Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.

From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.

The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.

Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.

Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.

China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.

It's not and that's fine, but it's very much part of the European economic area, and we have a great relationship as well as a lot of alignments with standards and so on. The EU wouldn't have no issues taking notes from the Swiss.

While it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.

Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that.

There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.

What should one do then? Just shut everything down?

Whether or not that's the case, the problem is that if you put together all the nuclear, solar, wind and hydro we can manage, we will still have less energy than what we get easily with oil.

I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.

It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.

If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.

Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap?

They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.

Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.

Your link says increased modulation adds 1.5-3.75 million euros/year in maintenance costs. That's utterly insignificant for the electricity supply to a nation of 70 million.

What if you destroy a dam? It would be catastrophic too... but nobody votes against dams for some reason.

> But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.

People aren't really partisan like that in Switzerland. They'll happily elect people from one party then vote against the party on specific issues in referendums or initiatives.

For something like nuclear, people who vote for green party might be mostly aligned with the party because it's a key issue for them while people who vote for center or right parties won't really care what the party recommends.

I'd see a lot more "nuclear no thanks" stickers in swiss German side than Romandie.

I'd expect the strong anti movement from Germany to have some impact.

> the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for

Unless you personally agree with whatever your preferred party's line is on everything and generalize that sentiment, I'm not sure how to get to that conclusion.

So French Swiss or German Swiss aren't going to be consuming French or German news media? If so that's refreshing compared to Canadians and Brits who constantly try to butt into American media and culture wars (eg. Rebel News, UnHerd) and vice versa (eg. X)

Shutting down nuclear power plants prematurely was very foolish (looking at you Germany). But other than that, it’s true.

When you boil the issue down to the fundamental facts, our challenge is simply: add as much power production as fast as possible. We have no other hope to tackle the issue but to optimise for this. Nuclear is a dangerous distraction. Solar+wind is now growing faster than nuclear ever did at its peak and they’re showing no signs of slowing down. It’s the only way to get more power fast enough.

We are building power for a future where we cut all CO2 emissions. Not just those from electricity. Our second biggest priority (well third after EVs, but I’m not too worried about EVs right now, it’s a self sustaining transition) is to bring down the capital costs of hydrogen plants. That’s the key to bringing down CO2 emissions in several sectors of industry. This pairs perfectly with variable power. We’ve already seen green ammonia fertiliser plants paired with renewables and now with the Iran crisis there will be higher pressure to build more of them to be self sustained. This way also lets us distribute production which is nice to be less vulnerable in case of war.

Once green hydrogen production has reached critical mass, and growth of renewables have pushed gas power plants into more of a backup role, with low fuel consumption, they will naturally switch to hydrogen. Many of the newer ones are already ready for hydrogen and others have an upgrade path. Perhaps hydrogen consuming industry will co-locate with gas power plants to share production/storage infrastructure. This path has very low capital costs besides the ones we anyway need to make the hydrogen necessary to decarbonise industry. The gas power plants are already built in most countries that will need them.

That's a foolish thing to say because building enough nuclear, even with the fairy tale prices and times people make up, would take soooo much longer and cost sooo much more than green energy.

Even more importantly, it's very hard to compromise and downscale a project when the inevitable fossil fuel lobbyists vote against you. It's a lot easier to half a solar park project than a nuclear project.

Have you read the comments?

One is regulatory. At least in the US, every nuclear reactor that produces at least 100 MW needs to carry a 375 million dollar insurance policy at minimum. Under 100 MW there is an alternate schedule that ranges from 5 million to 75 million scaling based on output. But the net result is that it's still more profitable to built a single large reactor, since a 1 GW reactor is less to insure than 10 100 MW reactors. This is written into law, it would require Congress to change it.

Second is that nuclear reactor efficiency tends to improve with size. The ratio of thermal watts to electric watts tends to be better with large reactors. I'm not super well versed on the engineering tradeoffs here by my rough understanding is that waste heat scales with surface area while useful energy extraction scales with volume.

Just one so far and it's not particularly small compared to a more conventional reactor.

Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.

SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.

You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.

Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical. A bigger nuclear reactor will always undercut your price per watt.

>commercially operating

And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.

>how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?

Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.

Or solar.

And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?

Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.

The Navy uses highly enriched uranium for its reactors, something like 70-80% enrichment. This is a non starter for civilian use, on account of proliferation concerns. That, and the enrichment requirements drive up fuel costs.

Yes, SMRs probably have a small niche market on military-adjacent applications.

>the entire US Navy uses them

Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market?

You are the one conflating things that have absolutely no connections.

Ok, this is interesting. I am skeptic about DC's in space, but I do appreciate people actually doing stuff. What is it computing up there. How did you get it up? How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary.

> Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night

That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.

you'll be so happy about being price competitive when the conditions are bad for like a week and the country just doesn't run (or rely on other countries price gouging you for what your country needs to exist.)

Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.

Cool, the price of solar right now is $30-$85 / MWh, and that range is dependent on whether you got storage included in the bill or not.

And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production.

Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years.

Nuclear is economically a dead technology.

The limit is not how cold the water needs to be for the power plant, but how hot it can be for the river ecology to not take (too much) damage. Even in Germany power plants regularly need to be shut down.

> 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to shut down their nuclear power plants partly or fully because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm (Barber, 2022; Limb, 2022; Miller and Vladkov, 2022). Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature (European Parliament and European Council, 2000; IKSR, 2022b). The resulting unplanned outages — and the efforts by nuclear operators to avoid such disruptions — highlight pressing concerns about the sustainability of nuclear energy, particularly its impact on river ecosystems in an increasingly warming world (see Fig. 1).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...

I'd say "Supplementary Information for Strategic deployment of solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe throughout the energy transition"[1] fits the bill. It lays out various paths to 100% renewables (which in Italy, like in Spain, is heavily solar) by 20250

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61492-9.pdf

Just look at any map of solar power potential, solar irradiance, hours of sunshine of Europe.

Latitude?

It's technically possible to replace rotating mass with batteries using a "grid-forming inverter", which is an inverter that converts the battery DC to AC with frequency varying depending on the grid load, simulating how that rotating mass would behave ("synthetic inertia"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource#Grid-f...

This competes with the traditional giant flywheel option ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser ), which has the advantage of being a simple and proven technology, and handling brief overload better, but the disadvantage of having moving parts. It's not clear which option is currently best. Both are in current use.

And as a third answer: You actually don't need to take the flywheels of the power plants offline, when you take the rest of the power plant down. The locations for them are perfect, as the whole grid has historically been build around them.

We actually don’t need those anymore. Grid forming inverters and batteries will take over that role.

Slovenia - Krško nuclear power plant.

I leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.

It always amuses me when nuclear power is the one area where the left becomes Very Concerned about excessive government spending.

despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel

Except for France which came up with the clever strategy of "not banning it", but that was apparently a mistake and they should have just used fossil fuels?

Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives

€50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.

France also produces less CO2, sell electricity at reasonable and stable cost.

If fossil fuel weren't massively subsided (impact the environment for free, wars with taxpayer money), Nuclear would have made a massive dent.

Producing the same with other sources will have a massive immediate impact on the land / environment.

It hasn't made a significant contribution because of panic after the various accidents and the "environmentalists" deciding to advocate against it when it was the clearest path to accomplishing their stated goals.

> Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.

It is reasonable to have a many-year strategic reserve of uranium for what you need. A modern reactor is going to go through 20 tonnes of enriched fuel a year and they refuel every 18-24 months. 5-10 years of security and stability is much, much better than oil and gas.

> The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs

There isn't enough room in my house for anymore people but there's enough room for a new couch. How can these things both be true? Probably because the two have entirely different requirements and "there isn't room" is shorthand for many, many things.

Not saying they're right, just that this is a bad counter argument, especially since the alternatives all have the same problem.

> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.

Yes, you need water capacity for cooling, about 2x as much as a gas plant for the same output. Definitely a trade-off. I don't know or care enough about Swiss water access to argue here.

> has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country

The uranium-producing countries are Kazakhstan, Canada, and Namibia. There is zero chance that you cannot get one of those to sell to you.

> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.

Wut?

You can make decades stocks of the fissile source

>Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.

What on earth are you talking about?

If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.

(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)

At least one Kanton has already requested a new build.

https://www.nuklearforum.ch/de/news/neues-kernkraftwerk-im-a...

Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:

The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.

People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.

See this long-form investigation:

https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587327

nimby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind

Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s

I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.

to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.

I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else, but I guess the economic argument still holds.

Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.

We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)

> I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.

We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.

Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?

Sorry not sure why I wrote Norway rather than Austria!

Obviously Norway has massive amounts of offshore wind potential too

Technically yes, but also no. The European electricity market have way, way to many rules and caveat to draw any conclusion, especially France with ARENH and other distortions.

It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.

I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.

Sure wish the UK could get some of this cheap renewable energy you're referencing.

That turns out not to be the case.

France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.

Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.

Civil engineering and power equipment companies also profit from other plants. In fact, there are specialized power companies for wind and solar. Can't speak for all countries, but lobbying for green energy in the USA, according to PACs, is higher than nuclear. I don't think Switzerland is different.

If energy companies won't invest, then either don't invest public funding, or invest but with focus on developing long-term technologies. After all, the primary reason for nuclear being uneconomic today is lack of investment. If solar and wind can be made profitable, I don't see how nuclear is any different.

Still, the positive note of this is the ban lift, not whether new reactor will actually be built.

If storage is a thing, then solar makes more sense.