> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.

Why would an ecologist have to be against more energy consumption? For climate change, what matters is energy from the sun hitting the earth vs. energy being radiated back into space. More energy consumption also doesn't necessarily cause more pollution of any kind.

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. This is the first law of thermodynamics and as far as I'm aware nobody has managed to refute it.

Finding better ways of controlling where energy comes from and where it goes, and doing it in a controlled way that has minimal impact on the surroundings is good (from an ecological perspective)- it is the most pure good an ecologist can hope for.

"Reduce, Reuse" has its place, but that place has to be in-line with also finding a way to balance our human needs with the environment.

I don't think reducing our energy consumption is realistic, many things that have a long-tail reduction in energy consumption have a huge up front cost.

For example, electric vehicles are a bitch to manufacture but are less impactful for the environment over a long term; and this is amplified if the energy that is produced to be used in the electric car has a minimal impact on the environment (Solar, Wind, Nuclear) - but nuclear plants have a huge up-front energy cost too.

I'll be forthcoming and say that I have a concern that over-reliance on solar and wind may have negative consequences on the environment too- harvesting wind energy from the atmosphere that animals may rely on, will likely impact the environment in ways we haven't thought about. However it's significantly better than coal and gas, and that's the marker we're going for: not perfect.. better.

Everything is bad at a certain scale after all, we just haven't hit that scale with our renewables- and because of this, on a baseline, I agree with you.

For France investment in nuclear is a big benefit, as you can see in the amounts of coal and gas burned to generate electricity in neighboring Germany in the last two decades, and still burning today.

Try to present the idea of "degrowth", to China, India, Indonesia, Brazil. They all on path of growth.

I agree that France, should be paying more to Françafrique countries, but raw uranium cost is only 50% of the finished nuclear reactor fuel. And nuclear reactor fuel is 5% to 10% of the operating costs of a nuclear power plant.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

Heinrich Böll Foundation and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, both funded from Germany, published many documents criticizing uranium mining in Africa:

" Addressing uranium-producing countries in particular, whom it seems to want to stop or at least reduce their activities, the report also focuses on the health hazards associated with extraction and the neo-colonial aspect of exploiting the resource. Particularly virulent regarding France, which is the subject of three articles and cited in several others, the Atlas targets head-on Paris's relationship with one of its main suppliers: Niger.

The Atlas likens the uranium mining model to a vestige of Françafrique and accuses the French government of enriching itself on Niger's behalf while orchestrating an ecological, human and social catastrophe in the country. The French company Orano - formerly Areva - which mines and produces uranium in Niger for French power plants, is a particular target."

https://www.docdroid.net/y7NENZB/comment-lallemagne-finance-...

https://www.ege.fr/sites/ege.fr/files/media_files/German_Int...

Thank you for this post. It is informative and nuanced about a complex topic.

    > Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.

    > If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.

> construction is heavily subsidized

It's not subsidized, quite the opposite EDF is subsidizing its competitors through ARENH.

> It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have.

It's not. It only appears expensive compared to other decarbonized means because the calculations never take the opportunity cost of intermittency. Wind and solar are only cheap because you never count the price of the back-up plan in the cost (and also because magnets and solar panels are bought for cheap from China). If you count the price of running an actual grid all year long then it suddenly becomes the most efficient option after hydro and that's why France has among the cheapest electricity in Europe. The German Energiewende is the canonical example of what the theoretical calculations leave out. It should have been cheaper and less carbon-heavy in the end, but instead hundreds of billions have been spent to get only expensive and high-emission electricity in the end.

>And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.

Come on, the Uranium coming from Niger is a just a fraction of the consumption: https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/questions-et-reponse...

> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.

What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.

> degrowth

Thanks for showing your true face. But no thanks for your anti-humanism.

Finally, someone with common sense. Nuclear is bad BECAUSE it produces lots of cheap energy. We DON'T WANT this. More energy = more capitalism = evil.

DEGROWTH NOW!

"degrowth" ... aand this is how you spot the real agenda of most environmentalists. ofc they'll call that a "philosophy".

glad you pointed out something very few people point out in these conversations - the cheap uranium fuel France gets has a very large hidden cost.

the coups that happened recently in west africa are largely due to that largely hidden cost.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821997

Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating, even mundane things like business offices real estate or highways wouldn't be economically viable if they had to provision for decommissioning.

You could clean up the high activity thing and let the buildings and their asbestos in place and nuclear decommissioning would still be more environmentally friendly than every other heavy industry.

Do you think it is cheap to decommission a large water power dam?

That's just a bullshit Statement considering all german plants except experimental or soviet units are decommissioned on operator money.

Costs are accounted and in some cases you have even price breakdown https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...

The only reason nuclear power facilities get decommissioned is because anti-nuclear politicians panic and force them to shut down. Sure, there's an ongoing cost of maintenance and replacement, but once you have a nuclear power facility, there's no reason for it not to continue generating power indefinitely. We're not going to stop needing or wanting more energy.

[dead]

Re debt: check how much debt the SV giants have. Debt isn't a bad thing per se, it's just how you finance investments.

Its has always been state owned, and it's much better for critical infrastructures to be so anyway.

> suffering from aged power plants having issues?

There was one (1) instance if of a serious common issue between multiple plants found in 2022, unrelated to the age of the NPPs (the most recent were affected as well) which affected the exploitation for about a year. It was bad for a moment, but not that bad, it's like saying the automobile industry can't be profitable because the Tataka airbag problem happened. (And the corrosion issue was much less severe than the Tataka one!).

Because it isn't. EDF devt to EBITDA ratio is as healthy or healthier vs german eon/rwe. Debt is ok to have for big corpos, unless you think Apple is a failed company.

Over half of french fleet was already upgraded to have safety similar to gen3 reactors through great carenage.

France also set record production this summer vs prev ones

Because being a cash cow does not mean the cash will be reinvested by the owner. The owner might just milk the cow and use the money for other things.

Couldn’t be because nuclear-hating bureaucrats have over regulated the industry?

> When EDF signed a fixed cost contract to deliver nuclear in England the CFO resigned.

Yes, because they had to borrow at a 7 or 9% long term rate on the market (in the era of ZIRP!), which makes financing costs 70-80% of the overall final electricity price.

Of course that kind of deal was insane, but it says more about financing long term projects on the market than it says anything about nuclear as a technology.

> The "profits" are from running decades old reactors that were never transparently costed.

EDF gave more in subsidies to its competitors through ARENH over the past 15 years than what the entire fleet costed.

French nuclear has been an indisputable financial success over the past 40 years (while giving France one of the cheapest electricity in Europe). Saying otherwise is just ignoring reality entirely.

I saw a DW Planet A documentary about decommissioning a nuclear plant in Germany. They walked around the plant in some safety gear, but with their faces fully exposed and no breathing apparatus. They said the project was decades behind schedule and it was costing ten times as much as expected. The decommissioning process involved spraying water and gels on slightly radioactive materials from the factory to reduce their radioactivity to effectively zero. The process created much more radioactive material than there was in the first place, which then itself had to be dealt with. The cost of decommissioning is determined by the lobbyists for the companies that do the decommissioning. Voters have no idea what decommissioning should cost, and no one will ever question going over budget. It's a great business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKIaRg3SdTw

" EDF Group assumes sole financial responsibility for decommissioning power plants. The cost is factored into operation from the start and included in the price of the kilowatt-hour. It is re-assessed every three years to take account of changing technical and financial assumptions, as required by law. "

https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/producing-a-climate-frie...

technically speaking they don't have to be decomissioned and when they absolutely have to be I believe at that point we will have fusion which is only 10 years away.

And the world leaders don't have an answer for the cost to keep our atmosphere habitable due to using fossil fuels as hard as possible?

What are these decommissioning costs?

The reactor vessel and the primary coolant loop.

All that steel can be vitrified and stored in stainless casks somewhere fairly indefinitely.

Or just buried. It doesn’t stay reactive very long.

The rest of the site is no different to any other electricity generator, and no different really to the average industrial manufacturing plant.

Everyone likes to just say ”decommissioning costs”, without actually thinking about what any of that means.

It’s not like every nuclear power site is a Chernobyl.

Why people spread such bullshit statements? Take Germany which enacted EARLY phaseout, yet all it's reactors are decommissioned on operator money except experimental and soviet units

Just declare that LNT is wrong and treat materials as non radioactive if they are less than half the radiation level associated with cancer. For the rest you can try and reuse them in new reactors if possible or store it in the same place as other nuclear waste.

What about Sweden?

South Sweden, with most of Sweden's population is at 20 gC02eq/kWh and at 36% nuclear

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/SE-SE3/yearly

Also Ontario?

Finland?

For some definition of "work". They don't seem to be able to build new nuclear plants now without massive cost overruns.

I am pretty sure anyone could make nuclear work by throwing lots of money around

One can argue that Switzerland is doing a good job too. Also, it is profitable for existing plants for the next 60 years or so.

> Yes, France is pretty much alone in making nuclear work. It's impressive. That said, it is alone.

Ontario, Canada may have something to say about that:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply

> I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions

Gaullism and strong governments are not in fashion these days. The main thing that made Messmer plan work was Messmer himself, a strong leader with the power to tell everyone to stfu and do it.

Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.

See nuclear topic, scroll just like 2 turns to see once again someone claiming nuclear is the one technology in all of history that doesn't improve with technology.

Insuring is dirt cheap. You don't insure against any nonsense but against most probable one.

Nuclear gets cheaper if you have several units built in same place and if you increase CF with various methods, incl higher enriched fuel

> Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive

Isn't this the thing where you require something in one case but not the others?

If every oil drilling operation had to carry enough insurance to cover Deepwater Horizon and every hydroelectric dam had to carry a policy large enough for Banqiao and every solar panel factory had to insure against leaving Superfund sites that leak into the groundwater in some of the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley then they'd be in trouble too.

> the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions.

People often say things like this and then if you actually have someone go through the existing process you find out that more than half of the labor is going to inspect things that aren't actually safety-related, or some corruption is involved which is quadrupling the cost because the contractor bribed a politician to make use of their services required by law or create artificial scarcity for something which is actually important but shouldn't cost as much as it does.

War would be so much harder w/o oil, yet we fight wars for oil. Hmmm.

> And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them

> so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated

That sounds very very questionable. We have like tens of countries in Europe that are trying to implement solar and wind energy throughout the decades, and are undoubtful lieders and visioners in that areas. And what is the practical results? Energy costs like 10 times more than if that energy was generated through burning fissile fuel alone.

You can count only the pure costs of generation of single type of power plant. But the customers are also paying the costs of distribution, costs of backup and firming.

Is the customer 10, 50 or 500 km from the power plant?

Do I need to build a second backup power plant for each installed primary power plant, 100% backup capacity? Or 40%, or 20% backup capacity?

Costs of pumped hydro/battery energy storage.

What are the costs of CO2 emission? Europe 80 Euro per tCO₂, China/India 8, US zero.

Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage?

Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.

This must at least partly be region-dependent right?

In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).

From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?

> China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor.

I've seen it claimed that this figure is not equivalent to the time-to-build in West, as the clock starts later in the process. I don't know if that's true, but I've seen the claim.

SA is at 168 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly

France is at 32 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.

So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.

SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.

It is really ideal for solar.

But the emissions are still much higher than France.

Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.

But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.

Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...

This is despite increasing solar.

This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever

Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.

That’s just not true.

An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.

It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.

> they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.

Unfortunately, this probably won't work everywhere. Particularly in Northern Europe winter is tough as there's very little sunlight (manageable) and often very little wind (not manageable,as it lasts longer).

Nuclear is an expensive way of solving this problem, but it's carbon neutral which is super important.

A couple points. No, entire plants aren't taken offline at once typically, individual reactor cores are, and modern designs work to minimize that. They still maintain extremely good uptime, especially if you're comparing them to intermittent renewables. Secondly, Italy isn't super tiny, and you need redundancy for outages and such in any grid regardless of its components.

> Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling

CANDU reactors, for one, can be (and are) refuelled live:

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

Every few decades they do need to be refurbished though.

I had a discussion with ChatGPT about this concern. When comparing a modern EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) to a modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant, the required maintenance cycles look fairly similar. For the nitpickers/tomato throwers (I see you!): I am using EPR because it is state-of-the art for nuclear power, and I am specifically using the term "modern" for thermal power plant because the newest ones (China, Japan) are nearly at the frontier of efficiency possible for that type of electricty production.

Roughly: EPR runs for 18 months, then requires 1-2 months of maintenance (which includes refuelling about one third of its fuel assemblies). A modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant runs 12-18 months, then requires 1 month of maintenance.

Next, I could not resist as other commenters already mentioned it. You wrote: "small country". As the Aussies say: Yeah, no. Italy is 300,000 sq km. That is not small. If compared to the United States, it would be the fifth largest state.

Finally, why does it seem that all discussions about electricity production on HN always devolve into the "Base Load Wars"? For me, it is starting to feel like a meme. (Are there LLM troll bots trained to enter HN discussions and make a bunch of "base load" arguments?) Seriously, can someone please create a text-based role playing game that revolves around a future society locked into eternal "Base Load Wars"? (See: PhD Simulator[1])

[1] https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html

Yes. There's all kind of hydrocarbons that aren't economic or barely so, like oil shale or shale oil, with is rock with a stain on it.

Interestingly, Venezuelan extra heavy sour crude oil is not profitable to use at $55 a barrel, the price before the Iran war, but is profitable when it's over $90 a barrel.

It's easy to make money when someone else pays the costs but you get to keep the revenue.

This is wrong. The peak of conventional oil is documented around 2007. Since then, Europe's economy has been slowing down (if you look at physical indicators like how much is transported by trucks or what surface is being built each year, not artificial ones like the GDP).

Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).

It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough

The 138€ is under pessimistic assumptions. Min profitability limit on the other hand is 9ct/kwh. But nobody denies fla3 was a failure.

You didn't understand the electric cap in France. It's a cap on profits. If edf sells at certain thresholds above 70€ due to market, the state will take extra profit. It's sort of like double CFDs for renewables except edf has no minimum compensation

Just after your quote:

> EdF responded that it "assumes full responsibility for the technical and financial aspects of dismantling its nuclear plants," and noted that it was currently decommissioning nine reactors, so had a good basis of experience. It also pointed out that its funds set aside for decommissioning were audited by the Ministry of the Environment, Energy and the Sea the previous month.

And, a little bit earlier, the article author's assesment:

> There are well-developed plans for dismantling these (which have been shut down since 1990 or before) and work is progressing.

Please don't cherry-pick articles.

There’s tons of costs associated with coal, oil, and natural gas extraction, processing, and use, which are neither priced into up front costs nor the price that customers pay for the product. If those were priced in, then fossil fuels would have to become more expensive. Those costs currently get diffused into various other areas and paid for by a wide net of payers, including both the customers and non-customers, and a big one is the government (taxpayer).

France net exported power this summer every single day and hour.

France net imported in 2022 less vs Germany net imported in 2024 in business as usual situation

Edf also announced yo add cooling towers to bypass old environmental laws, especially for Golfech

> Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.

Palo Verde is right next to the Sonoran Desert and has been running for forty years in Arizona heat:

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

There's no technical reason why nuclear plants can't run in low/hot water situations.

So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens. And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.

Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.

That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable

Hungary and Romania made a mistake by not diverting earlier more river flow. France net exported every single day of summer

You know when rivers run not-low? In winter when we need to heat all those freezing homes. Crazy how that works. Yup, it's not ideal in a summer heat wave... but that's precisely when solar can shine.

We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.

Many countries do not have the raw materials to build solar, wind turbines, and batteries so it doesn't solve the sovereignty issue.

I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.

>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries

I actually do since I'm Italian lol

Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant

> I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.

So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.

> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance

The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?

Neither it is for nuclear. It fixes the externality

Healthcare is profitable like schools are, or roads, or public transportation, or sanitary systems: the goal is for us a society to live better.

When something is profitable in the sense that a few oligarchs make more an more money, I see it as a bug, not a feature.

Exactly, there were no economical reasons for nuclear phase out in Germany.

It was a political decision and in the end a very costly one: much bigger burning of coal then necessary, new gas power plants, increased dependence on foreign energy imports.

Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)

canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too

has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it

Maybe don't keep it all in one spot, though.

The power trading market in the US and the markets in Russia and particularly China are not the same, at all.They are rife with tarrif pricing, state-set prices, and state-owned players. The whole idea of profit is only tangentially applicable.

In any case, your premise doesn't hold. China is hugely invested in nuke and continues to build as fast as they can. Theyve got 58 reactors operating (about 56 GW) and 33 more (over 35 GW) under construction. Theyve consistently been approving at least 10 new units a year. It's literally in the current 5 year plan.

They’ve been building out every form of power generation they can. Nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. It’s all skyrocketing.

The talking point that they’re going green doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti...

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

Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments.

Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.

If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities.

It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)

It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?

I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did. Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.

I am someone who knows, hence my disgust. Time to learn about the radioactivity of coal fly ash and how carefully that’s managed.

That's just not true. Event is PWR reactors take their root in the nuclear program for plutonium generation, that's not the case anymore.

Batteries and solar and wind are a lot cheaper, faster to deploy, and scale a ton better.

Nuclear is far too slow to solve our emissions problems, there's no chance of us being able to scale the nuclear industry to be able to confront climate change on the time scale necessary.

In contrast, batteries, solar, and wind are scaling on their own, without the massive government subsidies that would be needed to deliver nuclear too late to help.

Countries just can pretty easily make solar economically themselves, it’s no great secret. But they don’t because china makes them a bit cheaper , you keep them forever and we’re not in a war. You think all the billions of parts and steel in a nuke will all be locally built too? For eg Go look up who owns almost all the foundries in the world that are required to build large pressure vessels for reactors.

So, option a sounds great to me, but you clearly have some kind of agenda here, that maybe you could make clearer

yeah, works great for germany compared to france :) new nuclear price is skill/regulatory issue...

also great fosil things happening with backup plants

If we needed more nuclear fuel we would be producing more of it. Comparing current production to a world where we use a thousand times more of it is ridiculous. Uranium is not that rare, and spent fuel rods still have well over 90% of their potency so they can be recycled.

Nuclear energy could easily power the entire planet for thousands of years.

I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power.

And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).

Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.

My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.

Valcoe paper is written by the founder of antinuclear movement in Denmark(which led at ti becoming one of the highest coal burners), has wild assumptions about hydrogen getting basically free for firming

Australia's weather is different from what we got in Europe. And let's not pretend many of aemos estimations are already obsolete due to increased costs of transmission and hydro storage that are huilt.

Dk still has worse emissions vs france/sweden, just like SA

If you don't like nuclear, you'll have gas peakers, like Germany

> Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper

Cheaper for how long? And in what conditions?

What happens in a post petrol world? What happens when china stops exporting panels/batteries/inverters (aka a good 50% of the current supply)?

Until one day a volcano wakes up and decides no one can have sunlight for a few months.

Edit to add: heh, the CSIRO eh? That bastion of truth.

I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.

You can also check the report from RTE (French grid operator) that models several scenarios and mentions this security of supply thing

https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/publications/ene...

In a nutshell, yes.

The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.

What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.

I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.

That doesn’t mean they won’t have a use.

They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.

Then just build GenIII+ PWRs like most other countries.

Where do you live? Kinda hard to compare!

Italy is extremely energy poor, it even lacks coal. It does have significant hydro storage though

Okay yeah as expected some people seem to be too fucking dumb, so I’ll expand a bit, in case someone bothers to read this later.

There are several different concepts being collapsed together here.

“Baseload is a myth” is mostly a semantic dodge. Base load is simply the minimum demand on the system. You do not need a special category of plant called a “baseload generator,” but you absolutely need enough firm capacity and energy to meet demand continuously, including when wind and solar are producing very little.

“The grid can handle peak load, therefore it can handle base load” confuses transmission capacity with generation availability. A grid capable of carrying 50 GW does not produce 50 GW. The engineering problem is having enough generation available at the exact hours when it is required.

And batteries do not make that problem disappear. They are excellent for frequency response, peak shaving and moving solar production from noon into the evening. But a battery is an energy buffer, not an energy source. During a prolonged shortage it can discharge only what was previously stored, and then it must recharge. Once the problem lasts several days rather than several hours, the amount of stored energy required becomes enormous.

Germany provides a very useful real-world example.

Germany began its nuclear phase-out under the 2000/2002 agreement, briefly extended reactor lifetimes in 2010, then accelerated the shutdown after Fukushima in 2011. The final three reactors closed in April 2023.

In 2008 German nuclear plants produced roughly 149 TWh of electricity. Germany subsequently built huge amounts of wind and solar, and those renewables have unquestionably displaced a great deal of fossil generation. But Germany eliminated its existing firm, low-carbon nuclear fleet while it was still burning very large quantities of coal and gas.

And then there is the problem Germans have an excellent word for: Dunkelflaute.

This is not some hypothetical edge case invented by nuclear advocates. Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur defines a Dunkelflaute as a period of at least 48 hours during which combined wind and PV generation remains below 15% of installed capacity. Low-wind periods are recurrent; analysis of four decades of German weather data found roughly a five-day period with average wind output below a 10% capacity factor in a typical year, with substantially longer events occurring less frequently.

Germany got a particularly good demonstration in November and December 2024. During two Dunkelflaute episodes, renewable production collapsed while demand remained high. Germany’s own Bundesnetzagentur says that almost the entire controllable power-plant fleet was brought into operation and that substantial electricity imports from neighbouring countries were required. The regulator concluded that Germany urgently needs additional controllable generation capacity for future Dunkelflauten.

That is basically the entire argument in one empirical example. When there is plenty of wind and sun, Germany can have extremely cheap electricity and sometimes negative wholesale prices. When the weather changes, the system suddenly needs the plants that supposedly became obsolete.

And the price swings are spectacular. Germany’s average day-ahead wholesale price in 2024 was about €79/MWh. During the November and December Dunkelflauten it exceeded €300/MWh for dozens of hours and reached approximately €936/MWh at the peak. The Bundesnetzagentur investigated whether those prices resulted from market manipulation and found no such explanation; the underlying condition was very low renewable production, high demand, extensive use of controllable thermal generation and limited remaining dispatchable capacity.

At the retail level Germany also remains one of Europe’s most expensive electricity markets. In the second half of 2025 a typical German household consuming 2,500–5,000 kWh paid €0.3869/kWh, compared with an EU average of €0.2896/kWh—about 34% more. Germany had the second-highest household electricity price in the EU after Ireland.

Those retail prices cannot honestly be attributed entirely to the nuclear phase-out or to renewables: taxes, levies, network costs, fuel prices and the consequences of the European gas crisis all matter. But neither can anyone point to Germany as evidence that a wind-and-solar-heavy system has somehow made firm generation economically irrelevant. Its own regulator is saying the opposite: when Dunkelflaute hits, Germany needs controllable generation and imports, and it says additional controllable capacity is urgently required.

What supplies that capacity today? Coal and gas remain substantial. Germany has zero domestic nuclear generation, yet it still burns coal and natural gas and participates in a European interconnected system containing large quantities of French and other nuclear generation.

So the actual German experiment is considerably less impressive than the slogan. Germany spent decades building an enormous renewable fleet while simultaneously destroying an existing fleet of firm low-carbon reactors. It succeeded in greatly increasing renewable generation and reducing coal use over the long run, but it did not abolish the requirement for firm generation. When wind and solar disappear together, Germany burns dispatchable fuels, imports electricity, draws on reserves and watches wholesale prices rise.

Which brings us back to the original question.

Once you accept that an electrical system requires firm energy during prolonged periods of inadequate intermittent generation, the menu becomes fairly obvious. Hydro and geothermal are excellent where geography permits them. Storage, transmission, demand response and renewable overbuilding all help. Countries fortunate enough to possess enormous reservoirs, geothermal resources or exceptionally strong interconnections can lean heavily on those advantages.

Those countries are not a universally reproducible model. A solution intended to work in most industrial countries has to survive winter demand, multi-day wind lulls, minimal solar production, droughts, transmission constraints and simultaneous weather patterns across neighbouring regions.

Under those conditions, you need some combination of renewables and firm generation. At present, for most countries without exceptional hydro or geothermal resources, large-scale firm generation means principally nuclear or combustion, with storage and interconnection reducing how much of it must run.

So yes: build wind and solar. Build batteries where they make economic sense. Build transmission. Use demand response. Exploit hydro and geothermal wherever available.

But after all of that, somebody still has to answer the boring engineering question: what produces electricity on the fifth cold, dark, windless day after the batteries have discharged?

“Baseload is a myth” does not answer it. “Batteries” does not answer it unless you specify the required energy capacity and how it is recharged. And Germany, of all countries, does not answer it: every serious Dunkelflaute demonstrates why it still maintains dispatchable fossil generation and depends on the wider European grid.

"France's largest electricity producer said the move was required to comply with environmental regulations."

This is a policy decision, not a technical limitation. Palo Verde has been operating in the Arizona heat for forty years: nuclear can handle situations of low/high-temp water.

Even while that was happening, we never stopped being a net exporter of energy.

The system worked as designed.

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"base load is a myth" is a myth

And is it reasonable to get their doses that low?

Yes, but the parent was implying 50+ years of nothing to worry about once a plant is built.

>The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident.

The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding. Estimates range from 26000 to 240000 people dead, but rationally one has to assume the typhoon would have caused some damage in these areas even without the dams.

So claiming this was a single hydro dam causing 250 000 dead is hardly rational.

If you live in a narrow valley downstream from a dam you are aware of the danger. You as an individual can take action to protect yourself. If you live upstream by even 10 feet you are in no danger at all from the dam.

With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.

Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also it wasn't a power plant, not even indirectly as oil is mostly used for transportation, not electricity. Chernobyl and Fukushima were power plants.

So again, there is just no comparison between nuclear plants and any other power plant. Nuclear really does have a unique level of risk.

Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood, and for nuclear the consequence is immense. Meaning effort has to be spent keeping the likelihood extremely small, in order for the risk to be low.

This has to be accepted and considered in any discussion about nuclear power. Pretending it doesn't exist is not rational.

>It's cheap to operate. See https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...

It's not, the estimated production cost for existing swiss nuclear plants is 4-6 centimes per kWh, which is already expensive electricity and frequently higher than the market prices today. That is also the self-cost price, meaning whenever the market pays less for electricity, ch nuclear plants lose money.

And as always, swiss taxpayers cover that loss so you won't ever see it in the operators financial reports.

Also worth noting is that EDF in France sells for 7 cents after being bailed out when sellng at 4 cents. This is not cheap electricity.

> What non zero chance of millions of casualties?

Just to take one trivial example:

If nobody is able to refill the water in spent fuel pools at any nuclear plant, they will catch fire. Assuming a radial spread of the fallout it will be near guaranteed lethal for at least 50 miles, probably lethal for some 500 miles, and you "won't want to live there" for even further than that. And this will remain the case for millennia to decades, depending on weather and distance.

So basically 500 miles radius, uninhabitable for several generations if you run out of water.

Then consider that Switzerland is covered by a circle of some 120 miles, and has a population of several million.

Do you think the 4-6 centimes per kWh covers a scenario like that? I don't. Good thing Switzerland has lots of water...

This isn't right, in fact one of the main reasons for building nuclear power plants is independence from politically unstable places like Russia and the Mideast.

It's really a conspiracy. Ore is available in plenty of countries. Enrichment is done locally by orano+urenco amd fuel elements made by framatome

It would also not make sense considering china is the largest builder and they also sell most of vre

Says who?

Why shouldn't our civilization be defined by how efficiently we use the energy we gather? Or the lifespan and health of our citizens?

Claiming that the sum of a civilization is how much energy it controls is just a meme from the 50's. It's a shitty, short-sighted metric. One that would consider building a nuclear reactor and dumping the power into a bank of resistors as contributing "more progress" than growing abundant food, or protecting the ecosystem.

It's our civilization, we can define progress however we want.

Getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue.

Some of us don't share your faith in technological progress.

And sometimes I think Star Trek did more damage to the world than Das Kapital did.

We should be able to call out bullshit if we see it.

And the nuclear power boosters, especially the SMR fans, are riding in the data center slipstream. All kinds of debunked ideas have seen a chance for revival in the AI bubble.

I'm no fun because I've spent a lot of time doing critical path analysis in projects. A lot of planned data centers will never power up because the lead time for gas turbines is a few years now. You can't expect the first SMR to power a data center to come online with in 10 years. And while Bloom has done impressive work making a credible methane fuel cell, they have only a slim chance of scaling up their production to power the big Oracle data center in New Mexico.

There is an exasperating amount of BS to call out on this planet even before we get to wild promises of what's going to be put into orbit or on the moon or on Mars,

My argument was that while waiting for renewables to become cheap, we could have built nuclear instead of fossil capacity and avoided a shitton of emissions. The Messmer plan being an existence proof that such a thing would have been possible.

Interesting take to trivialize oil spills.

Take coal, then. The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).

But you focus on one single thing: Oil spills. The grandparent comment talks of fossile fuels. What about co2?

Co2 has been leaking out into the atmosphere for many years. You know what happens to it? It stays around basically forever, kills enormously (directly and indirectly), and in fact causes a spiralling effect.

Not always- sometimes it - forms a street:

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

The zonal pricing differences in Sweden are mostly a mathematical mirage. The cheap zones 1 and 2 are combined together only a third of the demand of zone 3.

If you waved a magic wand and combined them with infinite transmission for free the price in the expensive area with all the people and energy demand would barely move. (It would disproportionately rise in the cheap zones).

So any sane approach wouldn't spend money shifting the small amount of surplus power from the cheap region but spend the same money on say offshore wind feeding into the expensive zone. This is basically the pitch for zonal pricing, it tells you where demand and supply are needed. Building lots of transmission until the price is the same everywhere defeats the purpose. Building lots of offshore wind was the actual plan but most of those got rejected on bogus national security grounds.

The rejected wind farms would have doubled the entire country's generation.

We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.

> France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer.

That's because French nuclear power plants are designed to be directly cooled by river water instead of using cooling towers.

The biggest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona) is cooled by evaporating the treated wastewater, in the desert.

> We could have standardized the old reactors too.

Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.

Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.

You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.

Floating nuclear plants next to a city sound like a recipe for disaster

It's a great story: in theory you can produce modular components of a full scale nuclear power plant in a controlled environment. In theory.

In practice the production line wasn't as controlled as it needed to be and ended up delivering modules that needed significant rework. That caused modules to be delivered and ready out of order. In other words they bought a lot of project management complexity that was hidden behind the theory of modularity.

SMRs are turning out to be even more expensive than conventional nuclear power plants, which are so expensive compared to renewables that even without a risk premium they are uncompetitive.

Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements

AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.

Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.

Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.

That's another interesting theory, but Wright's law doesn't mitigate many other disadvantages of SMRs: the need for multi site security; the need for on-site technicians at more sites; the need to build grid hook up to more locations, etc. There's a reason reactors grew to a certain size, no smaller and no bigger. Ignoring that lesson has a high price.