging to make the system actually redundant. Had they actually engineered the MCAS properly, they would have never gotten caught in the first place.
dctoedt
3 hours ago
> Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine.
Yup: It really is big, it really is scary.
Forgeties79
2 hours ago
> and trying to avoid costs to carriers
Isn’t that just code for trying to violate regulations without getting caught?
ericmay
6 hours ago
There is room between under-regulation and over-regulation.
Given that we are experiencing high costs and other barriers to construction, we can do at least two things: reduce red tape where it makes sense or where the risk is acceptable to help lower costs, or the US government can, through a variety of mechanisms ranging from basic research funding to direct subsidies, spend taxpayer money to try and alleviate costs.
Given that we supposedly (and I agree) need to build nuclear reactors to help power our country and given that we aren’t building them, we can optionally use both levers to encourage construction. There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good, and so having more of them must be more good.
This is not accurate.
Regulations are simply a tool we can wield to achieve desired outcomes within various risk and need-based calculations. More regulations can be good, for example we should ban highway billboards- that would be a good regulation. Or we can eliminate regulations - allow businesses to build more housing using pre-approved designs that meet existing zoning code. Neither is good or bad, except in that it helps to achieve some aim that society has.
The regulation or lack there of, of nuclear energy in the United States has absolutely nothing to do with Boeing airlines screwing up some plane designs. Drawing a conclusion that nuclear energy must be regulated (it is) or over-regulated (it probably is or else we would build more), because of a belief that Boeing airliners weren’t regulated enough is, to put it lightly, nonsense, and you are mistakenly using the application of some regulation or lack of causing some bad things to happen, to imply that more regulation in another area would mean good things happen through this framework of regulation == good.
And further, if you’re going to suggest that Boeing is effectively unregulated, which is untrue in practice and in principal, then I’d argue that was for the best given that it is a hugely successful company that employs tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions have flown and continue to fly on their airlines every single day safely and without incident.
Forgeties79
5 hours ago
With something as serious as a nuclear reactor, I am OK with over regulation.
UltraSane
2 hours ago
Over regulation of nuclear energy in the US made it so expensive we didn't replace all fossil fuels with it.
dzhiurgis
4 hours ago
But why not same scrutiny for coal?
ben_w
2 hours ago
Correct operation of a coal plant has global impact, and therefore coal should be phased out entirely.
Absent that, when a coal plant goes badly wrong, the damage is small enough and localised enough to be affordable.
When a nuclear plant goes wrong, the upper bound for error includes both Chrenobyl and also "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" followed by terrorists repeating the Goiânia accident somewhere.
Making all the failure modes not happen is expensive.
nandomrumber
an hour ago
In the entire history of civil nuclear power "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" has never happened.
The Goiânia accident caused four deaths.
The Chrenobyl reactors weren’t even housed in containment buildings, they were housed in what’s best described as a shed.
Got any real complaints?
dzhiurgis
2 hours ago
But one is enforced (nuclear security) and coal is not.
p.s. ICE cars are literally spewing cancer fumes right into kids faces. 0 fucks given. If anything people try to frame EVs as actual devil.
nandomrumber
an hour ago
Except that modern car engines are vastly improved over their 1970’s carburettor fed, catalytic convertered, counterparts.
dzhiurgis
14 minutes ago
Go and run your car in garage lol.
I swear HN is infested with bots now.
Forgeties79
2 hours ago
Why do you think I am more generous towards the coal industry? We are talking about nuclear power. If you would like my opinion on coal, I will gladly give it to you. You never asked.
For starters: I think clean coal is absolute nonsense (I’ve cited the White House’s outrageous stance on this several times on HN) and people brush away the environmental, social, and general health impacts of coal to their own peril. We know the harmful impacts. We know the body count. We have alternatives and it’s time to move on.
I am absolutely 100% critical of the coal industry/power - far more than I am of nuclear. It doesn’t even compare.
So to answer your question:
> But why not same scrutiny for coal?
I’ll give you the same answer I give every person who gives me this tired refrain without ever even trying to suss out what I think about coal: I am. You are misinformed. And it has no impact on my desire to demand the highest safety standards for nuclear power.
ImPostingOnHN
30 minutes ago
> There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good
The people who don't agree with you are largely reasonable, as you likely are, and are no more infectees of a "mind virus" for holding their opinions than you are for holding yours. There's no need to denigrate them, or misrepresent their views to try to make your point. Indeed, many of them arrived at their opinion after seeing what happens when people push for not-enough regulation: Once bitten, twice shy.
hammock
2 hours ago
> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).
Different people
mlinhares
4 hours ago
There's also the surprise factor that it just never gets cheaper, the newly formed monopolies quickly take over and push prices up beyond what they were before and milk the cow they were given until all customers are bled dry.
People that missed the solar bandwagon during the Biden admin are going to regret dearly not having installed it at the price and interest it was back then, we'll never see that again.
psunavy03
6 hours ago
This entire comment is conflating "overregulation" with "no regulation" when these are not at all the same things.
Oh, and with an extra seasoning of Murica Bad on the side.
ToucanLoucan
6 hours ago
> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper
Americans have no broad idea how anything works. Decades of attacks on our education system have left us civically illiterate (and for a lot of people, actually illiterate too.).
stuffn
6 hours ago
The dunning Kruger effect on full display here. I love the mix of anti-American sentiment and BBC-tier soundbite nonsense.
gregbot
3 hours ago
People who attack the “public education system” as an argument pretty universally agree with every destructive neoliberal policy the American government pushes on the West.
CamperBob2
6 hours ago
So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe.
Here's what overregulation of nuclear power has done for us over the past several decades: "We can't risk releasing radioactive pollution in an accident, so we'll build coal plants that spew it into the air during normal operation instead."
janc_
2 hours ago
Many countries shut down all their coal plants over a decade ago. Why didn't yours?
CamperBob2
20 minutes ago
Because Greenpeace and other powerful lobby groups convinced Americans that nuclear power was more dangerous than fossil fuels.
I'm not one of those tinfoil hatters who rants about how the anti-nuclear movement was seeded and sponsored by the Soviets... but I will say that if they didn't do that, they overlooked some of the most useful idiots at their disposal.
whoknowsidont
4 hours ago
Sounds like the other systems are under regulated.
stuffn
6 hours ago
Regulation, I’d argue, is a far more efficient route to monopoly than “unchecked capitalism”. If you have enough money you can gain regulatory capture.
If you pay close attention the majority of “evil capitalists” the far left bitches and whines about so much are masters at this. Last mile service, car manufactures, medicine, law, construction, power, water, technology, banking, housing, etc. Most of the world’s billionaires got their money through fucking over the average person with regulatory capture. This must present the leftist with a conundrum they simple ignore because it doesn’t fit their paradigm. More government leads to more control of wealth by fewer people.
This isn’t to say all regulation is bad. However, the line between over-regulating and under-regulating is so thin it’s often better to err on the looser side. Otherwise, in many places, small business is immediately crushed and “late stage capitalism” is the result.
whoknowsidont
4 hours ago
>I’d argue
You could, but it's without any basis or evidence.
root_axis
5 hours ago
Regulatory capture is not an argument against regulation, it's an unavoidable externality that has to be managed.
epistasis
5 hours ago
Nuclear is expensive because of the large amount of high-skill labor, including welding, that's required. For less economically advanced countries, that labor is cheap. For more economically advanced countries, that labor becomes more expensive. Regulation is a red-herring being pushed as an excuse, mostly by startups that are desperate to get the next round of funding, because it plays very well to the investor class, but it's not based in reality. I ask about this all the time and even if there are some half-baked critiques of things like ALARA, nobody has a path to actually making the Nth build of a reactor cheaper from changing regulations.
Even France, which is known for having far lower construction costs than the US on big projects, and for being very good at building out their nuclear fleet in the past, is at ~$12/W with their newest round of 6 reactors. And that's before they have even started construction:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-estimate...
This is roughly the cost of the latest US nuclear reactor at Vogtle, which is viewed as unrealistically expensive energy.
And even the most optimistic plans for reducing the cost of nuclear from the Liftoff report in 2023 from DOE doesn't place regulations as having much of a role in lowering costs:
https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-...
There's significant political interest in having regulation be the reason that nuclear is expensive, but I find almost zero people in the nuclear industry that are able to articulate where regulations increase the cost of builds or whether there's anything that could or should be changed about the regulations.
stephen_g
4 hours ago
Grid forming inverters for providing virtual inertia are only going to get better and better, there's no reason that as those control systems improve why synthetic inertia won't be able to be basically identical to real spinning mass. In the meantime while that technology matures, synchronous condensers can provide grid inertia without needing nuclear or coal, we already have about four in Australia supporting our grid and will probably have another dozen or so built over the next decade or two.
Retric
6 hours ago
Nuclear is inherently expensive even with zero regulations you have the full costs of a coal power plant + more expensive lifetime costs for fuel + extra costs associated with nuclear such as more and more highly educated workers.
Meanwhile coal is dead because it’s already more expensive than the market is willing to accept.
The only hope for nuclear is massive subsidies, deregulation on its own isn’t going to work.
jeltz
4 hours ago
How come Sweden as cheap nuclear power? The main reason electricity is kinda expensive in Sweden is because the EU forces is to export our cheap nuclear energy to Denmark and Germany.
Retric
4 hours ago
Subsides, the cost to produce electricity and the cost charged for that energy end up very different.
ViewTrick1002
4 hours ago
Paid off nuclear plants produce quite cheap electricity. The problem is that it takes 10-15 years of building and then 40 years of paying $180-220/MWh to get a paid off nuclear plant as per modern western construction costs.
Retric
3 hours ago
In terms of pure operating costs ignoring everything else it can look good vs other sources that include all costs.
However, ‘Paid off nuclear’ in terms of construction costs still needs to worry about decommissioning, and their maintenance costs keep increasing every year.
Several power plants have looked at going offline for potentially years and spending billions at around year 40 to get to year ~60 as not being worth the investment. That’s the issue with projecting those long lifespans, the buildings/containment structure/cooling tower may be fine but that doesn’t mean the pipes, pumps, turbines, and control systems etc are still fine.
janc_
2 hours ago
And don't forget the cost of storing nuclear waste for the next 10000 years, which is never included in the "cost of nuclear".
nandomrumber
an hour ago
What nuclear waste? Where is it?
Somebody must be able to point to the nuclear waste by now. There it is, waving frantically in panic, the nuclear waste! It’s coming right for us!
Something is either highly radioactive for a short amount of time, or not very radioactive for a long amount of time.
But never both highly radioactive and for a long time.
In reality, there is so little nuclear waste that most of it has mostly been stored on site where it was generated, taking up less space than any grid scale solar or wind.
ImPostingOnHN
23 minutes ago
> What nuclear waste? Where is it?
Good question! Since you asked: it is largely in cooling pools and piling up in empty lots around nuclear power plants, waiting for safe, secure storage to appear.
> Something is either highly radioactive for a short amount of time, or not very radioactive for a long amount of time.
This is not true at all, unless you consider "short amount of time" to include decades to centuries to millenia.
xp84
an hour ago
You sound like you know a lot, I’m curious if there’s a case to be made that instead of batteries that take a ton of minerals and need to be replaced, instead using the excess energy to store energy by e.g. pumping water to higher altitudes and letting it generate electricity on the way down later when needed.
cperciva
6 hours ago
Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.
It's not just a matter of "overregulation". ALARA, aka As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable is an explicit goal of nuclear regulation.
sdenton4
6 hours ago
Or maybe it's expensive because it doesn't scale. The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them. And if we /do/ hit economies of scale, uranium availability is likely to become a problem...
vablings
5 hours ago
> The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them.
I disagree. building big infrastructure projects always scales well. As stated by the project managers at Hinkley Point C (the most expensive nuclear reactor ever) they estimate that build times and cost will be significantly reduced for the second reactor due to the knowledge and expertise baked into the workforce. Frances nuclear revolution during the 1972 oil crisis also shows the same thing with construction cost getting lower the more reactors built.
There are other reactor designs that do not use uranium that have been tested and hypothesized.
jandrewrogers
5 hours ago
> per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high
Unless you are the US Navy. It probably helps that they churn out dozens of the same few cookie-cutter designs without needing permission from NIMBYs.
epistasis
5 hours ago
Those reactors were also very expensive, though, weren't they? I've heard lots of people look to them as a reason that SMRs might work, but not because the naval reactors were cheap. Plus they use uranium enriched to levels that we typically don't allow in civilian reactors...
jandrewrogers
3 hours ago
Even at military contracting prices, estimates put them at $100-200M each IIRC. That's not terrible.
The highly enriched fuel is used because it simplifies the design and maintenance. It eliminates all the machinery you'd need to support things like operational refueling of the reactor. Old designs still needed to be rebuilt every 25 years but the new ones are sealed systems that are never supposed to be cracked open over their design life.
I think the main reason we don't use HEU in civilian reactors is non-proliferation concerns, valid or not. Ideally you'd want maximally simple, sealed reactors for the same reason the US Navy does.
epistasis
2 hours ago
I'm not finding much support costs being that low... best collection of info I have seen is here:
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
At 1.5-1.7x the cost of diesel ship, and the "well-managed" Virginia class costing $3.6B, we are at over $1B for 60MW of power, 200MW thermal, which is far worse than larger civilian reactors per watt.
The reason we use nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are their far superior operational characteristics when compared to hydrocarbon fuels. That benefit is massive and well worth it. For terrestrial grid electricity those benefits don't really exist.
vablings
5 hours ago
Honestly not a terrible idea. Just have your reactor on a huge barge and if it goes meltdown just drag it out into international waters and let the fish deal with it /s
larkost
4 hours ago
An actual meltdown at sea would have the now-molten uranium come in contact with seawater, which would instantly flash to high-pressure steam, throwing the uranium into a cancer-causing cloud that the world has never yet seen.
This is absolutely a terrible idea about how to deal with a meltdown.
cbm-vic-20
4 hours ago
Doing the math, it looks like the amount of uranium in pre-disaster Chernobyl is 200 metric tons. Apparently, that can bring 333ML (133 Olympic sized swimming pools) of room temperature water to a boil.
sheikhnbake
7 hours ago
I suspect geothermal is going to quickly replace Nuclear as the most viable option for base load stabilization. Tech has come a long way towards letting us access it away from hot zones and it uses a lot of the same infrastructure and expertise that the oil industry has already developed.
m0llusk
22 minutes ago
Or possibly under regulated. Where exactly is all the radioactive waste going to go? Especially the spent fuel rods pose major disposal challenges. The one site that was looking hopeful appears to have been discarded. It is a bit late in the game to be pending basic stuff that is piling up. Most nuclear power plants are not well sited for long term disposal, though that is what is happening.
immibis
3 hours ago
Is there a comparison of how much nuclear costs versus the number of cities destroyed per year? Say, if we allow 1 meltdown per year does it become comparable to solar or does it require 10 meltdowns per year?
nandomrumber
an hour ago
How many cities per year does solar destroy?
What?
wahnfrieden
2 hours ago
nuclear also has a very limited lifespan if we go all-in on it. we will run out.
TheTaytay
36 minutes ago
Run out of what? The fuel? Given its energy density, and uranium availability, that seems unlikely, but I haven’t done math on it.
lawlessone
6 hours ago
>Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.
Would to prefer underregulating it?
How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?
vablings
6 hours ago
> Would to prefer underregulating it?
No
> How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?
Difficult problem. The issue right now is that nobody wants to be seen to remove a regulation from a nuclear. One of the biggest things is that ALARA/LNT needs to go away. It is not useful, and it is not based on good modern science
Creating new assessments based on modern research would be good and there is already a ton of evidence around that could be foundational for making real science based changes
AlexandrB
6 hours ago
Changes to bring regulation in line with actual risk would be a good start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc
fasterik
6 hours ago
This comment is also misleading. First, $/watt is not how levelized cost of electricity is measured, you need to use $/watt-hour (or more commonly, $/MWh) over the lifetime of the project. By definition, levelized cost of electricity does not include storage.
The cost is also affected by the percent of energy coming from wind+solar+batteries vs. from natural gas. Wind+solar+batteries are cheap when they are used to supplement natural gas. If they were supplying 95% of generation (Levelized Full System Cost of Electricity 95%, LFSCOE-95), then the price of wind+solar+batteries would be $97/MWh compared to $37/MWh for gas, and $96/MWh for nuclear. For LFSCOE-100, the price of wind+solar+batteries increases to $225/MWh, compared to $122/MWh for nuclear and $40/MWh for natural gas.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
So yes, natural gas is much cheaper than nuclear. But that doesn't mean that nuclear shouldn't play a large role going forward. The moral of the story is that the price of energy is complicated. It's likely that a combination of nuclear, wind, solar, and battery backup would be the best option in terms of price and carbon emissions.
FarmerPotato
4 minutes ago
Thanks for that.
A cost model has a lot of independent variables. It can be a weird function of the quantity you want of each technology. Not everything gets cheaper at scale. And you need to be able to manage time-varying demand.
For easy example: a few solar or wind farms cost $X to bring up, but to go large scale you need to also store or transmit the energy, plus keep fallback options. That makes 95% or 100% reliance prohibitive.
There is also the speed of powering on/off. Gas combined cycle turbines are fastest to come online/go offline, followed by hydroelectric (if you have it). Coal and nuclear are at the slow end. You need to have the ability to match total sources and loads at any time.
Just some intuition why total cost is a complex function.
gardncl
5 hours ago
My comment is not misleading, you're just using outdated data from 2022.
Sure, happy to quibble over units.
The most recent mid-2025 data is from lazard here, it echos exactly what I'm saying.
Website: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
PDF of report: https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Go to page 8 of that PDF and you will see these ranges for LCOE:
* Solar $38-$78/MWh
* Solar + battery $50-131/MWh
* Gas combined cycle (cheapest fossil fuel) $48-107/MWh
Yes, we are finally at price parity for the technologies.
fasterik
5 hours ago
I didn't disagree that there is price parity for the levelized cost. There is still not price parity for levelized full system cost. If we used wind and solar for 95-100% of generation, the price would be much higher.
My point is not that we can or should replace wind and solar with nuclear. It's that it is far cheaper to use a combination of nuclear, wind, and solar than it is to use 100% wind and solar.
laurencerowe
5 hours ago
I think it’s quite conceivable that nuclear would be cheaper for a 100% carbon free grid.
But I don’t understand how the combination of nuclear, wind and solar would be low cost. Wouldn’t you effectively have to build out enough nuclear to cover still cloudy days at which point your wind and solar is not very useful? That sounds expensive.
I suspect we won’t end up building much nuclear because we will already have built out so much wind and solar. Nuclear is a poor fit for filling gaps in generation by intermittent renewables because fuel costs are negligible so it costs the same whether you run at 50% or 100% of rated output.
To eliminate carbon emissions entirely we will need some green hydrogen for turning into aviation fuel and as chemical feedstocks. Perhaps the gas backup will eventually burn that.
belorn
4 hours ago
Green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive and are still way more expensive than using fossil fuels to create hydrogen (called black hydrogen). Burning green hydrogen for electricity when we have yet to make green steel economical viable is not a good idea. Nuclear is still a magnitude cheaper than that.
Green hydrogen has to first prove itself that it can become economical viable. One of the biggest test trials for that is the Swedish initiative, and that one is mostly paid through subsidies and grants. Sadly it isn't looking very great even if the government did decide to continue sending more billions into the project.
gardncl
5 hours ago
Agreed. I misunderstood your comment and got too hot-headed. Sorry about that.
Yes, the 95% renewables is the number we should be shooting for not 100% as that causes battery backup price to explode.
I have been pro-nuclear for a long time, to disappointing results naturally. So, with how well renewables are doing I've really just jumped on this train and seen nuclear as more of a distraction from the critical next 10-20 years given how long it takes to come online.
At the end of the day the grid is only about 30% of the emissions problem (depending where you look).
fasterik
5 hours ago
I may have misinterpreted your original post as saying we should be going full renewables. I think we're basically in agreement about prices. We might just disagree about the percent of energy that should come from nuclear.
I don't see nuclear as a distraction, I see it as a piece of the puzzle. We will always need a source of reliable, uninterrupted power. Whether that comes from natural gas, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, etc. depends on geographical considerations and what tradeoffs we are willing to make in terms of cost and carbon emissions. I'm still optimistic that small modular reactors are going to see success in the coming decades.
gardncl
5 hours ago
Yeah, my opinion on how much should come from nuclear is that current levels (~20%) are enough to fill the rest in with renewables.
I'd love to be France (~50%) but there is so much pushback against the technology due to accidents that happened decades ago with generation II plants (chernobyl + three mile island). We're now building tech for gen III+ plants and there is just almost no appetite to build them, we finished the vogles and now are completely pivoting to SMRs, which is fine.
SMR is probably what makes the most sense even if they're less efficient because until now the nuclear plants have not been very standardized which increases costs.
Why do I think nuclear is a distraction? Because I don't think it's a like-for-like replacement of fossil fuels and this admin knows that. They're willing to invest because it won't disrupt their biggest donors. The time horizon on nuclear is long, and there is a future (I hope) where we have nuclear plants hooked up to carbon capture technology and we pull these gasses out of the atmosphere. But until then what is the cheapest and most efficient path between current emissions and a massive cut in them? Renewables and battery tech (that's currently undergoing very dramatic cost reductions!).
belorn
4 hours ago
When they calculate that Solar + battery would cost $50-131/MWh, how is that number reached? What is the number of charge cycles and over what time span? It seems obvious that the cost of producing, installing and operating a 1MWh system of solar and batteries will cost more than a one time payment of $50-131.
Most of the time when I try to find any data there is the underlying assumption that the charge cycle is a day and night cycle, where the day produce the energy needed during the night, and not a seasonal storage that basically has a single charge cycle per year.
ViewTrick1002
5 hours ago
First. $120/MWh for new built nuclear power is cheaper than any modern western reactors. Real costs are ~180-220/MWh when running at 100% 24/7 all year around. As based on Vogtle, FV3, HPC, proposed EPR2s, proposed Polish reactors etc.
The problem with these ”system costs” analyses is that they don’t capture the direct physical incentive structure of our grids.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a home battery buy $180-220/MWh when they have their own electricity available?
Why should they not sell their excess to the grid cheaper than said nuclear power? It is zero marginal cost after all.
You can call it tragedy of the commons but new built nuclear power simply is unfit for our modern grids.
We need firming for near emergency reserves coming from production with the cheapest possible CAPEX without an outrageous OPEX.
Likely gas turbines running on carbon neutral fuels. But only if we determine that they are needed in the 2030s.
New built nuclear power simply doesn’t even enter the picture in late 2025.
salynchnew
5 hours ago
> Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly.
People still insist that ecofascists(?) or NIMBYism is what killed nuclear, when the reality is that it was the coal industry.
hunterpayne
2 hours ago
There is sort of some truth to that but its still pretty disingenuous to phase it that way. The more honest way to say it is that the NIMBYists are (probably somewhat unintentionally) keeping FFs in use by opposing nuclear.
Also, you (and everyone else in the thread) are listing capacity costs. Nobody cares about capacity costs except the CFO of a utility. Utilization costs are what matters. And by that (honest) metric, nuclear is quite cheap if you exclude the extra costs due to scientifically illiterate eco-activists and regulators.
People like to say that "A diamond is forever" is the best marketing effort of all time. I disagree, the ability of FF extractors to get ecos to do their dirty work for them is far more "impressive" (from a POV lacking in ethics).
PS The number of outright falsehoods in just this thread about nuclear should prove my point. Just research about how nuclear pays for cleanup and compare that to some comments in this thread for an example.
ViewTrick1002
5 hours ago
South Korea which famously had an enormous corruption scandal coupled to their nuclear industry. Leading to jail time and a complete regulatory retake.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
The proposed costs for the Westinghouse reactors in Poland and EPR2s in France are pretty much in line with the unthinkably expensive Vogtle costs. They haven’t even started building.
hunterpayne
2 hours ago
"They haven’t even started building."
Both Vogtle units (3 & 4) have been online for over a year.
cyberax
6 hours ago
> US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity)
That's when storage is not considered. Once storage is factored in, the LCOE becomes anywhere between $5 to $20. In the US, solar makes a lot of sense in the southern states, less sense in Midwest and WA.
That being said, the US still has plenty of capacity to accommodate more "sewer grade" (no battery backup) solar generation. It will provide easy CO2 savings and it can work well with flexible power consumers (AI training datacenters).
gardncl
6 hours ago
That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test. Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x? So, someone installing a home battery system is paying up to 10x their solar install cost to also have battery backup? No way.
Also, battery tech continues to improve rapidly, we're seeing breakthroughs like this rapidly reduce the price: https://spectrum.ieee.org/co2-battery-energy-storage
A good video on LCOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-891blV02c
coryrc
5 hours ago
As usual, explain how you're going to power heat pumps in the Northern half of the country during a 3 week bomb cyclone. There are answers and they cost money.
The only answer we're using is to build 1:1 natural gas capability for solar, which is roughly double the cost. That's a solution, but it needs to be accounted for when comparing options.
gardncl
5 hours ago
Alternative to natural gas? Wind, geothermal, or nuclear. Wind is already in the northern half of the country and operates well when winterized, unlike the ones in Texas that broke since they were not winterized during that freeze a while back.
Natural gas and fossil fuels are not our only options, they are the easiest options.
coryrc
4 hours ago
It's also like to see a comparison to giving people/companies a discount if they have alternative methods of heating for 3 weeks and agree to be powered off. Places like hospitals and universities often have generators and do this. Sand "batteries" (aka electric resistive heaters in a few tons of sand heated to 1000°C) might be cost-effective if standardized. You keep it insulated and hot until the power goes out, then you let it bleed heat out to keep you from dying.
coryrc
5 hours ago
Context is solar and pricing. You can't only build solar, because people will freeze to death. So you can't say "solar+batteries is only $X/W!!!” because you're ignoring that you must also have a rarely-used natural gas, or install a rarely-used long-distance transmission line, or install rarely-used storage capacity. Which is fine, but you're being dishonest about costs if you don't.
osn9363739
5 hours ago
Couldn't this also be solved with transmission from other parts of the country? or is that what you're saying?
coryrc
5 hours ago
Yes, but you have to pay for a line you don't plan to use much, so its capital costs should be attributed to the generation method requiring it. Which is fine, but not including it is dishonest about the true costs.
osn9363739
4 hours ago
I think if you designed and built it with the idea in mind that you're building your renewables in the sunny/windy centre/south of the US to be transported to a these places all year round it's a better idea than it being a backup. But I agree that the cost of over generation should be factored in to comparison pricing. But I also think we don't include enough of the costs in FF infra either.
triceratops
5 hours ago
> a 3 week bomb cyclone
Sounds pretty windy to me.
coryrc
4 hours ago
I'm not sure how often the upper Midwest gets Dunkelflaute. If rare enough, then overbuilding wind is a possible solution (especially combined with additional transmission) but, again, those costs must be accounted for or the solar costs are dishonest.
https://www.ehn.org/europe-faces-challenges-from-low-wind-an...
cyberax
an hour ago
> That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test.
These are numbers from the known far-right organization....err... Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...
> Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x?
Exactly. And you need closer to 100x for some locations (Germany) for the solar to be reliable enough.
Solar is _very_ cheap when you don't care about reliability, and impossible otherwise. Wind is a bit more nuanced, but in general has a similar story.
toomuchtodo
6 hours ago
This administration won't last long enough to see any of these nuclear ambitions to any sort of success (its takes at least a decade to build nuclear generators in the developed world). Words are cheap, and regime change is coming. Solar and battery storage is already the cheapest form of generation in most of the world, and will only continue to decline in price, while the US will continue to face system and labor challenges precluding the large scale construction of commercial nuclear. The US currently doesn't have enough labor to build residential construction and naval vessels, so it will be interesting to see where they attempt to source this labor from (assuming the usual labor pipeline challenges where it takes up to half a decade to turn a human into a skilled tradesperson from an apprentice or other form of beginner).
Citations:
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-...
https://www.agc.org/news/2025/08/28/construction-workforce-s...
https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/10/hbi-labor-market-report
https://www.slashgear.com/2034405/us-navy-warship-building-w...
jetpks
7 hours ago
on the nuclear front, the administration has cut investment and reduced action in exchange for cheap promises. judge actions, not words.
gregbot
3 hours ago
> on the nuclear front, the administration has cut investment
Fascinating, I haven’t heard this from anywhere else is there something specific you are referring to?
Maybe this? https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-05/article-7001/trumps-fy-2...
Its not clear what specific programs this $408 million cut would affect but frankly ARDP and Gen III+ reactor development are not needed. What is needed is large construction investment in existing approved designs like AP-1000 and BWRX-300 which is what the $80 billion pledge is for. “The full details of the $80 billion deal, including the precise allocation of financing and risk-sharing, have not been specified.” With no contract signed your skepticism is warranted. https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-05/article-7001/trumps-fy-2...
tehjoker
7 hours ago
this point is very important. trump will take all sides of an issue rhetorically so you can almost always find some quote of his supporting whatever position you favor but they have a very definite political program that is concentrating control, cutting federal workers, rolling back renewables, doing spectacular stunts to favor racists, and aggression overseas
rtkwe
5 hours ago
Promises are cheap with this admin, don't count any money until it's actually being paid out. Used to be I'd say until it's in a bill but this administration claims the unilateral right to cut any funded program.
vablings
7 hours ago
So why make the cuts in the first place? There are so many things that could have been changed like getting rid of ALARPA for actual scientifically backed methods other than pointless gratitude's of X dollars for X industry. If the Trump admin truly believed in move fast and break things why is nothing moving
More power is always good (see china being 1# in solar, nuclear and wind lol), and it's known that the cost of energy directly correlates with growth right now there is no excuse for cutting any federal workers in the energy industry.
bakies
7 hours ago
Seems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws, facts, and balance checks. Just like the word "terrorist." It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.
So obviously the government can spend some of that $1T military budget on fixing their coastal radar.
I thought Massachusetts just won in court to get their money or construction resumed, wonder if this means they have to go back to court.
dylan604
7 hours ago
> Seems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws
By has become, you mean always has been, right?
bakies
7 hours ago
I guess I think it used to be more believable that it was used for security, but maybe I wouldn't if I knew better history.
zmgsabst
3 hours ago
I’m inclined to believe always — as the case establishing “state secrets” for national security was actually about covering up negligence.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/48-crash-us-hid-behind-natio...
BLKNSLVR
6 hours ago
Since 2001 at least.
_aavaa_
6 hours ago
Since WWII and the bomb. See Bomb Power by Garry Wills
sowbug
3 hours ago
Don't forget "war on" something that isn't a nation state.
abirch
3 hours ago
I think the Washington Generals have a better record than the USA on “wars on” non nation states
GolfPopper
3 hours ago
>It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.
Given that this is the same Supreme Court that ruled Biden (or Trump) could have them all shot[1], it seems near-certain that you're correct.
1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf (JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR dissent, pages 29-30)
stefanfisk
7 hours ago
Here in Sweden a bunch of offshore wind farm project and even residential PV installations are blocked by the military for unspecified reasons that everyone assumes is that it blocks radar and other signal intelligence.
Even though you can partially work around the issue with better onshore equipment or just placing the stuff on the other side of the interfering equipment it is still a step down from not having any interference in the first place. Especially if you want to keep your listening equipment secret.
opello
6 hours ago
I'm surprised residential PV even interacts with radar -- or is that the other signal intelligence part?
hunterpayne
2 hours ago
It probably has more to do with the fact that solar that far north is a non-starter. Any PV installed there will actually make AGW and carbon emissions worse, not better. Basically, the amount of carbon emitted due to manufacturing is greater than the carbon savings over the lifetime of the panel in those locations.
itishappy
4 hours ago
Big flat conductive panels make good reflectors.
dzhiurgis
2 hours ago
Wonder if it can be leveraged as for passive radar. Synthetic aperture also comes to mind.
I’m clueless in this field tho.
ViewTrick1002
5 hours ago
The best part is that Danish, German and Polish parks are planned mere kilometers away from the denied Swedish ones.
The military will need to figure out how deal with off-shore wind no matter what.
Scoundreller
2 hours ago
I did the same thing in Sim City: put my coal plants in the corner of town
whatsupdog
6 minutes ago
UK has a much smaller coastline, so it might be more cost efficient for them to install extra radars. Also I'm sure the wind turbines interfere in acoustic submarine detection due to the noise they generate.
jandrewrogers
7 hours ago
Even if it is a pretense, it is pretty obvious that this would allow ship-borne drones to use the wind farms as an effective screen. Putting radar platforms beyond the wind farms that are as capable as the existing land-based radars would be quite expensive in both capex and opex. Some of the existing land-based radars would likely need to be moved, ideally. No one was really thinking about this type of threat a decade ago.
That said, Democrats have also been trying to stop offshore wind farms for years (e.g. Vineyard Wind), so there is probably bipartisan support.
Msurrow
6 hours ago
The construction on some of these windmill farms started years ago. Before that permits & legal has been in the works for a long time. This surely included security clearances.
The orange shrimp pulling the “national security” card now, on the same day as he also creates a new Greenland debacle, is very clearly simply an attempt to strong arm the danish govt into Greenland concessions (in turn simply to please his fractile lille ego)
jeltz
4 hours ago
They were approved before the invasion of Ukraine and before our politicians could see how devestating drones can be. Just because the orange dictator did something does not mean it necessarily was wrong. Even a broken clock is right two times per day.
ineedasername
4 hours ago
>"Even a broken clock is right two times per day."
That is incorrect. There are any number of ways in which a clock might be broken such that its hands are not in the correct position even once per day.
gmac
3 hours ago
Not incorrect so much as underspecified?
The phrase more commonly starts with a ‘stopped’ clock, which works more clearly.
onewheeltom
3 hours ago
Should be “a stopped clock is right twice a day”
jandrewrogers
5 hours ago
This reply doesn't address any core point.
When these wind farms were permitted many years ago, shipborne drones were not part of the threat matrix. It was considered purely hypothetical even a decade ago because it was not an imminent capability for any country even though e.g. the US DoD had studied it. In the last few years shipborne drones have emerged very quickly as a substantial practical threat, largely due to the Russia/Ukraine war. Governments around the world are struggling to adapt to this new reality because none of their naval systems are designed under this assumption.
Whether or not this is convenient for Trump doesn't take away from the reality of the security implications.
Msurrow
4 hours ago
Yes, it does.
First of all: occam's razor. Political theatrics seems simpler than the US defence/intelligence forces sudenly realizing that drones can be launched from ships. Esp. with the timing involved.
Second: Established/traditional radar systems cannot spot drones. Take it from someone living in a country that recently had its airspace violated by (assumingly) Russian drones, affecting national infrastructure. It was considered an attack at the time. I don’t think thats the word we use any more, for political reasons.
Third: Trump already shut down one of these windmill farms once this year. Until the danish company building the park sued and got the courts word that the shutdown was illegal, and resumed construction. The current shutdown has much larger impact for many multi-national companies. Usually there is a political process expected between allied countries before such a drastisc move. We havnt seen that ie no attempt to solve a concrete (security) issue before punching the red button ie probably because there was no motivation for a solution ie the security issue was probably not an actual issue)
Fourth: Earlier this week the danish intelligence services released a new security assesment of USA (that takes Trumps behaviour on the international scene into account). That probably hurt the little mans ego, and now we see a retaliation. This provides yet another motivation for Trumps action, besides factual, real security concerns.
Looking at this purely from the security aspect is naive, and fails to consider the context of the real world.
bluGill
3 hours ago
Before Ukrain everyone though drones were easy to counter. Now that has proven false.
granted Trump probably isn't thinking that, but the concern should be real. We need better drone defense before someone (Russia, Iran...) starts anonymously shooting down airplanes.
janc_
2 hours ago
That's nonsense. Many countries have been using drones before. (Starting with Nazi Germany during WW 2.)
bluGill
an hour ago
We have learned counters for them over the years.
Ukraine makes drones vastly cheaper than the current counters and so we can be bankrupted trying the current counters.
alphazard
6 hours ago
Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US. That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if subsidies end. It makes sense for the area, the amount of wind, the serviceability of the deployments, etc.
Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more dependent on subsidies, it's a battle for/against rent-seeking. One party is in favor of this particular kind of rent-seeking and the other party isn't (they will be in favor of a different kind, no doubt). The subsidies are necessary for these deployments to make financial sense, and if they went away, then it would just be a bad place to put a windmill.
There is no national security issue, there is no real case for energy infrastructure either. This use case needs government money to make sense, and is therefore sensitive to political fluctuations.
hammock
2 hours ago
> Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US
Idk what you mean by that. I pulled up a map and saw dots all over the place. They are concentrated on the east coast because you can’t build fixed on west coast (has to be floating) but they are pretty much anywhere on the east coast.
pbhjpbhj
3 hours ago
Why do you say it's rent seeking? Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore.
You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?
alphazard
2 hours ago
> Why do you say it's rent seeking?
Because that's what economists call it when you get something for nothing, as is the case with any subsidy. I'm not going to argue this point; interested readers can look up how these energy projects are financed. Windmills that are privately funded, including debt and risk show you where it actually makes sense to put a windmill.
> Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore.
Not going to argue with any of this, although you left out maintenance costs, and larger blades means more value at risk. I'm not convinced that your efficiency calculation is measured in dollars and not windmill hours.
I would caution any engineer types reading from pressing their nose too close to the details of a particular energy technology. Instead, it's better to focus on the business plan or economic shadow that a particular energy project leaves. Dollars go in and energy comes out. A bunch of money has to go in up front, then trickles of money slowly over time, and occasionally spikes of money have to go in randomly. In exchange there is a modest, predictable flow of money out, which eventually is larger than all the in-flows in the bull case. The question to ask is: how much in and out of dollars and of Joules at each point in time? How does that compare to hamsters on wheels, people on bicycles, and lighting things on fire?
> You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?
This was never a stated premise, and my post starts with the opposite sentiment.
scoofy
6 hours ago
The problem is that we have a Congress that cares more about in-group loyalty than they do about idiocy.
Meanwhile, we even have Michael Burry pointing out the obvious: we're losing to China because we're not building up every bit of energy capacity that we can. But, sure, why not just ban windfarms in a location perfectly suited to them:
IndrekR
6 hours ago
Taiwan strait is filled with offshore wind turbines from both sides. This is not an issue for PRC nor Taiwan.
hammock
2 hours ago
Either it is not, or is a huge issue. Those windmills could be deployed on purpose
the__alchemist
6 hours ago
Yea... I don't trust the motivations, but can confirm that on AA radars looking low (Where you might find UAS or just low-flying aircraft), wind farms show up as clusters of false hits.
anigbrowl
6 hours ago
It's not like they're moving around though.
the__alchemist
6 hours ago
Yea; it will be obvious if you've accidentally locked into one, then look at it with eyes or other equipment. And the 0 ground speed. But UAS could hide in them effectively I speculate?
stevage
5 hours ago
But if they're just false hits it's easy to filter them out, right?
jandrewrogers
2 hours ago
It is more difficult than you may be assuming. How do you know the hits are false? These "hits" are collections of samples at points in time, not continuous tracks. The "tracks" are reconstructed by making inferences from the samples.
Determining whether any pair of sequential samples represents the same entity or two unrelated entities is an extremely difficult inference problem with no closed or general solution. If there is too much clutter, it becomes almost unresolvable. Aliasing will create a lot of false tracks.
History has shown that any heuristic you use to filter the clutter will be used by your adversary as an objective function to hide from your sensors once they know you are using it (e.g. doppler radar "notching").
For this reason the inference algorithms are classified but they will degrade rapidly with sufficient clutter no matter how clever. It is a limitation of the underlying mathematics.
stevage
2 hours ago
That's a great explanation, thanks.
the__alchemist
3 hours ago
Yes, but it increases the difficulty of finding an aircraft moving near them.
einrealist
2 hours ago
> So clearly this is politically motivated
The oil price is too low. Venezuela and now this, it is all part of selling fossil fuels.
AnthonyMouse
6 hours ago
> So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
I approve of this, because they were going to come up with an excuse one way or another, but "it's classified" has been a BS excuse that has received far too much deference to cover for all kinds of nonsense going back many decades, and being sufficiently flagrant about it is exactly what it takes to create enough of a backlash to finally do something about it.
dfxm12
6 hours ago
So clearly this is politically motivated
Trump has been charging at windmills ever since he was defeated in UK courts in a case where he didn't like that wind turbines (that provide enough power for 80,000 homes) could be seen from his golf course.
Gibbon1
6 hours ago
Combination of he's vindictive and he's making an example of what happens when you don't preemptively pay him a bribe.
pclmulqdq
5 hours ago
These things are also probably really loud if you happen to have a sensitive set of sonar buoys. I'm not entirely sure how you solve that one, because putting them in deeper water would also make them less effective.
cr125rider
3 hours ago
This seems like maybe the least BS answer. Sub detection.
janc_
2 hours ago
Should be easy enough to use some form of active noise cancelling for that.
KoolKat23
7 hours ago
It's well known ol' Don Quixote doesn't like windmills, I mean wind turbines.
bvan
4 hours ago
This administration is entirely founded on lies. Irrespective of any merits, of any, of its actions it has zero credibility.
calmbonsai
2 hours ago
Yep. I worked with France's EDF on their offshore turbines https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/inventing-the-future-of-... .
This rationale by the U.S. is total BS.
Spooky23
4 hours ago
This administration is all about wielding any form of executive power that they can get an unscrupulous lawyer to cook up.
andyjohnson0
7 hours ago
> I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.
Could it be that they just feel that offshore wind infra is difficult to defend militarily?
jandrewrogers
7 hours ago
No, they aren't any more difficult to defend than any other offshore platform. They do interfere with long-range land-based radar in a way that is problematic with the emergence of shipborne drones.
triceratops
5 hours ago
Are they shutting down offshore oil drilling too?
hammock
2 hours ago
Order of magnitude increase in difficulty to defend a wind farm vs an oil rig. Wind farms are dispersed, not continuously manned, harder to monitor/enforce a 500m maritime safety zone of exclusion, have a greater attack surface (subsea cables, substations), and are easier to sabotage with plausible deniability
KaiserPro
6 hours ago
https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/14/3541/2021/
There is data on what wind turbines do to radar.
sigwinch
7 hours ago
I feel like the defense against drones is denser, sharper turbines.
reactordev
7 hours ago
This. Also, drones can be jammed pretty easily so making jamming stations on those platforms would be something too.
The Brit’s have the right approach, just put radar on them so now you can see past them.
tim333
3 hours ago
The drones could fly over them.
You could mount interceptor drones on them though. Like https://youtu.be/bsy5xzdKahU?t=80
giantg2
6 hours ago
I'd imagine subsurface detection faces issues with the large electromagnetic fields from generation and transmission too.
rolph
7 hours ago
yes i found that take as well, i also found it interesting that potential for an industrial colony, and early warning infrastructure is undervalued.
moomoo11
6 hours ago
Wind seems like a waste of money compared to solar. We aren’t the UK where they are a tiny island holding on.
We have a massive land area on which we can build solar and plug it into existing power lines or build that part out. Probably way more feasible and better power generation results than building wind out in the ocean.
standardUser
6 hours ago
That you could come up with one reasonable-sounding explanation while they offered nothing makes me wonder if the administration is too lazy, or too inept.
sl_convertible
6 hours ago
Also look at how defensible having your power generation outside your coastline is. This is creating a big vulnerability in your power grid.