Thread

Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

908 points · 818 comments · geox

Loading the complete thread in the background. This saved snapshot is available now. Refresh

adrianN · 1790185744 · focus · HN ↗
It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?
1. toomuchtodo · 1790185956 · focus · HN ↗
  Time and demographics are also a component. Italy is old, has worker shortages for living wage work (and is currently issuing ~500k work visas over three years to attract labor to the market), and a new nuclear generator takes at least ten years to build. Each year, an additional 1TW of solar will be deployed globally. Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled.
  <a href="https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/italy/" rel="nofollow">https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/italy/
  > 49% of Italy’s electricity was generated from low-carbon sources in 2025, below the EU average of 71%. As of 1 January 2026, Italy was aiming for 69% of renewable electricity generation by 2030. For the country’s latest renewables targets, see our 2030 Global Renewable Target Tracker.
  <a href="https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/IT/fifteen_minutes" rel="nofollow">https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/IT/fifteen_minutes
  Record 2026 summer heat impaired nuclear generation in France, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, so I'd be curious how they intend to solve for that as the climate continues to warm (reduced capacity factor from reduced output due to cooling constraints impairs the economics).
  France to Upgrade Heat Wave Modeling After Record Nuclear Curbs - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790006">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790006 - September 2026
  Europe's Heatwaves Are Putting Nuclear Power Under Pressure - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49466909">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49466909 - August 2026
  Bulgaria's Nuclear Plant Plans First Output Cut Due to Low Danube - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376860">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376860 - August 2026
  Record heat is drying up Europe's major rivers, as these striking images show - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283344">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283344 - August 2026
  Bloomberg: Hungary Casts Doubt on Nuclear Plant Expansion After Danube Low Levels - <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/hungary-casts-doubt-on-nuclear-plant-expansion-after-danube-woes" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/hungary-c... - August 13th, 2026
  Italy to issue half million non-EU work visas over next three years - <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/italy-issue-half-million-non-eu-work-visas-over-next-three-years-2025-06-30/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/italy-issue-half-million-non-e... - June 30th, 2025
2. citrin_ru · 1790186713 · focus · HN ↗
  > I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar.
  Solar is 15% - a lot but not yet dominated. Solar works at day and demand is also highest during the day so solar should not be an enemy of nuclear.
  1. dalyons · 1790187354 · focus · HN ↗
    It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.
    This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.
    toomuchtodo · 1790187719 · focus · HN ↗
    Citation:
    France's EDF Warns Solar, Wind Surge Straining Nuclear Fleet Costs - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037839">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037839 - February 2026
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260217122120/https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journalists/all-press-releases/the-edf-group-shares-the-key-findings-of-its-report-on-the-modulation-of-its-fleet" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260217122120/https://www.edf.f...
    Related:
    Wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time in 2025 - <a href="https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-generated-more-power-than-fossil-fuels-in-the-eu-for-the-first-time-in-2025/" rel="nofollow">https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener... - January 22nd, 2026
    > Wind and solar overtaking fossil fuels in 2025 can be largely attributed to a staggering rise in solar power. Solar grew by more than a fifth (+20.1%) for the fourth year running. It generated a record 13% of EU power in 2025, above both coal and hydro. This trend was widespread: all EU countries saw growth in solar generation compared to the year before, amid a huge expansion in EU solar installations. Solar provided more than a fifth of electricity in Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands. Renewables provided nearly half of EU power (48%) as unusual weather conditions caused hydro generation to fall by 12% and wind by 2%, but boosted solar generation. Wind remained the second largest EU electricity source at 17% of EU power, generating more than gas. Signs of a structural shift are clear across the EU, as wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil sources in 14 of the 27 EU countries in 2025. Over the past five years, wind and solar have experienced massive growth (from 20% in 2020 to 30% in 2025). Fossil fuels have fallen from 37% to 29% in the same period, while hydro and nuclear remained stable or slightly declined.
    <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capacity" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (installed solar energy capacity goes brrr)
3. rayiner · 1790186718 · focus · HN ↗
  We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
  Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
  1. adrianN · 1790187730 · focus · HN ↗
    To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.
    I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
    neutronicus · 1790194908 · focus · HN ↗
    > I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
    I mean, you need to radiation-harden your structural materials and electronics for both fission and fusion, and some hypothetical antimatter reactor is probably using an evolutionary version of EM confinement techniques from fusion.
    But, yes, fission reactors are ultimately kind of ooga-booga (put a pile of metal in some water and run a steam engine) that's hard to characterize as on track for something sci-fi like an antimatter reactor.
  2. wat10000 · 1790187831 · focus · HN ↗
    Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.
    I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.
  3. diarrhea · 1790188394 · focus · HN ↗
    > upgrade civilization to the next level
    Why?
    someonebaggy · 1790198879 · focus · HN ↗
    Civilisational levels are defined by orders of magnitude in energy use.
    solid_fuel · 1790283084 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    rangestransform · 1790220785 · focus · HN ↗
    Practically, at the current rate of CO2 emissions we’re going to be needing that electricity to do carbon capture eventually
    Gareth321 · 1790231211 · focus · HN ↗
    If you're asking why we would want to progress as a species, I suppose that's a rather subjective question. I like the idea of materially improving the lives of humans. That includes scientific discoveries, curing ageing and other diseases, space exploration and interplanetary colonisation, material abundance like unlimited food, etc. We don't achieve this unless we make major technological advancements, and this requires major new sources of energy.
    pjc50 · 1790256819 · focus · HN ↗
    OP has literally been playing too much civ and believes that tech trees are destiny.
  4. Hikikomori · 1790188572 · focus · HN ↗
    Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?
    dguest · 1790189686 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams.
    Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.
    rayiner · 1790190522 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    vrganj · 1790193752 · focus · HN ↗
    Star Trek is a socialist society.
    Getting the tech without the social change first (e.g. what Musk et al are going for) gets you a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a post-scarcity utopia.
    rayiner · 1790194355 · focus · HN ↗
    You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.
    It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
    vrganj · 1790194903 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged.
    I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.
    You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.
    rayiner · 1790198205 · focus · HN ↗
    Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true.
    someonebaggy · 1790198923 · focus · HN ↗
    What's my life worth now?
    43187 · 1790199655 · focus · HN ↗
    And 30 years ago you could still afford a house. Tech helped people up until the internet, then it started to enslave them and make them poorer.
    All new energy initiatives should be nationalized and out of the hands of the tech robber barons.
    MentalM · 1790256347 · focus · HN ↗
    > And 30 years ago you could still afford a house.
    It is the people, who had build houses 30 years ago, and who set a price for those houses. Then came the government and start to regulate, redistribute, optimize and improve housing. And We live with the results.
    vrganj · 1790229320 · focus · HN ↗
    The industrial revolution begot the labor movement, which is what caused greater freedom.
    It could do that because of the dependence on labor for production, or in other words leverage over the ownership class.
    If we accelerate technology to the point where we sever this dependency, all those freedoms will no longer have the leverage required to extract them. Our lives didn't become not worthless because of the steam machine. They became not worthless because of leverage over capital reproduction, and once that's gone they may well become worthless again.
    Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
    Gareth321 · 1790231734 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you're both right in different ways. Some labour movements were not dependent on technological advancement. Some technological advancements materially and independently improved the lives of people. The contraceptive pill gave women much greater control over the timing of pregnancy. [Its diffusion substantially affected women's investment in professional careers and the timing of marriage.](<a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w7527" rel="nofollow">https://www.nber.org/papers/w7527) Medical and reproductive technologies played an important role in increasing married women's ability to participate in paid work. Those are changes in actual individual choice brought about, in significant part, by technology.
    However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.
    vrganj · 1790232909 · focus · HN ↗
    So I think abundance completely changes the game and I think we can all agree on that.
    I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
    Labor will no longer be required for their productive needs, so that handful of people that controls the abundance machines will no longer have any incentive to keep the rest of humanity satisfied, or even alive for that matter.
    In other words, if we don't change social relations before we get to this state, we will end up in a world where the Musks, Bezos and Zucks of this world control all material production, with the rest of us reduced to being dependent on their charity.
    Personally, that sounds like the worst dystopia imaginable.
    I will give you that prior attempts at socialism weren't necessarily successful and a lot of people died, however, I also think that argument requires holding one eye shut.
    People are dying from capitalism right now. There's a homeless guy in SoMa that is breathing his last breath as we speak. There's entire villages in Africa that can't afford clean water while Nestle sells it in plastic bottles that pollute our planet. The status quo is not without its own violence and I think that is a point that too often gets swept under the rug.
    Either way though, I think even if I were to concede that capitalism historically had better outcomes (which I have not been fully sold on! it's positives have just been more articulated imo, but that's another debate.), we are in a critical moment right now.
    If we really believe we're to transition into a post-scarcity world, we need to make sure the right social relations are in place before that happens and whatever we have right now is locked in forever.
    All criticism of socialism's supposed productive ineffectiveness becomes irrelevant once the transition is done anyways.
    Gareth321 · 1790233626 · focus · HN ↗
    > I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
    It's a valid concern. We use democracy right now to address inequality. Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
    Perhaps this is more of a regional risk? There are some nations which culturally value individuality. I'm not sure the U.S. would build national abundance machines.
    I think I broadly agree with your thesis, however. Abundance is going to force massive social change. If goods and services are effectively free, most jobs disappear. So too does their income and consumer demand, which destroys the entire premise of capitalism. You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
    When Middle American manufacturing jobs were offshored to China, Hilary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." I fear many more people whose jobs are lost to AI will be met with similar derision. It is only when things get very bad that change will occur. The Star Trek timeline describes this collapse between 2020s-2053.
    vrganj · 1790235226 · focus · HN ↗
    > Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources?
    Even though I'm not too concerned about that specifically, that is clearly a plan they have. [0]
    > To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
    I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
    > You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
    I, too, am worried about the transition, but for different reasons. I believe Elon when he says he believes capitalism will end in a few decades. However, I don't think he has prosperity for all in mind and that end state won't just naturally happen by itself.
    I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
    That, to me, is the core transition risk we need to manage. We need to make sure abundance machines aren't just a device for completely centralizing power in the hands of a few.
    [0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%B3spera" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%B3spera
    Gareth321 · 1790237617 · focus · HN ↗
    > I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
    I understand. I place less weight into this risk. The current AI supply chain is so globally interdependent that it has effectively distributed itself beyond centralised control. China has received the full weight of global chip sanctions and still somehow manages to provide competitive coding models using either grey imports, offshore cloud compute, or locally produced chips. It would be very difficult (and I would argue almost impossible) for a nation and especially an individual/company to seize ownership of the entire supply chain and prevent everyone else in the world from producing their own AI/chips/abundance machines.
    > I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
    No doubt many people in positions of power are megalomaniacs. This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.
    vrganj · 1790239516 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.
    I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
    You see both of these in action right now. Think of Elon Musk actively defying Brazilian rule of law [0] or him literally being put into a position where he can neuter the institutions designed to hold him democratically accountable with the DOGE appointment.
    To quote MLK - "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
    I think fundamentally one cannot disentangle democratic control of political power from democratic control of the economy, because economic power can be converted into political power.
    [0] <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/starlink-tells-brazil-regulator-it-will-not-comply-with-x-suspension-2024-09-02/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/technology/starlink-tells-brazil-reg...
    Gareth321 · 1790243724 · focus · HN ↗
    > I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
    I agree there is a risk, and I think defence of democracy should be at the forefront of fighting against the future you fear. I do not think the risk appears at the end of a gun. Rather, via propaganda and corruption. We know how effective propaganda can be, starting with Goebbels and all the way through to social media today. The problem here is that there is no clearly defined solution. Some people prescribe state control of information, which has historically resulted in catastrophic outcomes. Some people prescribe uncensored information to the greatest degree possible, and to the degree we have that today, it's also not working out very well. Perhaps this will be the great question of our time.
    For the record, re DOGE, I see that as the people getting what they voted for. Musk campaigned clearly on his intended actions, and for better or worse, a plurality of voters voted for that. We should be careful not to criticise democracy just because voters chose a different direction. However I think this is partly influenced by what I describe above.
    ben_w · 1790320935 · focus · HN ↗
    > However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.
    This is somewhat overstating the case, though I currently agree "the abundance must come first".
    Capitalism, as it was understood when the Communist Manifesto was written, basically doesn't exist any more. A large subset of what it called for is now so widespread even in "capitalist" nations that the absence of those things is considered a sign of being a failed state.
    Yes, there are three primary examples of Communism absolutely failing, hard: Four Pests, Holodomor, and Pol Pot.
    The Communist Manifesto was written during the famous potato famine. Less famously, the impact of the blight hurt the Irish much more than other places that were also using potatoes as staple crops, and the British Government of the era (which controlled Ireland) was pursuing laissez-faire capitalism at the time.
    Similar (that a capitalist regime was in charge) can be said about subsequent famines in India before independence.
    Some say that Communism ended with the USSR, that while modern China uses the name "Communist" for their one-party state it is really state-capitalism. By this standard, capitalism (as the term was understood by Marx et al) ended roughly in the era containing both Roosevelt's New Deal taking root in the USA and the UK's Labour Party replacement of the Liberal Party's position in Westminster.
    rayiner · 1790244739 · focus · HN ↗
    > Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
    Technology drives and makes possible changes in social relations.
    vrganj · 1790251443 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed, that is what I'm saying. But whether things change for the better or the worse isn't up to technology, it is up to social dynamics.
    hollerith · 1790260492 · focus · HN ↗
    Roddenberry was interested in communism during his involvement The Next Generation and he insisted that in its fictional world, human society had overcome greed and political polarization. No scripts in which one faction inside human society competed with another were allowed. Somehow over the 100+ episodes of the show, no two workers on the Enterprise ever competed for a promotion. AFAICR the show depicts no corporations, human investors or human merchants, and Cochrane is the only person depicted who might be a human entrepreneur. Also, Roddenberry insisted that human society had done away with money, and he made that stick for the duration of the show.
    I was once in a (private) vigorous debate over socialism in which my socialist interlocutor hoped his bringing up the portrayal of human society in Star Trek would get me to warm towards socialism.
    hollerith · 1790262959 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you really believe that human society as portrayed in The Next Generation was not socialist? (Socialist countries have militaries, too.)
    The proper reply to your parent IMHO is that the first two shows of Star Trek are evil propaganda, not that the society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.
    vrganj · 1790265721 · focus · HN ↗
    Wow, that comment went from quite reasonable to taking a very strange turn in the second paragraph.
    hollerith · 1790295550 · focus · HN ↗
    I regret publishing that second paragraph. I knew (or would've known if I had been paying sufficient attention) it would offend many in this audience, and I should've held my tongue.
    But I really do believe that Star Trek, specifically the parts that Roddenberry personally oversaw (namely the original series and the first four seasons of The Next Generation) had a very negative effect on the world.
    In addition to making some viewers more committed to socialist ideology[1] Roddenberry's Star Trek made many committed to the ideology of technological progress.
    Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
    [1] In a (private) debate with me, a committed socialist asserted that a successful transition to socialism would result in a society much like the one depicted in Star Trek. Since it is very unlikely that he engaged in many debates about socialism before his debate with me, the reason he believed that that assertion might make me warm to socialism is probably because it had contributed to his own warming to socialism.
    vrganj · 1790321613 · focus · HN ↗
    > Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
    I think you may have fallen victim to a common misconception of how ideology actually functions.
    The most affected by ideology aren't the ones consciously committing to a cause. Ideology is strongest precisely when you think you're outside of it - when your ideological commitments have become so normalized that they are completely invisible to you.
    There is no such thing as being unideological, whatever you perceive as such is just a reflection of your own ideology.
    If you'd like to delve deeper into the theory of ideology and how it functions, I'd recommend the works of philosophy legend and ideology expert Slavoj Zizek.
    There's his seminal work, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which goes into this at depth, but is a very dry and academic read. If you'd like something a bit more digestible, I would recommend the movie The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which uses a more pop-sci approach of dissecting popular movies to demonstrate their ideological function.
    tuesdaynight · 1790358487 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    hollerith · 1790359133 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm pointing at a different thing in the world than you're pointing at.
    One reason I know they're different is that the thing I'm pointing at is vastly less influential in some people than other, so much so that it clearly makes sense to call some people "unideological"
    I'm willing to switch to a different term for the thing I'm interested in, but I haven't been able to come up with one.
    rayiner · 1790276465 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    hollerith · 1790298864 · focus · HN ↗
    You're right. I had something I really wanted to say, which would have fit into the conversation if you had said something somewhat similar but actually quite different from what you actually said, but I overlooked the difference so that I could say what I really wanted to say.
    In other words, I sacrificed the quality of the conversation (namely, I introduced not only a tangent, but also a tangent rooted in a confusion) so that I could express some thought that had risen to salience in my solitary mind. My doing that made the conversation worse, and the conversation is what matters, not whether I got to express myself in a way that is quick and easy for me.
    ben_w · 1790271933 · focus · HN ↗
    > Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit.
    And as a drunk, who got to this stage in the aftermath of WW3, which was definitely not post-scarcity at this point because of how hard it was to "scrounge together enough titanium for the cockpit".
    And immediately after the test flight, some pointy-eared vegetarian space Buddhists landed and said hi.
    > It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
    TOS is very much "space is an ocean". NCC-1701 is very obviously a shoe-in for CVN-65, the "colonies" and other locations they visit are scaled more like Pacific islands than planets, the episode with Romulan cloaking device is classic submarine warfare filmography including getting people to be quiet (so the space sonar wouldn't pick them up?)
    TNG kept a lot of this, but was also "families on board" from the get-go.
    31aHgd · 1790196940 · focus · HN ↗
    I would not want to walk in pajamas on a sterile spacecraft and deal with new aliens every week.
    adrianN · 1790219149 · focus · HN ↗
    Only a tiny fraction of the Federation's population is part of Star Fleet. There are only a few thousand star ships scattered over thousands of light years. Crew complements are rather small, so at most a single-digit million people are on Star Fleet ships. That's comparable to the size of just the current US military personnel but the Federation has hundreds of planets and many billions of people.
  5. Zigurd · 1790190091 · focus · HN ↗
    Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
    Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
    rayiner · 1790190809 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    hollerith · 1790217092 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    31aHgd · 1790197246 · focus · HN ↗
    It isn't about space travel. The AI boosters use it as a pretext for powering more data centers.
    Zigurd · 1790214066 · focus · HN ↗
    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,
    zahlman · 1790201304 · focus · HN ↗
    This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.
    martin_a · 1790204027 · focus · HN ↗
    We should be able to call out bullshit if we see it.
    zahlman · 1790263250 · focus · HN ↗
    You are.
    There is no incompatibility between "calling out bullshit" and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .
    There is, however, an incompatibility between GGP's rhetoric and the guidelines.
  6. vrganj · 1790193533 · focus · HN ↗
    > upgrade civilization to the next level
    What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
    Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
  7. chrystalkey · 1790202200 · focus · HN ↗
    What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?
    rayiner · 1790202954 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  8. ben_w · 1790271027 · focus · HN ↗
    > Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
    Trivially. If we push hard, more than three orders of magnitude are possible (even for overall energy use, which is itself around an order of magnitude more than electricity), even without launching anything to orbit.
    > I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
    Solar is as likely as fission to lead to either of these things. Each of the four is a different beast.
    Solar is also the only way to scale up to a K2, which would trivially obviate both even with solar sails.
4. drnick1 · 1790187191 · focus · HN ↗
  > certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
  Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.
  1. adrianN · 1790187362 · focus · HN ↗
    Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.
  2. dalyons · 1790187498 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.
  3. fl0id · 1790188500 · focus · HN ↗
    How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.
    someonebaggy · 1790198836 · focus · HN ↗
    Conspiracy hat time: I think this is the main reason it's being pushed so hard. The US and Russia feel threatened by the rise of renewables and will do anything to get countries dependent on them again.
    drnick1 · 1790207202 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    someonebaggy · 1790210649 · focus · HN ↗
    From where does uranium come?
    AngryData · 1790227256 · focus · HN ↗
    There are some better mines in different areas of course, but it is available across most of the planet. Processing it is way harder than finding a source of it, but that is also a solved problem, you just gotta put in the capital to build it.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790275276 · focus · HN ↗
    Making an already uncompetitive energy source even more expensive.
    AngryData · 1790285942 · focus · HN ↗
    But it also secures your energy needs independent from anybody else and still scales. Solar lasts a long time, but not nearly as many countries have the minerals for building more panels and batteries as they do uranium refinement.
    someonebaggy · 1790299163 · focus · HN ↗
    What? Solar panels last virtually forever. The oft-quoted 25 years is for a 30% efficiency loss, they actually last way longer.
    Any country that can figure out uranium processing can figure out solar panel production, and they are made entirely from common materials with advanced processing steps. I'm not sure about batteries though.
    Moldoteck · 1790240130 · focus · HN ↗
    As example Canada and Australia
    Moldoteck · 1790240101 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    sien · 1790205909 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not.
    <a href="https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment" rel="nofollow">https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
    Orano and Urenco are European and have massive enrichment capability.
    Canada, Australia and Namibia have massive Uranium reserves.
    <a href="https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/world-uranium-mining-production" rel="nofollow">https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
  4. layer8 · 1790188630 · focus · HN ↗
    > it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.
    The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).
    So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.
    icantevenhold · 1790189221 · focus · HN ↗
    Idk we can import uranium from lots of places; i think currently mostly from Canada.
    But I just don’t get why it’s being discussed at all - its obviously so much more expensive and time consuming to build than the alternatives
    philipkglass · 1790189421 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    layer8 · 1790189830 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, but the parent was implying 50+ years of nothing to worry about once a plant is built.
    AngryData · 1790196320 · focus · HN ↗
    It would cost a bit more is the worst case if you had to build your own centerfuges, uranium is not all that rare. And a single ship could carry a decades worth of fuel (not that I recommend a decade of fuel on a single ship), so even if shipping was costly it would be cheap compared to the actual fuel refinement. You couldn't Hormuz a uranium fuel supply because it doesn't take thousands of ships or miles of pipeline to deliver.
    So maybe not worry free, but if you are able to run nuclear reactors for power to start with, obtaining fuel for them in any scenario shouldn't be impossible. You got atleast a year or two lead time between refuelings, and it might be able to be stretched a little longer in an emergency. And even more time if you hold some in reserve.
    Emma_Goldman · 1790189679 · focus · HN ↗
    Australia and Canada are top producers of uranium ore, and uranium ore is a small fraction of total lifecycle costs. Given a ~2 year refuelling cycle and the possibility of stockpiling uranium, this is very far from an interruption to oil and gas flows - which you need a continuous supply of. Security isn't just a function of autarkic raw material supplies.
    Moldoteck · 1790238878 · focus · HN ↗
    There are many more deposits to explore, like Sweden. And we can start doing purex+mox recycling to extend operation further
  5. _verandaguy · 1790189248 · focus · HN ↗
    Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.
    It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.
    To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.
    someonebaggy · 1790198799 · focus · HN ↗
    What if we just skipped the certification?
    JackSlateur · 1790452340 · focus · HN ↗
    I dunno, China seems to be doing exactly that
    Perhaps the self-induced costs can be volontarily reduced and not inflated ?
  6. Phelinofist · 1790190148 · focus · HN ↗
    > Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment
    ... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
    sgjohnson · 1790205441 · focus · HN ↗
    > and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
    It's perfectly figured out. Just entomb it in concrete and store it on site. All spent nuclear fuel to date combined would quite comfortably fit in an average Walmart parking lot. It's a complete non-issue. And if we'd get really desperate, the spent fuel could be re-enriched.
    Moldoteck · 1790240289 · focus · HN ↗
    Opex is low. Storage is figured out. See onkalo or hundreds of others for forever toxic chemicals
  7. Kon5ole · 1790194012 · focus · HN ↗
    >Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,
    That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.
    The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.
    Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
    >t's that or buying gas from Russia.
    Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.
    And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?
    jjk166 · 1790207790 · focus · HN ↗
    > Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
    Dams bursting can and repeatedly have have killed tens of thousands in a single incident. Pollution from coal plants running normally causes 1 million premature deaths per year. The deepwater horizon spill was a $100 billion disaster with an environmental impact greater than any nuclear incident. Nuclear is not uniquely risky by any rational metric.
    Kon5ole · 1790235351 · focus · HN ↗
    >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.
    jjk166 · 1790279072 · focus · HN ↗
    > The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding.
    So we're not counting natural disasters that cause power infrastructure failure? I take it you don't consider the events of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to be a nuclear accident then.
    > 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.
    And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China.
    > Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima.
    It was much worse in terms of environmental impact, particularly the area impacted.
    > Also it wasn't a power plant
    I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.
    > Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood
    I was being generous in only looking at consequences without considering likelihood. The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives, but the likelihood has been astronomically less, hence Nuclear has been the safest power source ever utilized by mankind. So yes, in a way nuclear's risk is unique - uniquely low. I fully agree this should be accepted and considered in any discussion.
    Kon5ole · 1790284492 · focus · HN ↗
    >So we're not counting natural disasters that cause power infrastructure failure? I take it you don't consider the events of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to be a nuclear accident then.
    Of course not, if I did that's 20 000 dead from a "nuclear accident" right there. But that would be dishonest and silly, and I aim for rationality.
    >And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China
    Not even if you assign all the blame of global warming to chinese coal plants would this be even remotely true.
    >I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.
    You responded to a claim that no other power plant represent as great a risk at a nuclear power plant.
    Maybe you should have created a new thread saying something like "a nuclear plant is not as bad as the entire fossil fuel industry worldwide"? ;-)
    >The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives
    You completely ignored the facts that clearly tell you that the consequences are orders of magnitude worse.
    That's no way to convince anyone. Just saying.
    Moldoteck · 1790356528 · focus · HN ↗
    So you are in a phase where coal is safer than nuclear? Sorry but that's bullshit. German early nuclear phaseout did already cause due to pollution half of total nr of estimated deaths from Chernobyl per UN assuming LNT is true at low doses. It's you that are ignoring facts and spread literally fossils fuel propaganda to justify your antinuclear position
    Kon5ole · 1790361407 · focus · HN ↗
    >So you are in a phase where coal is safer than nuclear?
    The permanent truth phase yes. Coal is so much safer than nuclear that a comparison is hardly meaningful.
    Let me put it this way - If coal power plants were run with as much security as nuclear plants they wouldn't kill mosquitoes sleeping in their chimneys. If nuclear power plants were run with as little security as coal plants however, we would not be here to have this discussion.
    You seem to be well aware of the dangers of fossil fuels, but you come across as entirely ignorant of the dangers of nuclear power. Good decisions need knowledge of both.
    I'm as anti coal as I am anti nuclear because both are terrible ideas. Renewables, batteries, e-fuels and other storage options are here now. They're better, faster, cheaper, safer. Let's do that.
    Moldoteck · 1790239059 · focus · HN ↗
    It's cheap to operate. See <a href="https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
    The statement about getting 70% from Russia is total bullshit
    What non zero chance of millions of casualties? Chernobyl, a shit design that weren't allowed in the west even then is estimated to kill about 4k in total. In Fukushima the number is zero or 1 deaths from radiation due to low dose. And that's old gen2 reactor striken by tsunami and earthquake
    I've seen what antinuclear europe does to remove the weakness of renewables - subsidies for new gas peakers in Germany
    Kon5ole · 1790264946 · focus · HN ↗
    >It's cheap to operate. See <a href="https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte" rel="nofollow">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...
    Moldoteck · 1790356340 · focus · HN ↗
    4-6ct/kwh is dirt cheap. It's so cheap that even curtailing renewables to let it run more instead of using gas peakers is cheaper
    And it's far from being higher than avg market prices today in Switzerland, where did you get this nonsense?
    The price includes their profit margin. Even if they sell at lower, they'll still make profit, just less.
    The claim about swiss taxpayers is bullshit, please stop spreading it, there's no proof to this whatsoever. Swiss nuclear plants operation is not subsidized.
    Edf was not bailed out. It was renationalized (albeit state was always majority owner) to push for construction of epr2. EDF debt to EBITDA is healthy. It made profit pretty much every single year despite arenh, except 2022. EDF could definitely operate their npp more profitable but that's another story.
    But even if we assume that 9bn transaction was a subsidy, do you realize it's merely half of what Germany is spending for EEG alone EACH YEAR?
    "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."
    Please refrain from spread utter bullshit again. Not only you don't comprehend under what conditions used fuel catches fire or that if by some absurd reason nobody can cool the spent fuel to avoid boiling, something much more terrible happened, but catching fire/melting doesn't mean it'll be a fallout. It's clear you are antinuclear person and enjoy fossils. You don't need to invent bullshit to firm your position.
    Land is not uninhabitable. Heck, even in freaking Chernobyl animals are thriving. Try saying the same about german coal mines
    Kon5ole · 1790367716 · focus · HN ↗
    >And it's far from being higher than avg market prices today in Switzerland, where did you get this nonsense?
    It's not nonsense but you made a different statement than I.
    Switzerland doesn't use market prices. Electricity in Switzerland is regulated so they pay vastly more than the european market at most times.
    This Sunday for example, Germany enjoyed spot wholesale prices of 2 centimes per kWh while Switzerland had 12. You can verify the German prices on nordpool and an equivalent swiss energy market site.
    Citizens in Switzerland pay much more than wholesale, averaging over 20 centimes last year. They are forced to do so by regulations.
    When you force your population, aka the taxpayers, to pay 5-10x as much for electricity as it costs in the open market you using taxpayer money to subsidize electricity.
    You follow?
    >Edf was not bailed out. It was renationalized
    Thats synonymous, and it was actually the second time EDF were bailed out, France had to pay for the overruns on the plant in Finland too. Lucky Finland!
    The mechanism varies by country, but the bottom line is that taxpayers always have to pay for nuclear. They have no choice.
    There is no option to walk away, you can't leave it, it has to be taken care of. Every other power plant you can shut down and walk away but nuclear is, again, unique in this respect.
    When all the swiss nuclear operators go bankrupt, the swiss will still have to pay people to operate the plants, or decommision them, and then store the waste, for longer than Rolex has existed as a company.
    Nobody else will. So it's the taxpayers, always.
    >by some absurd reason nobody can cool the spent fuel to avoid boiling,
    Absurd reasons are not that uncommon. War for example. Also, landslides, earthquakes, terrorists, pandemics, sinkholes. Stupid politicians. Lots of things. Non-zero.
    >something much more terrible happened,
    The spent fuel fire will be the most terrible thing that happened that day, unless the cause was an actual nuclear weapon strike.
    Or well, since it's Switzerland I guess CERN could have come up with something worse but I can't imagine what. ;-)
  8. jmyeet · 1790231527 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh it has tons of cons:
    1. It's the most expensive form of electricity;
    2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;
    3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);
    4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;
    5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;
    6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;
    7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;
    8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;
    9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";
    10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and
    11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.
    thomashabets2 · 1790234297 · focus · HN ↗
    > No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost.
    Do fossil fuel plants pay co2 costs, or insurance costs for killing the planet? Well, it wouldn't make any sense, since it's not accidents that kill in that case, but the steady state.
    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).
    JackSlateur · 1790452856 · focus · HN ↗
    About waste: somehow, this is a solved problem (at scale) ? Fast breeder reactor, half life ~= 30 years (IIRC)
    From your message, I understand that your country fails to build nuclear plant in a timely fashion but that other (china) can. Seems like a lack of skill/willingness to me, not a technical issue.
5. Zigurd · 1790189062 · focus · HN ↗
  Nuclear power plants are uninsurable in the private market. There is no natural investor base for a product that is uninsurable. Unless you are an imagining a culture war where real capitalists are fighting corporate welfare queens, it's not a culture war issue.
6. dualvariable · 1790189794 · focus · HN ↗
  > It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
  For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.
  1. jabl · 1790192196 · focus · HN ↗
    People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.
    That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.
    dualvariable · 1790192421 · focus · HN ↗
    And nuclear has still sat there being too expensive and solving nothing, proving the point, but apparently this is evidence of the opposite.
    jabl · 1790192934 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    dualvariable · 1790225763 · focus · HN ↗
    Renewables passed nuclear a long time ago. If the economics of renewables weren't making sense, the economics of nuclear were worse.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790275363 · focus · HN ↗
    We did try to build nuclear. Massive subsidy programs were created, it just didn’t deliver.
7. Moldoteck · 1790238788 · focus · HN ↗
  It can happen like in Sweden with proper guarantees
  1. fulafel · 1790273192 · focus · HN ↗
    Nuclear plants have been decommissioned recently there.
8. poolingdrool · 1790266364 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
9. 7952 · 1790270487 · focus · HN ↗
  Wether we like it or not power generation at this scale is political. And whilst the culture war stuff is rubbish we can't escape the fact that these questions exist on dozens of different dimensions and include things like economics, politics, emotional, human factors, the environment etc. ultimately the argument needs to be won rather than settled.
iamheretoo · 1790185764 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
egorfine · 1790185944 · focus · HN ↗
Nature is healing.
b38484848 · 1790186101 · focus · HN ↗
too late
ngubu and ahmed aint maintaining nuclear power and solar is most cost efficient now anyway
1. OKRainbowKid · 1790186417 · focus · HN ↗
  Agreed on your second point, but why couldn't you make it without the blatant racism?
  1. b38484848 · 1790186427 · focus · HN ↗
    oh, Im italian
  2. redsocksfan45 · 1790187022 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
2. JV00 · 1790186673 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe not them, but their children could do it. Italy's capability to assimilate is underrated.
MadrasThorn · 1790186212 · focus · HN ↗
>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.
>The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.
Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.
1. orwin · 1790187138 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?
  1. dguest · 1790187361 · focus · HN ↗
    I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.
    dalyons · 1790187617 · focus · HN ↗
    A theory with a lot of leaps that is in no way guaranteed. But it’s a nice idea
    _aavaa_ · 1790187787 · focus · HN ↗
    It will reliably cost only 10x, and it theory it will roll of a production line.
    The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle were explicitly marked for the modular construction as a key selling feature, which would reduce time and cost. It came out 20B over budget and 7 years late.
    Zigurd · 1790188478 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    manquer · 1790189028 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790190241 · focus · HN ↗
    Look at the proposed EPR2 subsidies. It is interest free loans and €100 per MWh on top of that, while assuming large learning effects.
    They are admitting Flamanville 3 like costs before they have even started building
    manquer · 1790191761 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    _aavaa_ · 1790190485 · focus · HN ↗
    Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units.
    > Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C
    Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late.
    These are terrible results.
    That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun.
    The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.
    manquer · 1790191205 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    teamonkey · 1790201342 · focus · HN ↗
    The most annoying thing about Hinkley Point C is that after all the delays and investments, the electricity it generates won’t even be cheap. £133/MWh!
    Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind dawn is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.
    stephbook · 1790188230 · focus · HN ↗
    Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too.
    Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that.
    France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.
    oofbey · 1790188582 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    MengerSponge · 1790188934 · focus · HN ↗
    You absolutely can. Read up on the French nuclear reactor fleet!
    <a href="https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivite/" rel="nofollow">https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...
    There are minor variances locally, but you can make enough components common to benefit massively from economies of scale.
    bathtub365 · 1790189151 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    AngryData · 1790195602 · focus · HN ↗
    Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer.
    The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.
    oofbey · 1790199293 · focus · HN ↗
    Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.
    bluGill · 1790189648 · focus · HN ↗
    Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on.
    There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.
    icantevenhold · 1790188963 · focus · HN ↗
    Floating nuclear plants next to a city sound like a recipe for disaster
    cyberax · 1790189939 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790190133 · focus · HN ↗
    All these extra methods of preserving water adds cost, to a technology where paid off plants are struggling. Let alone ruinously expensive new builds.
    samus · 1790191099 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    cyberax · 1790191193 · focus · HN ↗
    They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them.
    You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790195235 · focus · HN ↗
    If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Evidently they are not free.
    cyberax · 1790195750 · focus · HN ↗
    > If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them.
    Pretty much all the new thermal power plants are (including biomass-burning plants), except in places where cool water is not scarce.
    It's weird to glomp onto that idea, as if it's some kind of a fatal flaw of nuclear power.
    SoftTalker · 1790190165 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    MostlyStable · 1790225391 · focus · HN ↗
    They were already safer than coal...by several orders of magnitude. A Chernobyl level disaster every single year would have killed fewer people than coal power. The level of safety you are describing has literally killed millions of people.
    Commoditizing the existing reactors of 40-50 years ago would have lead to a dramatically better world than we currently live in, with cheaper power, essentially defeated climate change, better air quality, and fewer premature deaths associated with that air quality.
    stephbook · 1790242990 · focus · HN ↗
    The designs didn't evolve, the requirements did. That's going to happen to SMBs too.
    You build 10, someone is concerned about a flaw, you build the next 90 differently. Oops!
    jabl · 1790192612 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    teamonkey · 1790200853 · focus · HN ↗
    You can in theory build a SMR next to a data centre, so I guess we’ll find out
    stephbook · 1790243238 · focus · HN ↗
    > Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.
    It is not. There are roughly 200 >1GW reactors.
    The US just doesn't want Chinese reactors and vice versa. The same problem will haunt SMBs.
    oofbey · 1790188406 · focus · HN ↗
    Wright’s law is the only way to reduce costs. It’s a generalization of Moore’s law. The more of anything you build the cheaper it gets. Most products get 10% - 20% cheaper every time total production volume doubles. The most obvious example right now is rockets - launch costs are going down exponentially because we (SpaceX mostly) are doing so much of it we are finally getting economies of scale. SMRs will too, but only if they become popular. It’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but the economics are clear. If lots of people start using SMRs they WILL get cheap. And it’s a form factor where it’s plausible lots of people will.
    Zigurd · 1790188800 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jacquesm · 1790188470 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no economic case for SMR that you couldn't make for a larger one with a massive benefit of economies of scale. SMRs are - in my opinion - a dead end, larger reactors could work well but will be delivered later and likely will still not be profitable on a KWh basis when compared to an equivalent installed base of solar and wind and will most likely be deliver much, much later.
  2. 1209387 · 1790187615 · focus · HN ↗
    Because Trump is pushing SMR on all "allies", UK, Japan, Italy:
    <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzevzwxwro" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzevzwxwro
    I couldn't find immediate investments from Kushner etc., but will dig further.
  3. gatio · 1790188042 · focus · HN ↗
    Prefab & faster construction possibilities would be a big one.
  4. cyberax · 1790189593 · focus · HN ↗
    Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.
    In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.
    This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.
    I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.
  5. fedecaccia · 1790343927 · focus · HN ↗
    Main idea: license once, then repeat and repeat. Scale. The cost to produce energy from one single SMR is higher than fomr a classical PWR (diving output per full buidling cost) but that cost is reduced once you start scaling (all the costs associated with initial license are amortized).
epolanski · 1790187785 · focus · HN ↗
> after voters *twice* rejected it in national referendums
Democracy is just lovely.
Have your citizens answer to a straightforward question on a topic twice, have them reject it, both times.
And the government will still go its way.
I'm not against nuclear per se, I'm just baffled at the "democratic" process.
1. eru · 1790189405 · focus · HN ↗
  Shouldn't people be allowed to change their minds?
  A party can lose three election, and if they win the fourth, they still get into power.
  1. epolanski · 1790191020 · focus · HN ↗
    > Shouldn't people be allowed to change their minds?
    People haven't been asked?
    Twice they were, twice they said "no" at the referendum.
    There still hasn't been a "yes". But a government proceeding on their own.
2. layer8 · 1790189461 · focus · HN ↗
  The referendums were in 1987 and 2011, respectively. Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.
  It’s much less frequent than the usual democratic election cycle, where people are also allowed to reevaluate their positions.
  1. epolanski · 1790191113 · focus · HN ↗
    > Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.
    But nobody asked, there hasn't been a third referendum.
    jltsiren · 1790191825 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn't work that way in Italy. A popular referendum can only abolish an existing law, partially or fully. The general public cannot vote to adopt new legislation.
3. icantevenhold · 1790189589 · focus · HN ↗
  The government was elected by the people - if they disagree with this decision it will have consequences in the next election.
  I think the public opinion and sentiment has changed quite significantly since 2011 when the last referendum was held.
  The current Italian government is massively populist so they wouldn’t do this if they thought people would disagree.
  I don’t see any problem with the democratic process here - sure it’s a flawed system but I believe it’s still the best we came up with so far
  1. epolanski · 1790190974 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding.
    arlort · 1790229577 · focus · HN ↗
    The referendum is obviously legally binding, the laws they were about were abrogated as the vote requested and it's been 15 years since the last one.
    Since then politics shifted, technology changed, the geopolitical situation changed, 10 million people died, 9 million people became adults that weren't before
    If people are still against nuclear the same mechanism to call for a referendum to reject this law still exists and there's elections next year anyway.
4. Alles · 1790233263 · focus · HN ↗
  Mind you the referendum vote was held only 2 years after the Chernobyl incident
reddalo · 1790188063 · focus · HN ↗
I'm Italian and I'm super happy with this.
The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.
Curiously enough, some Italian town signs still have a small sub-sign reading "denuclearized municipality" (example: <a href="https://live.staticflickr.com/1421/712461235_e46a2c7db5_z.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://live.staticflickr.com/1421/712461235_e46a2c7db5_z.jp... )
1. icantevenhold · 1790188614 · focus · HN ↗
  As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
  Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
  1. someonebaggy · 1790188941 · focus · HN ↗
    It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
    sgjohnson · 1790204386 · focus · HN ↗
    "as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill.
    US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.
    It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se.
    The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x.
    For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.
    someonebaggy · 1790247225 · focus · HN ↗
    And is it reasonable to get their doses that low?
  2. thegabriele · 1790188950 · focus · HN ↗
    About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.
    icantevenhold · 1790189729 · focus · HN ↗
    Fair - but using new (unproven) technology imo only increases the cost/time/risk overall?
    preisschild · 1790243945 · focus · HN ↗
    Then just build GenIII+ PWRs like most other countries.
  3. gignico · 1790189515 · focus · HN ↗
    The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.
    icantevenhold · 1790189675 · focus · HN ↗
    Aren’t SMRs essentially unproven? I think only Russia and China built some working facilities, and the rest is still under construction.
    I mean anything could happen but seems like a long shot
    gignico · 1790190188 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    icantevenhold · 1790190510 · focus · HN ↗
    Gotcha - yea I think it’s a good idea to try out these things. I just hope it doesn’t become a ideological fight to make something work at any cost to fit a certain narrative (same goes for renewables of course)
    teamonkey · 1790200126 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jasonwatkinspdx · 1790203705 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, the issue isn't knowing how to build small reactors, it's whether you can do so with enough economy of scale and learning to make it cheaper than conventional nuclear.
    And I personally have switched from bull to bear on that. I was rooting for NuScale but they're hitting the same thing as everyone else.
    Meanwhile, battery storage has been on an insane cost reduction curve.
    FlowingRiver · 1790205545 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a key point to many things. Need to identify the difference between technically viable and economically viable.
    It is the same argument I make for Starship. Technically, yeah it should work. The economics of of going to Mars, not so sure about that.
    jasonwatkinspdx · 1790210367 · focus · HN ↗
    If they can get Starship reliable enough, it'll definitely be successful even if it never goes to mars.
    But despite SpaceX's huge successes with Falcon, that doesn't prove they'll cross the finish line with Starship. Falcon and specifically the Merlin engine made just about every choice they could in favor of risk reduction rather than the best possible performance. It was a continuation of work that Tom Mueller did while at TRW.
    With Starship they're in more uncharted territory, especially the re-entry concept, and the engine has been designed under the opposite philosophy of trying to push limits.
    preisschild · 1790243826 · focus · HN ↗
    Countries should definitely evaluate LMRs (Large Modular Reactors) too. Most countries need large amounts of carbon free energy, not small amounts.
    But yeah their most modern nuclear power plant was a BWR 4 with Mark II containment, which would probably not be worth modernizing instead of building a new GenIII+ PWR from scratch that lasts a century.
  4. sndcr · 1790189759 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790190411 · focus · HN ↗
    We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.
    Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:
    Some recent ones:
    Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544225042720" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
    Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
    Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway. <a href="https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Electricity-transition/GenCost" rel="nofollow">https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
    Flip-per · 1790193197 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.
    K3UL · 1790195994 · focus · HN ↗
    Because what is true for these 3 countries is not true for all countries. There are counter-examples where nuclear is cheaper.
    In most countries which don't have the advantages of Australia or Finland, you do need a mix as the OP was saying
    teamonkey · 1790199754 · focus · HN ↗
    What is Italy lacking? Sun? Wind?
    Flatterer3544 · 1790201370 · focus · HN ↗
    Usually comes down to industry energy needs.
    realusername · 1790204106 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn't downvote but it's nonsense, nobody can sustain a winter with batteries and other storage.
    I only checked the first paper and it doesn't seem talk about what would happen if a 3 weeks bad wind event would happen in winter, and a rough look at the figures makes me think it just wouldn't work. I didn't check the other papers.
    And the proof is in the pudding anyways, if it's that cheap and feasible to do, well let's see who's doing it.
    FlowingRiver · 1790205327 · focus · HN ↗
    It is Simon Michaux that throws out the figure that you need 2TWH of storage to make it through he worse of Winter.
    <a href="https://www.ecoshock.org/2024/02/why-renewables-cannot-power-your-world-simon-michaux.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ecoshock.org/2024/02/why-renewables-cannot-power...
    I think he points to a valid point but completely over plays his hand. Everyone that has argued these kinds of points have brought valid arguments but have completely under estimated the pace of change.
    He might be right, and him pointing to the issues may actually be something that helps us avoid these issues. Generally, knowing about a problem is a much better position than being slammed by something you didn't anticipate.
    I tend to think long term we are going to a much lower energy world, that we made the mistake of building a world and our expectations to the paradigm of fossil fuels. But I also think that we are not going back to the stone age and that renewables will do better than the pessimists. Good chance we will hit a reasonable mid-ground even if it means living standards change, possibly a smaller, slower but more intentional world. It may be nice even if it means you can no longer get a slab of Coke for an hours wage.
    realusername · 1790217509 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the complete opposite, we are going towards a high energy world, I expect the current electric grid to be multipled by 3, both to replace petrol and add new usage.
    Which makes the whole "we'll build renewables and storage" sounds even more unrealistic
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790234123 · focus · HN ↗
    They just model the weather hour by hour. But you’re made up scenario is of course impossible to cover.
    preisschild · 1790243537 · focus · HN ↗
    OP (ViewTrick) is very well known in the online nuclear energy community. He is the moderator of the NuclearEnergy subreddit where he regularly bans people for saying positive things about nuclear energy.
    chris_va · 1790211014 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    lifty · 1790236528 · focus · HN ↗
    I love renewables, especially solar with batteries, but I definitely see the tail risks of not having some amount of independent base load, for which nuclear seems like the best fit. The tail risk could materialize from different sources; could be an asteroid, nuclear war, weird weather patterns etc. nuclear would chug along in most of these conditions. So if I would be a policy maker or decision maker, I would definitely invest in nuclear and maintain an industry regardless of the initial cost. I would try to make it as cheap as possible.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790238645 · focus · HN ↗
    This is having decided that we must waste money and resources on new nuclear, and trying to rationalize it.
    We fix tail risks when we encounter them. Not by envisioning your pet ones to make your solution fit.
    psini · 1790243992 · focus · HN ↗
    > We fix tail risks when we encounter them
    You're suggesting to start fixing the issue after the blackout happens?
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790252202 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790252327 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790252365 · focus · HN ↗
    Grid operators already manage this through resource-adequacy modelling, reserve margins, and ancillary services, preferably procured through market mechanisms when needed.
    That’s the sensible way to handle tail risk: identify plausible contingencies, quantify them, and maintain enough margin to cover them.
    Designing the whole system around every conceivable extreme scenario would be unnecessarily expensive.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790252403 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    UltraSane · 1790244858 · focus · HN ↗
    Building the only dispatchable source of zero CO2 emissions electricity is not a waste of money.
    rightnutwingjob · 1790232327 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790234084 · focus · HN ↗
    Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues? Or the majority of the Eastern European due too hot or low rivers? Or half the Swedish fleet multiple times the last couple of years?
    Please do tell what is wrong with the CSIRO GenCost.
    lifty · 1790236746 · focus · HN ↗
    There are scenarios where either can fail, that’s why it’s smart to have a multi pronged energy strategy. Maintain strong industries for being able to do both renewables and nuclear in house so you can hedge the tail risks of either of them. Not everything needs to have the most economically efficient model. As we’ve seen with the supply chain problems they happened during Covid, some things are more important than absolute cost.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790239014 · focus · HN ↗
    "Multi pronged" works when different technologies complement each other. The problem is that renewables and nucelar power competes for the same slice, a battle nuclear loses with a mile. Any grid will include emergency reserves. But those optimize for lowest possible CAPEX and higher OPEX. Since they sit idle most of the time.
    Nuclear power has the opposite spread of ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.
    I would say the pandemic shows that you do not need to account for every possibility. Humanity is amazing at adapting itself and finding new solutions to the problem at hand, rather than wasting all our resources trying to prevent the next made up disaster.
    This is why we model with 10 year winters, X00 year floods or similar. Fix reasonable problems, leave the tail risk as tail risk. The worst that happens are rolling blackouts until the grid adapts, which is no different than any other outage due to grid maintenance or someone cutting a cable with a digger.
    toasty228 · 1790252560 · focus · HN ↗
    > Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues?
    It mostly happened because covid hit at the same time.
    Moldoteck · 1790238656 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790239312 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    UltraSane · 1790244925 · focus · HN ↗
    Germany made their electricity both very expensive and high CO2 per joule.
    Moldoteck · 1790255773 · focus · HN ↗
    German gco2/kwh are dropping but it could have been so much better with nuclear similar to France
    UltraSane · 1790264110 · focus · HN ↗
    It is still very high, especially when you consider how expensive it is.
    toasty228 · 1790252491 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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)?
    ViewTrick1002 · 1790252915 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  5. AlexandrB · 1790189974 · focus · HN ↗
    Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
    [1] <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544222018035" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
    [2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Bank_of_America_(2023)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
    icantevenhold · 1790190432 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks for sharing those links, very interesting.
    I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.
    Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh
    K3UL · 1790196372 · focus · HN ↗
    You can also check the report from RTE (French grid operator) that models several scenarios and mentions this security of supply thing
    <a href="https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/publications/energy-pathways-2050" rel="nofollow">https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/publications/ene...
  6. cloudie78 · 1790192699 · focus · HN ↗
    Two words: base load
    And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)
    yifanl · 1790193073 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you use more than 2 words in your explanation next time? Reciting known talking points offers little.
    rotringlvr · 1790201279 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    fnwbr · 1790193368 · focus · HN ↗
    lol because nuclear reactors are so damn stable: <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/13/france-shuts-down-nuclear-reactors-as-heatwave-intensifies" rel="nofollow">https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/13/france-shuts-down-nuclea...
    throw0101c · 1790254169 · focus · HN ↗
    "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.
    ThePowerOfFuet · 1790255051 · focus · HN ↗
    Even while that was happening, we never stopped being a net exporter of energy.
    The system worked as designed.
    bryanlarsen · 1790193863 · focus · HN ↗
    The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.
    Rebelgecko · 1790194013 · focus · HN ↗
    Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime
    rotringlvr · 1790201170 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    cloudie78 · 1790243788 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    JackSlateur · 1790451708 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank you for this very detailled and instructive post
    dalyons · 1790203144 · focus · HN ↗
    Six words: base load generation is economically obsolete
    goodpoint · 1790238851 · focus · HN ↗
    base load is a myth
    UltraSane · 1790245128 · focus · HN ↗
    "base load is a myth" is a myth
  7. cpill · 1790193558 · focus · HN ↗
    can you link to data to prove the economics are bad?
  8. rotringlvr · 1790201057 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  9. mahboi · 1790212530 · focus · HN ↗
    If it's actually inefficient, there's no need to have laws against it.
    icantevenhold · 1790213349 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t follow that logic. Because there was a law against its efficient?
  10. r3trohack3r · 1790230908 · focus · HN ↗
    I wonder why China has brought 27 nuclear reactors online in the past 10 years, with another 36 actively being developed.
  11. rightnutwingjob · 1790231113 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn’t matter what you think. What does the data tell us?
    Won’t it also take decades and cost billions to roll out renewables to the extend that they can even put a dent in total energy usage? So I don’t see how that is even an argument.
  12. Moldoteck · 1790238487 · focus · HN ↗
    Because both are needed if you don't like gas. Fossils take even more billions so it's ok
2. lnxg33k1 · 1790194742 · focus · HN ↗
  we had a referendum in 2011
  1. vconnor · 1790202323 · focus · HN ↗
    Right after Fukushima
    mahboi · 1790212604 · focus · HN ↗
    Wow
3. fweimer · 1790196666 · focus · HN ↗
  Where in Italy would you put reactors?
  <a href="https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-index-viewer/#7/42.743/13.574" rel="nofollow">https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-i...
  Sardinia?
  1. someonebaggy · 1790198702 · focus · HN ↗
    Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.
  2. scythe · 1790204372 · focus · HN ↗
    I think that there are plenty of blue areas on that map
  3. wraptile · 1790226873 · focus · HN ↗
    wow, seems like Italy and Turkey are few places where you _would not_ want to go back to nuclear. Wild. I guess the old geezers approving this wouldn't even live to see the first meltdown anyway.
  4. etiennebausson · 1790231371 · focus · HN ↗
    That doesn't look good, and that's before you filter by proximity to a large river (that doesn't run dry in summer).
    I would say near Pisa, on the Arno River.
  5. vconnor · 1790234090 · focus · HN ↗
    Scroll up. There was one in Trino, Piedmont, which I imagine will be among the first sites to be considered.
  6. rich_sasha · 1790238989 · focus · HN ↗
    For a point of comparison, I understand the Fukushima plant survived the mag 9 earthquake just fine - but got damaged by the ensuing tsunami. Specifically, the water flooded the diesel generators for emergency cooling - and it went downhill from there.
    Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?
  7. preisschild · 1790244314 · focus · HN ↗
    Just like with skyscrapers in Taiwan, we can and have built earthquake-resistant nuclear power plants before. Fukushima only failed due to the tsunami water shorting transmission lines and the emergency generators. It withstood the earthquake itself fine.
4. lawgimenez · 1790202210 · focus · HN ↗
  In my country, we also have a dormant nuclear plant because of Chernobyl and political reasons.
  <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/world/asia/philippines-bataan-nuclear-power-plant.html?eafs_enabled=false" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/world/asia/philippines-ba...
5. simonebrunozzi · 1790457904 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm Italian, too. A country with a weaker energy infrastructure is prone to being controlled better.
  Italy lost WWII, and became a de facto protectorate/colony of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if behind the nuclear referendum in the 80s there way to gentle hand of US services.
jacquesm · 1790188361 · focus · HN ↗
I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
1. asmodeuslucifer · 1790189256 · focus · HN ↗
  I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
  That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
  1. EA-3167 · 1790189525 · focus · HN ↗
    China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…
    …and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.
    lukan · 1790190173 · focus · HN ↗
    People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder.
    If not, reading a list of this helps:
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
    But sure, oil leaks can be bad as well. Solar leaks on the other hand seem bearable.
    EA-3167 · 1790192119 · focus · HN ↗
    I am someone who knows, hence my disgust. Time to learn about the radioactivity of coal fly ash and how carefully that’s managed.
    lukan · 1790192909 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh, I know and am in favor of shutting coal down asap and before nuclear. But you seem to imply handling radioactivity is not a big problem compared to fossils, but I believe it is, considering how faulty and corrupt individual humans are, or corporations or government bodies doing the oversight.
    batisteo · 1790192756 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    lukan · 1790193151 · focus · HN ↗
    Did I imply anywhere anyhow that I am a fan of coal?
    I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong.
    Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).
    EA-3167 · 1790199845 · focus · HN ↗
    Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories.
    We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.
    lukan · 1790204362 · focus · HN ↗
    "We don't have time for perfect solution"
    Exactly. You can buy and deploy solar, wind and batteries as much as you want now. If you care about strategic independence, build factories for them.
    But a nuclear reactor takes a long time to get build. And is likely way more expensive. If italy manages to do it fast and cheap - other countries will follow, but I believe it when I see it.
    otherme123 · 1790270792 · focus · HN ↗
    And China is importing some of their reactors from France, Russia and USA. It is not like they become fully independent (maintenance and parts). More independent than oil and gas imports, but can't depend forever on these three either.
    otherme123 · 1790190932 · focus · HN ↗
    China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market.
    They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being build is in China (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.
    You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.
    hnedeotes · 1790191623 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    otherme123 · 1790270406 · focus · HN ↗
    Even if China is the number one in installing nuclear power, the installed capacity dwarfs compared to solar. China is "betting" on anything that produces electricity that doesn't depend on imports, and if that is nuclear they go for it. But it is clearly not their main bet:
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Production_and_capacity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Pr...
    Wind overtook nuclear production in 2016, Solar FV in 2022. Today both more than double it.
    Tables in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#ChinaEnergyPortal.org" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Ch... are also very telling. Total power production: 15% wind, 17% solar, 5% nuclear. Nuclear is almost stagnant, but they will probably finish what they are already building, or have planned. That is the way they work. But they are slowing the rate of nuclear installations, it took 5 years to go from producing 400 TWh to 500 TWh, while wind in the same time went from 500 TWh to 1.1k TWh and sun from 260 TWh to 1.2k TWh. These growing rates will drive nuclear from being ~5% of production to be irrelevant in 10 years. But you will read from pro-nuclears that they "plan" to double nuclear output in those 10 years, even when they barely put a +20% in last 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised it they pivot to solar, wind and batteries suddenly (a very China thing to do), abandoning all nuclear that is not already almost finished.
    IMO China is not betting on nuclear. Just before solar was economically sound (c. 2015), they believed nuclear could be a solution for their dependency problems, and bet on it. As of today, they are no longer betting on nuclear, or at least the bet is crawling to a halt.
    No nuclear debate without Germany. This is my opinion: Germany actually is winning. Not a lot, but their current situation is far from the catastrophe some predicted (massive blackouts! outrageous electricity price!). Nuclear was quickly replaced with solar and wind after an initial coal and gas spike. But now coal usage is going down, and gas is stable. Dependency from Russia is less than 10 years ago. OTOH, France is having serious problems to 1) increase their nuclear production and even maintaining what they have (average reactor age: 35 years, younger reactor: 18 years) and 2) to deal with the install of cheaper energy sources because their base load is so high and can't be easily phased out.
    And please, stop with the "bad press" tune, as if everyone that doesn't blindly believe nuclear is the future is dumb and can be manipulated with ease, meanwhile pro-nuclear are very smart and impossible to manipulate. Do you think there is no nuclear or fossil lobby also releasing "bad press" about everything else and selling nuclear as the only solution? It only causes high friction unproductive debates: it is like Democrats firmly believing that Republicans are dumb, and vice versa. Either you accept that you are also being manipulated by the nuclear lobby to support them, or stop accusing others of being manipulated. Italy is running without nuclear power for more than 30 years, but only recently, when it makes absolutely no economical sense to start new nuclear plants if you have your production-demand figured out (not booming like China), some politics, not at all "manipulated" or "bought" by the nuclear lobby, plan up to 10 new reactors against people will (94% of voters against installing new nuclear in 2011). Yes, people are dumb, politics are honest and smart. That is the only possible cause.
    hnedeotes · 1790275141 · focus · HN ↗
    I would imagine that China not having a world wide market for selling/dumping their reactors would have some relation too.
    I have no horse in this race but anyway, I hope Europe goes back to nuclear, and then get nukes enough to wipe out anyone in the world some 35 times if needed.
    otherme123 · 1790496581 · focus · HN ↗
    Europe is already heavily nuclearized. Even the nuclear lobby recommends a "10% nuclear power in the mix", which many countries en Europe already meet... or way more than that. On average 24% (varies between sources) of European mix is nuclear. Yes, there are a couple of countries (Germany and Italy) that banned nuclear, but there are also the most nuclearized country in the world (France, 60% nuclear), and countries like Slovakia (60% nuclear), Hungary (40% nuclear).
    Europe produces almost no uranium, and France has a historical problem with uranium mining in Africa, is not like Europe is giving up a free-of-trouble energy source. Honestly, sometimes it feels that some pro-nuclear won't be happy until 100% of the base load is nuclear. They are asking for more nuclear than the nuclear lobby does.
    bryanlarsen · 1790191940 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    EA-3167 · 1790212817 · focus · HN ↗
    Quite telling, but then so is climate change and it's not exactly hard to understand the motives of those who want(ed) to deny it for power and profit. We should be listening to their wise advice on this topic... why?
    nradov · 1790191133 · focus · HN ↗
    China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).
    EA-3167 · 1790192070 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    <a href="https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-production/" rel="nofollow">https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti...
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
    nradov · 1790192467 · focus · HN ↗
    I never claimed that China is "going green" (whatever that means), merely that they're gradually reducing their dependence on imported fossil fuels.
    bryanlarsen · 1790192841 · focus · HN ↗
    That link is out of date. China's coal share fell under 50% this year (your link says 58%), and their CO2 emissions dropped 1% the first half of 2026.
    So yes, it can be reasonably claimed that China is greening. "greening", not "green" -- 49.7% coal is still a lot of CO2.
    <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/china-pushes-coal-miners-lift-071500851.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/china-pushes-coal-...
    ericmay · 1790195019 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe emissions fell because industrial activity fell instead? Maybe oil and gas have been used less because the cost has risen. Maybe that explains coal as well depending on how it is used. I’m speculating coal might be used in the production of steel - what if that product is highly tariffed in the US and EU so China had to cut back?
    China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal. If it was they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
    wk_end · 1790199387 · focus · HN ↗
    Where did "some lofty moral goal" come from? The only motive anyone in this thread has proffered for electrifying was because "they're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk."
    EA-3167 · 1790199543 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh you're correct, the same thing is happening in India without any of the nonsense fanfare.
    <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-china-and-india-for-first-time-in-52-years-after-clean-energy-records" rel="nofollow">https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
    <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/span-style_font-size_0.94em__Coal-power-drops-in-China-and-India-for-first-time-in-52-years-after-clean-energy-records.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/span-...
    You can see the same dips hit at the same time for the same reason.
    In terms of Chinese coal though there's a reason boosters always talk about percentages and not absolute number... one goes down, but the other keeps rising. Even if China continues on the current course in terms of tonnage burned they won't reach "peak coal" until at least 2030.
    triceratops · 1790201395 · focus · HN ↗
    > China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal
    Why does the "why" matter? Tons are tons, right?
    > they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
    You can freely buy as many panels and batteries and EVs from China as you like. Those come with minerals. What are they "hoarding" exactly that the planet needs to go green?
    ericmay · 1790204069 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why does the "why" matter?
    Well it doesn’t entirely matter but we should just acknowledge that it’s a geopolitical strategy and not really something they are doing for the planet.
    > You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled. What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
    Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports for example due to alleged “dual use” as they continue to apply military pressure on democratic Taiwan? I’d encourage you to read up on these restrictions with respect to Japan for example who is alarmed by Chinese and North Korean provocations.
    You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels. For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies. It’s not just the US, by the way. The EU is tariffing China too.
    They are entitled to pursue these strategies but we are also entitled in the west to recognize them and combat them how we see fit.
    triceratops · 1790212397 · focus · HN ↗
    > not really something they are doing for the planet
    If it doesn't matter why do you feel the need to acknowledge it?
    > Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports [to Japan] for example due to alleged “dual use”
    How do these restrictions prevent Japan from using Chinese PV and batteries in their grid?
    > You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry
    Translation: they gave the world a ton of deeply discounted goods. And you said they didn't do anything nice for anyone!
    > so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels
    Other countries are free to subsidize their own solar and battery industries. Godspeed to the ones doing it right now. But also is it really that amazing of an industry to have? Low-margins, constant price wars, not much of a moat. Rich economies tend not to have those anyway.
    > For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies
    Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
    > The EU is tariffing China too.
    There are no EU tariffs on Chinese solar panels or grid-scale batteries or heat pumps. They are considering tariffing heat pumps right now.
    ericmay · 1790216328 · focus · HN ↗
    > If it doesn't matter why do you feel the need to acknowledge it?
    Just to make sure nobody is ever confused. Why do you feel the need to defend China?
    > How do these restrictions prevent Japan from using Chinese PV and batteries in their grid?
    It limits Japan from developing their own home grown market or utilizing technology for what China considers dual use?
    > Translation: they gave the world a ton of deeply discounted goods. And you said they didn't do anything nice for anyone!
    Other translation: Those cheap goods weren’t worth the cost to the environment or to empower an autocratic regime.
    > Other countries are free to subsidize their own solar and battery industries.
    When that happens there can be retaliatory measures against countries who are in for example the WTO or have other trade agreements. You don’t just subsidize products in a vacuum.
    > Godspeed to the ones doing it right now. But also is it really that amazing an industry to have? Low-margins, constant price wars, undifferentiated commodity product without much of a moat. Rich economies tend not to have those industries anyway.
    You’re focusing on solar panels but that’s not all we’ve been discussing.
    > Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
    That doesn’t follow from what you quoted.
    > There are no EU tariffs on Chinese solar panels or grid-scale batteries or heat pumps. They are considering tariffing heat pumps right now.
    They are tariffing other products/industries and working on additional ones.
    triceratops · 1790251486 · focus · HN ↗
    > Just to make sure nobody is ever confused.
    That a country is acting in its own interests? I don't think that's news.
    > Why do you feel the need to defend China?
    I think climate change is the biggest problem of our lifetime. China's output of green tech is our best chance. I think useful idiots for the fossil fuel industry demonize China to transitively discredit renewables (i.e. not for "lofty moral reasons" like democracy). There's a genuine double standard.
    > It limits Japan from developing their own home grown market or utilizing technology for what China considers dual use?
    Drill deeper. How does this prevent Japan from "greening" today? That's the topic we're discussing. Why can't Japan source rare earths from somewhere else? They aren't actually that rare. Japan could invest in mines and processing facilities in Africa or the US or Canada.
    > Those cheap goods weren’t worth the cost to the environment
    Cheap, abundant PV and batteries that can decarbonize the world? I'm ok with localized damage to one country's environment, done voluntarily, for that.
    > there can be retaliatory measures against countries who are in for example the WTO
    How did China do it then?
    > You’re focusing on solar panels but that’s not all we’ve been discussing.
    Ok what else then? You want battery manufacturing? Motors? Has China somehow restricted countries from building their own industries?
    > > Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too?
    > That doesn’t follow from what you quoted.
    Ok what is the US doing for renewable energy under this administration?
    > They are tariffing other products/industries and working on additional ones.
    We're focusing on renewable tech here. That's the focus of this thread.
    ericmay · 1790260025 · focus · HN ↗
    > That a country is acting in its own interests? I don't think that's news.
    You changed the topic though, that wasn't what we were talking about.
    > I think climate change is the biggest problem of our lifetime. China's output of green tech is our best chance. I think useful idiots for the fossil fuel industry demonize China to transitively discredit renewables (i.e. not for "lofty moral reasons" like democracy). There's a genuine double standard.
    That basically proves my initial point lol. That's why it's important to make sure while the effects may be good for the climate, it's not done with any intention for the planet's benefit and specific tactics that are being used are harmful to other countries.
    > Drill deeper. How does this prevent Japan from "greening" today? That's the topic we're discussing.
    I'd challenge you to do the same thing. How can Japan "green" when China has restricted exports of rare earth materials to Japan because China and its junior partner North Korea are engaging in provocative military activities near Japan?
    If your version of "Japan can green by buying China's products" you're being immature in your understanding of international relations, the importance for countries like Japan to maintain their industrial base, and how the environment is an important consideration, but just one of many.
    > Why can't Japan source "dual use" rare earths from somewhere else? They aren't actually that rare. Japan could invest in mines and processing facilities in Africa or the US or Canada.
    Well Japan and western allies and democracies are working on it, but the problem isn't the location of rare earths it is the ability (as far as I understand) to process them. It'll take time for those capabilities to be stood up, and they have to be subsidized or benefit from tariffs because China has built up so much excess industrial capacity that other countries can't build their own without such policies.
    > Describes most oil-producing countries. This is virtue signalling.
    Norway is an oil-producing country and not an autocracy. Your point was disproven.
    > Cheap, abundant PV and batteries that can decarbonize the world? I'm ok with localized damage to one country's environment, done voluntarily, for that. Climate change will wreck the global environment.
    That's your opinion but it's not the opinion of others. I disagree, for example.
    > How did China do it then?
    You want me to explain the history of the World Trade Organization, the US advocating for China to do it under the guise that China was going to liberalize and democratize, and then how China used most-favored nation status, a regime of state subsidies, and artificially depressing its currency to boost exports? If you're not aware of this stuff, are you sure you should be speaking on this topic without even the basics?
    > Ok what else then? You want battery manufacturing? Motors? Has China somehow restricted countries from building their own industries?
    Already explained above.
    > Ok what is the US doing for renewable energy under this administration?
    Idk? We'll have a new administration in a couple of years though.
    > We're focusing on renewable tech here. That's the focus of this thread.
    Ok then you can stop replying to me since that's not the only thing I'm talking about. I'm focused on more than renewable tech and that's of little concern to me in the grand scheme of things including climate change.
    triceratops · 1790263776 · focus · HN ↗
    > > Describes most oil-producing countries. This is virtue signalling.
    > Norway is an oil-producing country and not an autocracy. Your point was disproven.
    Are you somehow unfamiliar with the definition of the word "most"?
    > That basically proves my initial point lol
    I don't know what your "point" was honestly.
    > Ok then you can stop replying to me since [green energy is] not the only thing I'm talking about
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821986">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821986 that's what you were talking about there.
    > If your version of "Japan can green by buying China's products" you're being immature in your understanding of international relations
    Japan's already "not green" by buying energy from other autocratic nations. Like I said this is all virtue signalling to avoid going renewable.
    "Rare earths" are a strategic necessity for defence, and China won't sell them for that reason - fine. Countries who still need them can nationalize processing capacity and run it at a loss for the sole use of defence industries. No need to participate or compete in the market at all. China's subsidies and the WTO don't matter.
    ericmay · 1790265440 · focus · HN ↗
    > Are you somehow unfamiliar with the definition of the word "most"?
    Your point was still not great, but I apologize as I misread what you wrote.
    > I don't know what your "point" was honestly because you yourself conceded it didn't "matter much".
    If you don't know what we were discussing why are you arguing about it?
    > <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821986">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821986 that's what you were talking about there.
    Industrial output falling because of tariffs for example would be aligned with my initial post. You're being argumentative here for no good reason. If you just want to talk about the engineering technology I don't have much else to say about it. But if you want to talk about the important stuff, why it's not being adopted, why some countries are adopting it and others aren't, I think that's an interesting conversation to have.
    > Japan (and most other countries) are already "not green" by buying oil from other autocratic nations. Like I said this is all virtue signalling to avoid going renewable. The fossil fuel industry loves it.
    Well they're stuck between buying oil from autocratic nations (China also buys oil from autocratic nations) or buying green technology from autocratic nations which are also threatening them or stopping exports of the technology or industry. Saudi Arabia (or insert whatever country here) doesn't for example stop oil exports to Japan for example if Japan also does their own oil drilling or exploration. China does stop exports of certain technologies or even processed rare earth minerals.
    > "Rare earths" are a strategic necessity for defence, and China won't sell them for that reason - fine. Countries who still need them can nationalize processing capacity and run it at a loss for the sole use of defence industries. No need to participate or compete in the market at all.
    No lol they'll subsidize them and refuse to buy China's products to protect domestic industries and capabilities to build the products themselves. It won't be limited to defense. Plus as I have pointed out a few times China itself restricts exports because of the threat of dual-use (which is in response to Chinese provocations) so China will in effect stop the export of defense-related products even when they can be used by consumers.
    > China's subsidies and the WTO don't matter.
    That doesn't make any sense.
    rgmerk · 1790197655 · focus · HN ↗
    To add to this, China’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have been flat or declining for a couple of years now: <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-have-now-been-flat-or-falling-for-21-months" rel="nofollow">https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
    EA-3167 · 1790199742 · focus · HN ↗
    Your own link says the following:
    > After the first three quarters of the year, China’s CO2 emissions in 2025 are now finely balanced between a small fall or rise, depending on what happens in the last quarter.
    And then goes on to describe how the largest drop (3%) is happening at a time when it just happens that fuel is increasingly expensive and scarce, shipping is increasingly expensive and slow, and the global economy has spent months grinding increasingly towards a terrible outcome.
    People might as well brag about their incredible weight loss journey through amputation.
    coryrc · 1790222402 · focus · HN ↗
    That's 50% of electricity, but not 50% of energy. Coal still provides ~80% of energy IIRC (roughly 10% is carbon-free and growing faster than the US). China burns so, so much coal, while much of the world has shifted to natural gas, which has much less carbon per energy.
    bryanlarsen · 1790247718 · focus · HN ↗
    You don't recall correctly. Coal is also 50% of energy. It's used a lot for heating, but that is dropping rapidly. It's used in manufacturing, but that is also doing rapidly, except for steel. It's not used for transportation.
    EA-3167 · 1790277444 · focus · HN ↗
    Bit of a shell game as usual unfortunately.
    <a href="https://clintel.org/chinas-massive-coal-to-liquids-expansion/" rel="nofollow">https://clintel.org/chinas-massive-coal-to-liquids-expansion...
    coryrc · 1790357596 · focus · HN ↗
    You're closer to right. I was remembering oil+coal=80%. Coal is 60% today and oil is 20%.
    <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
    XorNot · 1790195419 · focus · HN ↗
    China can be going green while also refusing to constrain it's economic growth on the short term.
    When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.
    All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.
    At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.
    Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.
    triceratops · 1790201305 · focus · HN ↗
    Fossil is flat or declining. Everything else is skyrocketing.
  2. asmodeuslucifer · 1790189538 · focus · HN ↗
    Off topic, but this guy on youtube is a knowledgeable (pro-nuke) resource.
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@tfolsenuclear" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@tfolsenuclear
  3. tremon · 1790190090 · focus · HN ↗
    Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?
    jacquesm · 1790191278 · focus · HN ↗
    Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.
    palata · 1790191669 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Muromec · 1790197151 · focus · HN ↗
    Neither it is for nuclear. It fixes the externality
    Klaus23 · 1790192201 · focus · HN ↗
    Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.
    ImJamal · 1790194247 · focus · HN ↗
    Many countries do not have the raw materials to build solar, wind turbines, and batteries so it doesn't solve the sovereignty issue.
    AndrewDucker · 1790197528 · focus · HN ↗
    Once you have a solar panel you can't be cut off from using it. It's not like oil where you need regular deliveries forever.
    ImJamal · 1790197841 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, but when your existing ones break or you need more you can have issues.
    triceratops · 1790201050 · focus · HN ↗
    > when your existing ones break
    They last 25 years. Enough time to spin up domestic manufacturing if you're really paranoid.
    > or you need more
    Lots of countries manufacture them today.
    ImJamal · 1790202832 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not talking about manufacturing. I am talking about raw materials for chips, battery cells, etc. You can't be sovereign if you have the capability to build something but don't have the resources to build it
    triceratops · 1790203314 · focus · HN ↗
    If your electricity usage isn't growing like crazy, existing batteries can simply be recycled to make new ones.
    What chips are you talking about?
    Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
    ImJamal · 1790206604 · focus · HN ↗
    > What chips are you talking about?
    Electronic chips in wind turbines, hydro stations, etc.. Believe it or not but all of these use chips...
    > Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
    I am not holding renewables to it. The person I was responding to made the erroneous claim that you would be sovereign with renewables. "Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue." I am just pointing out that most countries wouldn't actually have sovereignty and would still be reliant on other countries.
    I am the one holding the consistent standard since I believe most countries wouldn't be sovereign regardless of them using fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
    triceratops · 1790212000 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok so no one meets the ImJamal standard of sovereignty. Might as well go with the source of energy that pollutes the least and allows you to be import-free for the longest amount of time - solar, wind, and batteries.
    ImJamal · 1790220721 · focus · HN ↗
    The US, Canada, Russia and many other countries could be sovereign with oil and coal.
    China, Brazil, Russia and other countries have a lot of rare earth minerals to build electronics for turbines and other sources of power.
    Australia, Canada, Russia and other countries have a decent amount of uranium.
    So, yes, some countries meet the definition of energy sovereignty.
    sfn42 · 1790241874 · focus · HN ↗
    So you think oil and coal doesn't use electronics?
    They use exactly the same stuff. Nearly all power generation is just spinning magnets, obvious exception is PV. There are no particular electronic components you need for wind turbines that you don't also need for a coal or gas fired power plant. Everything uses electronic control systems.
    Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
    ImJamal · 1790256972 · focus · HN ↗
    We had electricity from coal and oil prior to electronics... Or do you think we had electronics in 1900?
    Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
    tremon · 1790273058 · focus · HN ↗
    We did have electronics in 1900 (Kirchoff's laws date from 1845, the first semiconductor from 1874 and the first vacuum tube from 1904). What we didn't have is transistors and the miniaturization technology that gave us integrated circuits and microprocessors.
    ImJamal · 1790289858 · focus · HN ↗
    The conversation was clearly about more modern electronics since I was talking about rare earth minerals which were not used in the devices you are talking about.
    You are able to drill and burn oil along with transmit the electricity without technology that requires rare earth minerals.
    sfn42 · 1790327974 · focus · HN ↗
    You were able to drill and burn oil without modern technology. These days, pretty much all those easily accessible wells are drained and the only oil left is in harder to access wells that you'd never even find without modern technology. That's why we're fracking and messing around with oil sands and building offshore oil rigs etc.
    We also had windmills long before we had electricity. And the west has plenty of rare earth deposits, despite the name they're not actually that rare. They're just expensive to refine and the refinement process causes a lot of pollution. China does it cheaper, polluting itself in the process and that's why we don't do it. If they were to stop giving us access to these minerals we could restart our own production. It's not just used for electronics by the way, it's also used for magnets which are a key component in electric motors/generators, so without rare earth minerals you're not generating electricity regardless of having oil.
    This whole argument of yours is asinine.
    triceratops · 1790250989 · focus · HN ↗
    If you think all those countries are ImJamal Sovereign you don't know what you're talking about.
    ImJamal · 1790257053 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not saying they are currently sovereign, only that they could be if necessary.
    Moldoteck · 1790238326 · focus · HN ↗
    You als can't be cut if you stockpile uranium for a decade or 2
    triceratops · 1790201194 · focus · HN ↗
    That's like saying oil-producing countries aren't sovereign unless they also manufacture oil drills and pumps and other extraction equipment.
    ImJamal · 1790207662 · focus · HN ↗
    They don't need to make things themselves, they just need to have the capability to make it themselves to be sovereign.
    If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil? If you want sovereignty then it is critical to have the ability to make drills, tankers, etc in your country if you rely on oil.
    This is no different than solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc when it comes to renewables. If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go. If you do, then you need to be able to handle everything yourself otherwise you are always going to be reliant on other countries.
    triceratops · 1790211867 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go
    If no one is sovereign then sovereignty is meaningless. Who cares.
    ImJamal · 1790220397 · focus · HN ↗
    > Your existing drills and pumps might work long enough for you to stand up a domestic drill manufacturing industry.
    > Same for solar, except that panels and batteries operate for way longer than drills and pumps.
    This is not about factories, but raw material as I said in a previous comment that you responded to. Most countries don't have uranium. A lot of countries do not have rare earth minerals for electronic chips.
    > If no one is sovereign then sovereignty is meaningless. Who cares
    The person I was originally responding to did and was claiming that you could achieve sovereignty with renewables.
    dalyons · 1790202206 · focus · HN ↗
    An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors
    ImJamal · 1790205351 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not talking about manufacturing but the resources necessary to build them.
    dalyons · 1790206690 · focus · HN ↗
    But they have the resources to build nuke plants?
    I don’t understand the point
    ImJamal · 1790220139 · focus · HN ↗
    The person I was responding to made the claim that renewables makes a country sovereign. I am saying it doesn't and it seems like you agree so I don't understand your point.
    I never made the claim that nuclear would make a country sovereign. Only a small number of countries could have sovereignty with nuclear.
    Moldoteck · 1790238377 · focus · HN ↗
    Nuclear requires the least amount of mining and materials vs alternatives <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-less-mining-fossil-fuels" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-... So in both cases the argument makes little sense
    Klaus23 · 1790224971 · focus · HN ↗
    Having sovereignty over your energy production doesn't mean that you need to control every single step of the renewables industry from raw materials to installation. Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines won't run out within a few weeks to months like strategic oil reserves. If you're suddenly and completely cut off from your suppliers, there's enough time to switch to other providers or build you own industry before the current hardware reaches the end of its life.
    frumplestlatz · 1790192292 · focus · HN ↗
    And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), 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.
    I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.
    In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.
    There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.
    I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.
    amarcheschi · 1790194628 · focus · HN ↗
    >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
    frumplestlatz · 1790196931 · focus · HN ↗
    This was at the Ospedale San Carlo di Nancy in Rome.
    amarcheschi · 1790199318 · focus · HN ↗
    Understood, never had to deal with healthcare in Lazio region
    belowavgiq · 1790203012 · focus · HN ↗
    Uhhh, some nerve damage, news worthy? Ho qualche dubbio al riguardo.
    Fellow italian here, let's not act like our third rate ERs never leave people suffering for hours without caring whether the pain comes from something that will have lasting consequences. My dad had this happen to him as well. Thank you
    ktzar · 1790195466 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    hunterpayne · 1790196912 · focus · HN ↗
    I've lived in Spain a couple years ago. I've seen the quality of its health care. Its easily 20 years behind the US and that's being charitable. The family that lived next to me had a man who had the exact same break I had had 20 years before. He had worse, more primitive care than I did in the US decades before. I had to explain to them why it was a bad idea for him to sit in his wheelchair all day because nobody in the Spanish system seemed to know how to care for a simple broken leg. You got what you paid for...
    PS Spanish taxes are absurdly high...insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries. All that and an actual working economy and energy system.
    MentalM · 1790254940 · focus · HN ↗
    > insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries.
    If you are a white male. But what about suppressed minorities and women (and especially minorities women and nonbinary persons) that can't get job because of chauvinistic billionaires?
    frumplestlatz · 1790197265 · focus · HN ↗
    Sometimes it works — but the overall quality, speed, and care outcomes remain, on average, very poor when compared to the US.
    The price is good, though, if you ignore what you’re paying on the backend through taxes for poor medical care.
    Mawr · 1790198816 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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?
    frumplestlatz · 1790199876 · focus · HN ↗
    A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me.
    Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff's incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.
    My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.
    Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.
    > The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
    My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.
    And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.
    The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to the cost of living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
    the_gipsy · 1790202943 · focus · HN ↗
    > I’d rather be in the hole financially
    You don't have the slightest clue what it means to be poor and in a financial hole. Like, it's impossible to explain to you.
    frumplestlatz · 1790203628 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    belowavgiq · 1790203634 · focus · HN ↗
    Count me in. I'd rather be poor in the worst neighborhood (or village) in Nigeria but healthy than in a European mansion and unhealthy. Feel free to tell me all about how I can't understand, champion of the proletariat.
    belowavgiq · 1790202353 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    JumpCrisscross · 1790196498 · focus · HN ↗
    Power is an input. If it isn’t profitable it needs to be subsidized from elsewhere.
    Healthcare is the same. It just turns out subsidizing it from wages works because healthy people are more productive.
    Profitability isn’t a hard limit. But if something isn’t internally profitable, it requires an external partner to get going.
  4. idiotsecant · 1790190764 · focus · HN ↗
    What exactly does it mean for a powerplan in china or russia to be profitable?
    ceejayoz · 1790193264 · focus · HN ↗
    The same thing it means anywhere else?
    Any argument that environmentalists run amok is the sole cause of nuclear's failure to launch has to address the fact that these two places, where environmentalists are a lot more likely to get a club to the head than a say at the table, are largely not expanding their nuclear power.
    idiotsecant · 1790266103 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    ceejayoz · 1790274618 · focus · HN ↗
    > They are rife with tarrif pricing, state-set prices, and state-owned players.
    This is the case in the US, too, as public utilities.
    > Theyve got 58 reactors operating (about 56 GW) and 33 more (over 35 GW) under construction.
    They added 315 GW of solar in 2025 alone, so we agree.
    idiotsecant · 1790298167 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure if you think the two are equivalent ...
  5. palata · 1790191502 · focus · HN ↗
    Profit is not everything.
    > That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
    Spot on. That, plus... peak oil.
    jandrewrogers · 1790193373 · focus · HN ↗
    Peak oil was supposed to have happened decades ago but current projections put it well past 2050. Demand for oil is going to fall due to electrification long before we run out of sufficient oil production capacity.
    It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.
    asmodeuslucifer · 1790196974 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    palata · 1790200107 · focus · HN ↗
    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?).
    no-name-here · 1790213388 · focus · HN ↗
    Peak oil was initially believed to occur due to depletion - I believe that’s what the GP was referring to: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
    palata · 1790255967 · focus · HN ↗
    Still we had a peak of conventional oil in 2007, I don't get why I'm getting downvoted for that fact.
    no-name-here · 1790341669 · focus · HN ↗
    > we had a peak of conventional oil in 2007, I don't get why I'm getting downvoted for that fact.
    I don't think you were downvoted for that; instead, I think you were downvoted for saying "This is wrong" when GP commenter claimed the peak oil has been predicted decade after decade. GP also just said "peak oil" not "peak conventional oil" so I'm unsure why you brought up that distinction?
    A better reply might have been "Peak oil has been wrong decade after decade, but current projections are somewhere between 2025 and after 2050. Additionally, if we restrict it to only specific geographic regions, or to only a subset of oil extraction, it occurred in the mid-2000s instead of the original projections of between 1922 and 1960."
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
  6. ndr42 · 1790193187 · focus · HN ↗
    But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
    Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
    ink_13 · 1790193635 · focus · HN ↗
    Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia
    FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
    LtdJorge · 1790194038 · focus · HN ↗
    Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)
    kccqzy · 1790196838 · focus · HN ↗
    Why? Isn’t it in the national interest of a government to preferentially use foreign sources of uranium to preserve domestic sources?
    31aHgd · 1790197544 · focus · HN ↗
    It should be in the national interest. But every nation is determined to let Russia have the last resources in 30 years by boycotting Russian oil and gas.
    As we hear downthread though, we'll have warp drives by then.
    succo · 1790197365 · focus · HN ↗
    there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision
    rebolek · 1790198440 · focus · HN ↗
    Mining uranium in Spain would destroy environment and involve legal slavery?
    the_gipsy · 1790202566 · focus · HN ↗
    Slavery is obviously not an issue in a country like Spain, but any kind of mining operation here seems to be heavily opposed by the people that live around the potential sites, for environmental reasons.
    pigpop · 1790198665 · focus · HN ↗
    Mining isn't a great argument against nuclear. Uranium fuel has an incredibly high energy density so a relatively small amount of high grade ore can be converted into a large amount of electricity so even when compared to the one time input from mining required to produce all of the components that go into making a PV installation it can still perform favourably. Uranium mining is also transitioning away from open pit mines to using in-situ recovery where a liquid solution is injected into a uranium ore formation to dissolve the uranium before recovering the solution, about 55% of current uranium production uses this method already.
    afiori · 1790226217 · focus · HN ↗
    The only alternatives to nuclear are coal and LNG
    Or starting with solar more 20 years ago.
    Moldoteck · 1790236296 · focus · HN ↗
    Again bullshit. Nuclear requires least mining vs any alternative <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-less-mining-fossil-fuels" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...
    And in situ mining is one of the best environmentally
    8note · 1790202341 · focus · HN ↗
    canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too
    jjk166 · 1790205381 · focus · HN ↗
    Canadian reactors don't use enriched uranium. Also many countries have centrifuges - Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, and of course all the nuclear armed states. Further, enrichment plants can be built anywhere.
    looofooo0 · 1790193726 · focus · HN ↗
    Wrong uranium you can easily stock for 10years inadvance
    ceejayoz · 1790198140 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe don't keep it all in one spot, though.
    XorNot · 1790194941 · focus · HN ↗
    Nuclear power plants refuel on yearly cycles.
    That's plenty of time to source alternative uranium supplies presuming you haven't stockpiled.
    Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.
    dukeyukey · 1790195503 · focus · HN ↗
    Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.
    Plus you can stockpile it super easy.
    rich_sasha · 1790219026 · focus · HN ↗
    Refueling nuclear power plants only happens fairly rarely. You hold your customer hostage a lot less if you say “ha! Next time in 8 years time when you need to refuel, we won’t sell the goods to you!” as compared to literally turning off the gas tap.
    pm3003 · 1790227687 · focus · HN ↗
    You can easily store 10 years worth of uranium, unlike gas and oil.
    Moldoteck · 1790236247 · focus · HN ↗
    Many is how? Why are people spreading such bullshit? Only a subset of plants, mainly VVER are dependent on Russia, albeit that'll change too.
    Russia is ore importer itself and Orano+Urenco have enough capacity to satisfy most of Europe, both expanding.
    Decentralized is not guaranteed. You mostly deploy ren in productive areas, see northern offshore, or that most of Ukraine's ren were in the South. Guess what happened to that. France has a decentralized grid too- many plants scattered around the country, each with multiple units
    harrouet · 1790238960 · focus · HN ↗
    Uranium is not rare. You can even extract it from sea water.
    Russia's is just cheaper.
    But it accounts for 5% of the cost of a produced MWh, so if it had to be generated otherwise, we'd know how to do it.
  7. Hammershaft · 1790193532 · focus · HN ↗
    That... doesn't seem true?
    <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
    Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.
    Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.
    looofooo0 · 1790194016 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, thank you. Eroi ist the only thing which matters from a hard physics stand point.
    rgmerk · 1790197381 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    micromacrofoot · 1790199917 · focus · HN ↗
    30 years is generally the guarantee for some minimum output so it's the floor too... could still be outputting 60-70% of original spec for 50 years
    looofooo0 · 1790237839 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure but all the residual stuff needs als be considered.
    micromacrofoot · 1790254338 · focus · HN ↗
    as with every system, yes
    looofooo0 · 1790261439 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes but with RE it is the major cost, because they are not firm energy.
    looofooo0 · 1790237639 · focus · HN ↗
    That is not how RE works at scale.
    epistasis · 1790199759 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    looofooo0 · 1790237704 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure labor amount is strongly correlated with EROI
    pfdietz · 1790245997 · focus · HN ↗
    Why use a bad metric when one can use the actually relevant metrics?
    I see this from nuclear advocates when they talk about "energy density". Energy density (or EROI) are only relevant insofar as they affect cost. Why not just use cost? (The answer is that cost isn't giving the nuclear advocates the answer they want, so they have to lie and use some substitute metric.)
    looofooo0 · 1790261375 · focus · HN ↗
    Huh? Cost vs EROI differences show potential for improvements. You can never cheat bad eroi of RE grid.
    pfdietz · 1790265091 · focus · HN ↗
    RE grid doesn't have a "bad EROI". The EROI of renewables is quite acceptable.
    looofooo0 · 1790270003 · focus · HN ↗
    Not if you factor in all the residual. Adding to fossil or water based grid is okay, running on its own with all the necessary residual it gets way worse.
    pfdietz · 1790273881 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, even if you factor in "all the residual".
    EROI cannot be bad, since energy is only a small part of the cost of manufacturing. If EROI was unacceptable, then overall cost would be too.
    looofooo0 · 1790311754 · focus · HN ↗
    EROI of 5 means 20% all energy goes just to preserving current status. As wind is limited this gives hard limits to what is sustainable in northern countries. These problems completely disappear with nuclear.
    pfdietz · 1790395332 · focus · HN ↗
    EROI is a lot higher than 5.
    looofooo0 · 1790476000 · focus · HN ↗
    No
    epistasis · 1790199712 · focus · HN ↗
    Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!
    There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
    Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
    red75prime · 1790201727 · focus · HN ↗
    Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE.
    epistasis · 1790202064 · focus · HN ↗
    Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
    The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
    Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
    red75prime · 1790202977 · focus · HN ↗
    I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some not.
    pfdietz · 1790268011 · focus · HN ↗
    > Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
    From what I've seen, some countries have renewables comparable to nuclear for baseload power, at least for now, but in no country is new construction nuclear cheaper.
    Those countries where nuclear does best will be energy ghettos in the post fossil age, as they will be competing with countries (typically sunny places closer to the equator) with cheap renewables.
    pfdietz · 1790245846 · focus · HN ↗
    > Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
    Those arguments typically assume Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage, which is a completely clown argument.
    esarbe · 1790251896 · focus · HN ↗
    I've yet to see any serious engineer make the argument that Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage. I've more often seen it used as a straw man argument against renewables.
    pfdietz · 1790265133 · focus · HN ↗
    I've seen the argument made plenty of times. Even nuclear engineers from MIT basically made this argument!
    pfdietz · 1790245776 · focus · HN ↗
    One can account for those with more detailed optimization/simulation, and if you do so you find nuclear still doesn't compete.
    red75prime · 1790258506 · focus · HN ↗
    I've seen calculations for Denmark that has great offshore wind power potential[1]. They indeed don't need nuclear. The lowest cost mix is offshore wind power (66%), combined cycle gas turbine (26%), and solar PV (8%).
    Solar photovoltaic is so low thanks to its intermittency. The more solar you have as a percentage of the total production the more costly it gets. At the limit of 100% solar its SLCOE is almost twice as high as nuclear.
    So, the availability and the quality (offshore wind is less variable, causes less backlash and so on) of wind power resources plays a big role.
    [1] <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
    ivo_sheets · 1790575135 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    rstuart4133 · 1790199882 · focus · HN ↗
    He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.
    None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
    If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
    But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
    The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
    [0] <a href="https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and-supply/our-electricity-supply-and-market" rel="nofollow">https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...
    dalyons · 1790201186 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    dukeyukey · 1790202098 · focus · HN ↗
    To be fair South Australia is:
    * Incredibly sunny
    * Incredibly sparely populated
    * Functionally winterless
    Like it's the perfect setup for solar.
    Somewhere like Denmark, Japan, even the US Northeast does not have those.
    MomsAVoxell · 1790333340 · focus · HN ↗
    Imagine a city-sized solar panel array, sitting somewhere very shiny in the North African region.
    A long, not insurmountable, cable strings its way across the gap and into Europes tender bits, i.e Spain and Turkey/etc.
    Electrons, once redirected/collected, can be redirected far.
    Heck, at scale, probably a lot of it could be done with microwave, anyway ..
    hylaride · 1790203079 · focus · HN ↗
    Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.
    esarbe · 1790251792 · focus · HN ↗
    France's reactors became successively more expensive as the need for more layered safety features was exposed. The first generation (CP0, CP1, CP2) was quite inexpensive, the P4 and P'4 designs were already more expensive and the N4 was yet more expensive.
    At this point I think if you want inexpensive nuclear, you just have to accept some risk. Going from 99.9% safety to 99.99% adds just too much complexity to remain economically viable.
    filleokus · 1790202273 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    jltsiren · 1790216645 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of Finnish wind capacity was built without subsidies. The demand was saturated at ~25% of total generation, after which the market started building solar. Wind power is more cost-effective at these latitudes, but solar generation is currently more valuable, as it correlates less with existing renewables.
    coryrc · 1790221793 · focus · HN ↗
    That only makes sense if you're burning hydrocarbons to heat your homes; about 1/3 of total energy use is space heating. Shifting to heat pumps and more wind before wasting money on solar panels at high latitudes is better ROI on energy independence and carbon reduction.
    jltsiren · 1790223937 · focus · HN ↗
    Heat pumps already became popular a long time ago. Electricity is so widely used for heating, that the difference in electricity consumption between the coldest winter days and July nights is almost 2.5x. While there are some old legends of Finnish (or maybe Sami) wind wizards, we still haven't figured out how to generate wind power on demand.
    In any case, it's up to the market. If you believe it's possible to make money with wind / solar / nuclear power in Finland, you should be able to get permits in a reasonable time. Right now, those building solar are investing more than the others.
    jasonwatkinspdx · 1790203095 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    sorenbs · 1790233235 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    pfdietz · 1790245569 · focus · HN ↗
    There's also very interesting work on non-battery storage technology. The one that has gotten my attention is Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" thermal storage technology. I don't know where they are in crossing the chasm on this, but the theory looks very promising, with capex as low as $0.10 per kWh of thermal storage capacity. This promises to make 600 C heat available 365/7/24 for a cost as low as $3/GJ, similar to heat from combustion of Henry Hub natural gas.
    sien · 1790223993 · focus · HN ↗
    SA is at 168 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.
    <a href="https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly" rel="nofollow">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 :
    <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/measuring-what-matters-themes-and-indicators/sustainable/emissions-reduction" rel="nofollow">https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...
    This is despite increasing solar.
    rstuart4133 · 1790232537 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    pfdietz · 1790245333 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
  8. bdauvergne · 1790193913 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).
    The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
    legulere · 1790194873 · focus · HN ↗
    > The reliability of french electricity
    Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.
    Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
    K3UL · 1790195414 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    geysersam · 1790218311 · focus · HN ↗
    There were also issues recently where low river water levels forced reactors to reduce output and even shut down.
    pyrale · 1790231200 · focus · HN ↗
    This has been happening for decades. It's pretty common in summer, which used not to be an issue since peak use is during winter.
    This may come as an issue if air con develops fast, though.
    Moldoteck · 1790238216 · focus · HN ↗
    Check out data this summer and tell me how many hours or minuts did France NET import power in all 3 months?
    Moldoteck · 1790238162 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    throw0101c · 1790253628 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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:
    * <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station" rel="nofollow">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.
    asmodeuslucifer · 1790195052 · focus · HN ↗
    Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
    In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
    <a href="https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france?ref=undecided.tech" rel="nofollow">https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
    krferriter · 1790210657 · focus · HN ↗
    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).
    pyrale · 1790231007 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    derriz · 1790196833 · focus · HN ↗
    Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.
    - <a href="https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nuclear-milestone/" rel="nofollow">https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...
    - <a href="https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-de-flamanville-la-rentabilite-n-est-pas-assuree-142457/" rel="nofollow">https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-d...
    Moldoteck · 1790238048 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    derriz · 1790262009 · focus · HN ↗
    > It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
    It was nationalized because it had suffered record losses in the previous year and was struggling with a ballooning debt mountain of 65B euro. The French government didn’t need to nationalize it to control its strategic direction - it already owned 84% of it. That was the press release claim in order to present the bailout as “strategic”.
    And the point was to address the gp’s claim that nuclear was profitable. Profitable enterprises don’t lose 18B a year or suffer financial instability due to a debt mountain on their balance sheets.
    > You didn't understand the electric cap in France.
    I don’t see how you drew that conclusion - the reactor needs to earn €138 per MWh (that’s the middle estimate not the worst case which is €180 per MWh). But the most it can earn is €70/MWh due to The cap? You’re just restating what I said. This reactor will be deeply unprofitable for its entire life.
    ceejayoz · 1790198190 · focus · HN ↗
    Until the rivers run low.
    <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclear-plant-could-shut-down-thursday-or-friday-pm-says-2026-07-30/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
    > Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.
    Zopieux · 1790205790 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    ceejayoz · 1790206280 · focus · HN ↗
    > We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.
    "Solar and nuclear are the only two options" is a false dichotomy, lol.
    anonymars · 1790215685 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course it becomes a dichotomy if you add "only"
    ceejayoz · 1790245051 · focus · HN ↗
    “We need both” implies both are needed, yes? That no other options satisfy said need?
    Moldoteck · 1790238254 · focus · HN ↗
    Hungary and Romania made a mistake by not diverting earlier more river flow. France net exported every single day of summer
    epistasis · 1790199928 · focus · HN ↗
    What, no there's only massive massive massive subsidy for French nuclear reactors.
    Germany's subsidy for solar dramatically changed the technology landscape, accelerating the cost learning curve such that solar is ridiculoulsly cheap.
    France's massive subsidy of nuclear resulted in "negative learning by doing." A decade of building reactors from the 1970s to 1980s made the technology more expensive, to the point that it never completed the full intended amount of building: <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
  9. looofooo0 · 1790193929 · focus · HN ↗
    This is wrong, Germanies Konvoi where immensely profitable. The greens complained about these as money printing machines.
  10. dev_l1x_be · 1790194105 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not sure what you mean by profitable here?
  11. nailer · 1790196670 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, while we’re looking at expenses, add the military to oil.
  12. graeme · 1790198311 · focus · HN ↗
    >I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable.
    This is comparing to the base case of fossil fuels. But those have tremendous negative consequences.
    Loudergood · 1790210978 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah but they get to dispose of their waste for free.
  13. planckscnst · 1790199087 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
    elevaet · 1790199505 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, let's not forget defence budgets that are spent to prop up oil availability too.
    genxy · 1790200032 · focus · HN ↗
    War would be so much harder w/o oil, yet we fight wars for oil. Hmmm.
    Arnt · 1790200306 · focus · HN ↗
    Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:
    Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
    Llamamoe · 1790200684 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    markvdb · 1790201513 · focus · HN ↗
    Then why is the insurance for every single reactor public sector based?
    doctorpangloss · 1790202237 · focus · HN ↗
    Well if you're BP, and there's a oil well malfunction, you self insure.
    DennisP · 1790206841 · focus · HN ↗
    Possibly because if there's a big accident, everybody in the region who gets cancer will sue, even if there's no detectable change to cancer rates.
    tcfhgj · 1790218284 · focus · HN ↗
    Cancer is the smallest problem when bigger areas become inhabitable.
    account42 · 1790249327 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes and we should also shut down the large hadron collider because it might cause a black hole.
    tcfhgj · 1790301628 · focus · HN ↗
    you do you
    account42 · 1790321628 · focus · HN ↗
    Unfortunately if other people act on irrational fears to the extend that it affects my energy prices I cannot just do me.
    tcfhgj · 1790332187 · focus · HN ↗
    Nothing irrational here, already happened
    DennisP · 1790342312 · focus · HN ↗
    Once, with a horrible reactor design that nobody builds anymore. It had two major problems:
    1) It was inherently unstable because when the fuel temperature increased, it made the reaction speed up. Modern reactors do the opposite.
    2) It didn't have a containment dome.
    tcfhgj · 1790343005 · focus · HN ↗
    how many black holes have been created by particle accelerators in the past?
    Arnt · 1790201686 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you saying that plutonium isn't nearly as poisonous as people claim, and watching for hairline cracks in containment walls is a waste of time?
    Or something like that?
    aeonik · 1790202774 · focus · HN ↗
    Not GP, but plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is.
    Don't get me wrong, it's super deadly, but there are loads of toxins that are more deadly than plutonium. And while its radioactivity is seen as ultra scary, it's actually pretty nice, because you can at least detect it. Harder than beta or gamma, but still, it announces its presence.
    How I wish I had a magic wand (spectrometer) that I could wave over my food to see if cyanide, ricin, mercury, or lead were there.
    stymaar · 1790203338 · focus · HN ↗
    This. I wish people made a Geiger counter equivalent for pm2.5 and other atmospheric pollutants, people would never get to the subway again.
    tintor · 1790206554 · focus · HN ↗
    It exists already.
    pvaldes · 1790204358 · focus · HN ↗
    > plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is... it's super deadly
    "Super deadly" sounds enough scary to me, thanks
    There are things that are "super deadly premium" of course. Stupidity terrifies me more than Plutonium. Specially when both things come together, but in the end the result is not much different.
    joe_the_user · 1790205770 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, the problem is the overhyping of radiation's danger kind of covers-up the other problem, radiation weakens everything. Hairline cracks are a threat because the radiation is going to weaken the cement that's holding the very high pressure steam that's generating electricity.
    Nuclear meltdowns have been common but dangerous radiation leaks rare and over-hyped, sure. But meltdowns involve an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment irrevocably breaking and that is what has made nuclear power uneconomical, not environmentalists' hand wringing. Indeed, I'd suspect nuclear company executives love to say the environmentos killed things, much better than saying their operations weren't economical.
    pvaldes · 1790203885 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    rcxdude · 1790204431 · focus · HN ↗
    Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it.
    pvaldes · 1790211833 · focus · HN ↗
    > the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have
    This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".
    People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.
    The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.
    To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.
    AnthonyMouse · 1790229520 · focus · HN ↗
    But now you're using older designs to argue against not building newer ones.
    The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't actually a nuclear reaction. It was that the reactor got hot enough to separate the cooling water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you can get a hydrogen explosion.
    If the primary coolant is water. And the reactor is designed in such a way that that can happen.
    Meanwhile you can use other primary coolants or other designs where that isn't a thing. There are designs that don't explode even if you lose power entirely. At which point the cost of an evacuation that the design doesn't require you to do, isn't a cost that you have to pay.
    Moldoteck · 1790235793 · focus · HN ↗
    No they didn't. Data was available to jot do rushed forced evacuation and for older people evacuation literally led to death. Even if Fukushima was as bad as Chernobyl (which would be a wild statement considering it has containment), those ppl would have died from age earlier vs cancer. It was absolutely idiotic decision in this regard.
    rcxdude · 1790241568 · focus · HN ↗
    There is a fair argument for the uncertainty at the time affecting that call. And I think we can agree that avoiding what happened at Fukushima is a core part of nuclear safety. My main point, though, is that people often think that nuclear safety people spend most of their time and effort on 'make the reactor not blow up', but actually the regulations and practical reality is that they spend most of that instead on avoiding trivial amounts of radiation exposure to their workers and the public, perhaps to the expense of effort that could be spent on 'not having a massive disaster' or (assuming you somehow fix the other bits of nuclear that are really expensive) 'not having a climate that's too hot'.
    pvaldes · 1790283225 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    fragmede · 1790212462 · focus · HN ↗
    > Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
    What are they?
    rcxdude · 1790241192 · focus · HN ↗
    The physics of nuclear reactors push you towards making them big, and that means that there are correspondingly few of them, and they are all big civil engineering projects that are a little bit different from each other. This is a recipe for expensive and slow construction. The whole reason people are trying to make SMRs a thing is to try and get around this but it's not obvious there's an intersection between what the physics is happy to make efficient enough and a scale where you can actually get some learning rates and economies of 'scale' (which is more economies of unit volume than just in total how big something is).
    leonidasrup · 1790239636 · focus · HN ↗
    Lot of health impact of Chernobyl disaster was also because of Soviet's obsession with saving face.
    The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.
    Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product#Iodine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product#Iodine
    therealdrag0 · 1790205221 · focus · HN ↗
    The human impact of those is a fraction of fossil-fuels. So it’s not fair to judge nuclear for being expensive if we don’t hold other fuels to similarly rigorous standards
    joe_the_user · 1790205081 · focus · HN ↗
    No,
    The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
    pinkmuffinere · 1790206694 · focus · HN ↗
    > Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
    Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
    azan_ · 1790207401 · focus · HN ↗
    > Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
    It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.
    pinkmuffinere · 1790208822 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree coal power plants are much worse. As an aside, I’m not convinced that’s the bar we need to clear. I would think we need to be safer than solar power, since that’s the source that’s actually growing rapidly. If we’re going to add new power generation, I think it’s probably a trade off between nuclear and solar.
    And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.
    Moldoteck · 1790233792 · focus · HN ↗
    Ironically, nuclear is similar to solar already with old gen2 plants <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
    pinkmuffinere · 1790284623 · focus · HN ↗
    Wow, that's really fascinating to me! I am a bit cautious that the distribution of outcomes from nuclear may be skewed, so we've maybe avoided some of the "black swan" events so far simply because we don't have much nuclear deployed. However, we'd also learn more and improve the safety as we deploy more, so I (somewhat naively) feel this is a pretty good argument in favor of more nuclear.
    hdgvhicv · 1790210435 · focus · HN ↗
    Fukushima killled a couple of people? More died that day from car crashes.
    ppsreejith · 1790211913 · focus · HN ↗
    You're right but this seems difficult to estimate. From the wikipedia* article:
    > ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
    > ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.
    * <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_casualties" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
    hdgvhicv · 1790213370 · focus · HN ↗
    So a couple of orders of magnitude below the number of deaths caused by things like car crashes in Japan in a single year.
    Moldoteck · 1790235596 · focus · HN ↗
    Per UN no deaths are recorded nor will be recorded due to the low dose.
    Evacuation wasn't necessary, govt enforced it deliberately. If ppl weren't evacuated in such a rush(or not at all), they would have been fine
    The low dosage claim is shady considering we have parts of the world with higher natural background radiation and in some cases cancer rates are lower there
    Still, even by wildest estimations nr is fairly low
    leonidasrup · 1790238547 · focus · HN ↗
    The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (which also caused meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident) caused 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, 2,553 missing.
    So nuclear radiation impact from Fukushima is minimal in the total loss of life.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
    myrmidon · 1790255623 · focus · HN ↗
    This is incorrect and naive.
    Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).
    See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_casualties" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
    pinkmuffinere · 1790274830 · focus · HN ↗
    To be fair, people will say many of those deaths are due to the evacuation rather than the meltdown, and they’ll say the evacuation was overblown — too _much_ regulation. However, I think you’re right that these can still be attributed to the meltdown, since the evacuations were undertaken to avoid the difficult-to-predict impact of the meltdown. In hindsight, we can see the evacuation wasn’t needed. But the reactor meltdown made an already-bad situation even more brittle, and in a disaster scenario i think we naturally prefer the evacuation, as opposed to the (low) chance of total destruction.
    hdgvhicv · 1790342457 · focus · HN ↗
    > For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50”
    In 2011 4,612 died in Japan from motor vehicles. And a similar number every year since.
    pm3003 · 1790225391 · focus · HN ↗
    In France after Fukushima nuclear plants that are 500 km inland had to be safeguarded against the risk of a tsunami.
    brohee · 1790238445 · focus · HN ↗
    They are in valleys and I think the risk assessment was heavily influenced by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard which has been toned down quite a bit since... But IRSN (now ASNR) studies all kind of risks seriously...
    kortilla · 1790228293 · focus · HN ↗
    Your 3 examples were all different regulatory regimes.
    Moldoteck · 1790233715 · focus · HN ↗
    In Fukushima zero people died from radiation. If we regulated everything to a similar point (cars, planes, fossils), you'll start living like a monk. Fossils aren't just worse but orders of magnitude worse
    cycomanic · 1790255768 · focus · HN ↗
    That myth keeps persisting. In reality per $ of the project wind farms face significantly higher regulatory costs in many countries. Nuclear power operators also managed to get regulations on the turbines dropped compared to coal plants (in Germany IIRC).
    In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.
    chermi · 1790209592 · focus · HN ↗
    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.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.