This still has to pass with the people in a referendum.
The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.
Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.
We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.
Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sense to invest the money in something else.
> One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns.
Areva underbid on the fixed price contract to win against the ABWR, IIRC. Admittedly the Fins were not pleased at the time overrun, but the construction cost was historically not so bad given it was FOAK in a country without recent construction experience .
All of the EPR builds in Finland/France/UK have seen enormous construction cost (3-4x) and time (decade+) overruns. France expects its EPR2 builds to cost about 30% less but even if they manage to hit that target it will still be extremely expensive.
Indeed, it might be said that they underestimated the cost and timescales to get the project off the ground. But this is generally the case with mega-projects.
Guess we shall see how the construction of Sizewell C goes.
China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service.
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
Please read Directive (EU) 2022/2557 and then tell me how a disgruntled office worker is supposed to do anything they aren't supposed to, given full compliance with the directive. I've seen some preliminary national implementation efforts and it's really serious stuff physical security wise.
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.
There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that.
Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.
Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
"Unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as Th-231), which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Additional fissile material or another neutron source is necessary to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fuelled reactor, Th-232 absorbs neutrons to produce U-233. Depending on the design of the reactor and fuel cycle, the generated U-233 either fissions in situ or is chemically separated from the used nuclear fuel and formed into new nuclear fuel."
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
I think the larger concern is containment breach via sabotage and the resulting material release, definitely less than ideal if these things are put under random buildings where you have little perimeter control.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down because:
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.
The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.
Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.
They don't need to build reactors just to retain a military nuclear program. They specifically maintain a nuclear deterrent by policy, they don't need an excuse. They build reactors because they need more power. They have 60+ reactors and will have more nuclear the US by the end of the decade. They're also heavily investing in next-gen reactors which they wouldn't need to do if they just wanted a weapons program.
Yes it's subsidized, everything in China is subsidized, that's the best part of a planned-capitalist economy. But it's actually becoming more market driven so they can reduce financial pressure and force efficiency from competition. In 10 years those subsidies are gonna be a lot smaller
it is worth noting that if you were to measure by degree of subsidy, the planned output for nuclear has not really budged, but wind and solar are exploding in China in comparison.
> Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.
> Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.
> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
BYDs are certainly better than VWs, Fiats, Citroens and Renaults. The only problem is getting parts - you'll have to wait at least a month or so for the part to arrive from China if it isn't locally available (which often is the case).
Honestly, VW spent years developing the ID line which was just too expensive, buggy, and constanly positioned as an alternative to much cheaper and better equipped Golf/Polo lines - it's like they were afraid to canibalize their own products. I don't know a single person who owned an ID.3 and was actually happy with it.
Or Mercedes, where they decided to build extremely expensive EVs that departed from their core design so much their core audience didn't want to buy them, then they were surprised EVs don't sell.
Or Audi who were probably a masterclass in offering the worst possible value for money you could imagine with their EVs - £50k Q4 that still had manual seats, like what are you competing with exactly?
Only Skoda could really kinda buck the trend with the Enyaq, which proves that VW could be competive if they wanted to, but they actively decided not to.
And don't start me on the Peugeot/Renault/Opel cars, which initially looked incredibly interesting and actually competitive, but I can only guess that Stellantis told them to tone it down because again - have to protect their core business of ICE cars, can't be too good.
And then MG came in with very well specced working EVs, and then other Chinese brands moved in, and big european manufacturers are crying that they are eating their lunch. Like, you guys had literally years to address this, but you decided to protect your legacy product over investing in the future = you're reaping the results now.
I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
It was good... for a while. And it was a "small amount of directly affected people". I mean, so long as you ignore places like St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Camden, etc., and the powers-that-be seemed to be okay with doing that. It's a major part of why the center of the country turned out the way it did politically, but whatever. What's done is done.
But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.
Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).
Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
Solar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage.
Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly.
The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.
This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
Finland is the definition of an outlier, and folks in similar situations make up a tiny percentage of the world population. They can burn gas for the next 50 years, and we can still be good.
I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
Being part of the same grid doesn't matter so much as the amount of interconnection available. Finland has a higher proportion than Spain since France has stalled on building more interconnection capacity as this will likely reduce the amount they can sell their excess nuclear generation to Germany.
> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing.
> It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
> You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build a nuclear power plant or Thorium reactor, which is coming online soon in China, it also doesn’t take that long to build high speed rail system either.
> Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
Where did you get that idea from? This isn't Norway; we don't have any mountains. The country is mostly flat and most of the suitable locations already have a hydropower plant since the 1970s.
And at high latitudes, the night can be very long. And even when the sun does appear for a bit, it doesn't provide a lot of energy.
And you might want to ask the Fins how they feel about nuclear power: around two thirds of the population are for it as well as pretty much the entire political establishment, including the Green Party.
Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
> We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!
> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?
> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.
In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.
"A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced."
"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico, US, is a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years."
But for political reasons it's used only for military nuclear high level waste.
For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository. High level nuclear waste is very small and French nuclear waste from light water reactors is no different from Swiss nuclear waste or Swedish, German, Spanish. (U.K. Magnox fuel rods are different and have special storage requirements). Single waste repository in Finland, Sweden or Norway would be enough, they have lot of old granite and very stable geology.
I don't think people appreciate how much power comes from such a small amount of waste. The largest plant near me has been operating for > 50 years and the waste is still kept on site though I believe they are working on another solution.
Most plants don't need anything special for waste management. They just put it in dry cask storage and leave those in the outside.
Ironically, there's less background radiation around the casks than away from them, since they are so shielded you also get shielded from part of the background radiation too.
Every time someone mentions a year where nuclear started being "safe," I find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment, plus plenty of near misses. Broader than waste though.
Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes into the air.
> find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment
That is what safe looks like, nobody said perfect. It's like how cars are death traps but people can still reasonably call them "safe". You could do the same thing for solar panels but for the fact it isn't newsworthy if there is some toxic sludge in some dump somewhere is associated with solar panels.
There might not be any material that we produce on an industrial scale that doesn't leak hazardous or toxic chemicals. I looked up concrete [0] to find out what it's problem was, and it turns out concrete leaks toxic and radioactive materials into the environment because turns out natural rock is sometimes radioactive. Concrete is nonetheless pretty safe stuff.
They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing. Different people are taking on the risk in each scenario too. Despite this, I'd be fine with a reactor next to my city if I got something like cheap power in return.
> They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing.
Would "they" rather we just dumped the nuclear waste off in some corner somewhere? Then it'd be a slow and certain leak too. If they want slow and certain rather than probably-nothing then that can be arranged. It'd still be less damaging than business as usual.
I mean, I get that people are scared but they are scared of their own imaginations as opposed to anything that can be engineered. I still think I'd be much better off having lived through a Class 7 nuclear disaster rather than my actual experience of spending years near a coal mine. Policy made for and by people who just live in fear for no obvious reason is never going to work. They're still going to be scared whatever the actual policy is and the rest of us are going to be forced to do stupid things in the real world.
Most of the incidents are less about waste storage and more about accidental draining of something, usually contaminated water. Or like, San Onofre got its reactor installed backwards, which yeah does raise some questions that can only be answered with imagination.
While there are problems, I think that you should compare with alternative technologies to be fair. For instance, coal used in Germany and China actually releases more radioactive material than nuclear!
A great perk of nuclear waste s that it's so small compared to the power produced, it's way easier to dispose and manage, than, say, expired wind turbines (which aren't recycled currently and take a massive amount of space).
If nuclear were regulated like automotive, they'd let me run a reactor with minimal training at age 16, and the emissions inspector would be bribeable with $500. Well same with coal.
For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025):
690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
So nuclear waste is not a technical problem, mostly political problem.
And it's not very much talk about, but the real issue is geopolitics. Each nuclear trans-uranium waste repository (spend nuclear fuel) could in future be mined to retrieve the stored plutonium for nuclear weapons. And even better, over centuries the most radioactive short lived isotopes are transmuted into more stable isotopes, so the mining and handling of this material is much easier. And even even better over millennia, the undesirable isotope Plutonium-240 (with half-life 6561 year, much shorter then Plutionium-239 half-life 24110 years) will decay away and the reactor-grade Plutonium waste will itself transform, without any external action, into very usable weapon-grade Plutonium.
Therefor spend nuclear fuel and storage of spend nuclear fuel in non-weapon countries is subject to monitoring by the enhanced verification measures of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Additional Protocol.
U.S. goes to great lengths to prevent other countries from acquiring material usable for nuclear weapons. Like, for example retrieving plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.
"The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium (enough for 20,000 warheads) into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants."
"The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US."
From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.
The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.
I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know) in a way that depends on a social solution that doesn't seem to exist. Pro-nuke people will handwave it away, ignoring the total failure to secure storage sites in most places, and the anti-nuclear people treat it as a fatal flaw in the technology (which it isn't).
That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!
The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).
> I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know)
It's not a 10k year problem, it's a ~300 year problem, after which most of it is at the same level as natural uranium ore; and the stuff that isn't can be blocked via aluminium foil (to stop beta particles).
The first 10-20 years post-removal are the most dangerous, and why the fuel is kept in cooling ponds. From 10-300 you still have danger, but that is manageable with concrete casts:
Once you're past the ~300 year mark, all the most dangerous isotopes have burned away, and you're at point where the main ways of getting ill from what remains is by either eating the pellets or grinding them up and snorting the powder like cocaine.
That's fair and I'll admit to using a bit of hyperbole with that number. My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.
> My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.
The design life spans of bridges are 50-75, with some going towards 75-150. But once a bridge is EOL, the need for it doesn't just go away: it needs to be replaced. And in the intervening years it needs to be maintained.
So we have finite-but-overlapping life spans of infrastructure with the implicit assumption that society/civilization will continue on existing to deal with repair, renewal, and updating said infrastructure. Used-fuel storage is no different.
And if you want to reduce the total volume, spend money on reprocessing (which is currently more expensive than digging new fuel out of the ground; only France makes an effort to do this).
If you are looking in tritium leaks, I would encourage to look into leaks from coal power plants, which are gigantic in comparison to nuclear power plants.
Coal plant waste is visibly a nightmare, mountains of toxic dust, only "mildly" radioactive but also chemically toxic and physically dangerous. If that was the other option you'd have my support for a nuclear plant - but it isn't the other option.
Today the alternate project might well be renewables and BESS, and even if it's fossil fuels it will be natural gas. Natural gas waste isn't roses and kittens, but on every measure it's less bad than coal, and it doesn't have such viceral "this a bad idea" vibes. No heaps of toxic ash, no clouds of smoke, the pollution is too abstract.
Several UK solar projects which bid for AR6 in 2024 are live today, when it was daylight earlier those projects helped power the country. They paid us handsomely to do so, because the market price was almost £100 per MWh even at midday but they bid about £75 at the CfD auction back in 2024 so that (adjusted for inflation) is all they get.
Nuclear is the other option, and cherry picking the most generous data from a deindustrialised economy is a far less meaningful metric than you seem to think.
I wish people like you, who care genuinely about this topic, would engage with it in a more holistic way.
* Removing fossil fuels requires massively increasing the grid capacity by electrifying a vast range of extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes. The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
* That extra load is almost entirely baseload - running large smelters, furnaces, etc intermittently is infeasible and would use even more energy
* This real energy economy is hidden in deindustrialised western countries, where the people depend on energy consuming processes in faraway lands - energy is 'imported' in the form of finished products like cheap building materials. It never shows up in grid usage
* The reality is that the countries where energy is consumed will use as much renewable energy as possible, when it is cheaper to do so, but will rely on fossil fuels to supply the bulk of the baseload demand
* The UK 's energy policy will be a rounding error in this decision-making process
Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
> The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
It's weird for somebody who says they want nuclear power to bring this up - have you been playing too much Fallout ?
The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport and heating, which not only are being electrified already, they're also places where electrification is a net energy win, so that diesel or natural gas power translates into less than half as much electricity for the same results.
For heat it just comes down to heat pumps, since we don't actually want to make more heat we can instead move the heat that already exists and avoid that high price, easy with electricity, impractical otherwise.
But for transport it's even more fundamental, efficient fossil fuel power is about scale and regularity, but for transport you want tiny engines and bursty usage. A transition shrinks the overall energy budget while improving the outcomes, that's why this is such an obvious economic step.
> Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
The vast majority of UK consumers do not have a wholesale tracked price for electricity, so in fact that lower immediate wholesale price is just profits for the retail electricity companies.
Long term price trends matter more, but notice the CfD strike price for the new nuclear power station in the UK was a lot higher (IIRC) £92.50. If, of course, that station ever supplies actual power. So whether the headline price is £60 or £600, the price actually paid was £92.50 and somehow or another that's what you're paying for that electricity even if you were told it was £60.
£92.50 isn't bad for a novel technology. If you were going to deploy it next year and in five years you'd be bidding £80 or less for another new plant I'd have enthusiasm for this concept. But in fact you're going to come back in five years, still without a finished plant but now pitching for £110 per MWh instead of £92.50 -- we have seen this story before.
This is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Yes coal power is worse! I know that and clearly you know that. What are we even talking about?
So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.
I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.
Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.
Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown?
It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.
Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.
Yeah but the risk management of a dam is ridiculously small compared to waste which will be dangerous so far into future that we might not know if people will even know what it is.
A dam damming water at a hill is obvious.
Some warm stuff set up like something really special, is not.
Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.
If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.
Unless we have civilizational collapse in which case a bit of nuclear waste will be the least of our problems.
It won't have to be monitored for a 1000 years. First, by that time the level of radioactivity is very low, and when it's in a deep-geological repository (like the ones we already use for vastly greater amounts of highly toxic chemicals that never decay) it is gone. We know enough about how geology works.
We also know how a BLU-122 works. Can you be sure the US wouldn't use one on its allies in yet another moment of irrational tantrum? What about Russia?
> Being an additional problem is not a contradiction of it being the least of those problems.
How does this even help your argument?
Yeah, we have a nuclear winter. 80% of the civilisation is dead. "Hey look, we've found warm stuff". A few years later: 10% of the population died of cancer.
Are you kidding?
> No it won't.
Spent nuclear fuel stays a radiation hazard for extended periods of time with half-lifes as high as 24,000 years.
> That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.
The fact that your single example is Yucca mountain and even the US wasn't able to come up with another place and is still discussing this one, shows that there is not an abundance of places you can put it. Even in such a huge country like the USA.
Other countries have the same issues and they are geological.
Germany had a spot a few decades ago. Everybody thought it would be safe. It has to be evacuated now. An evacuation which will cost the taxpayer millions of Euros.
Please explain how people in the midst of a nuclear winter aren’t going to be aware of what a radiation hazard is? Come on, just think for a moment before you say something.
Loss of knowledge in disasters so wide is not something which is hard to imagine. How come you have so much trouble with it? And nuclear winter is just one catastrophic scenario. Will you come for every one I list?
Correct as long as we still have Geiger counters.. I’m not sure what kind of apocalypse you’re planning for. Maybe get a radon detection kit for your basement.
"How" is not really a relevant question in this context. They are, empirically.
Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe, meaning it doesn't really matter that much which of these you use, the overall risk is always going to be very low, and the relative numbers are going to be very sensitive to small changes or variations in analyses.
Hydro is significantly more dangerous, and all the fossil fuels are tremendously more dangerous.
Due to the fact that intermittent renewables usually require fossil backup for that majority of countries that don't have abundant hydro, you have to take that into account.
A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.
Whereas the WHO predicts that there will be no measurable health effects on the general Japanese public from Fukushima, and the majority of negative health consequences were from the unnecessary evacuations.
> Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe
Who said that?
What are you talking about? How is a solar panel even on the same safety-shelf with nuclear material??
What are you talking about??
> A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.
Which is again related to the Astroturf tactic of playing nuclear vs. coal and is not related to today's calculations where it is renewables vs. nuclear.
Would you please stop derailing the discussion with this?
> Who said [that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe]?
Not "who". "What". And the answer is "the data". The data say that.
Empirically. Completely independent of whether you understand how.
And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year, 2025 was another record production year, the number of states adopting nuclear power is rising, the number of reactors is rising, the number of builds is rising, the rate of the increase in number of builds is rising.
Empirically.
And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels. Which is why almost all industrialized nations are doing nuclear AND renewables.
Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
In the real world they are complementary. Here's the Finnish environment minister:
"If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines.
> Not "who". "What". And the answer is "the data". The data say that.
Why don't you link to "the data" then?
> And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year,
I just gave you a source which proves my statement and shows that yours is a lie. Just like everything else you added to it.
> And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels.
Weird how they can't but already do. Must be some kind of magic eh?
> Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
Nope. This is a lie also :)
Nuclear clogs up transmission ways when it's not necessary. This is a fact and happens today.
> Here's the Finnish environment minister:
Why not add the French environment minister also? You can add as many ministers as you want, the world doesn't care. The money goes into renewables and they're the future.
Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
My understanding has been that an additional reason breeder reactors have been discouraged is due to nuclear proliferation fears; the neccessary reprocessing of the fuel also produces weapons-grade plutonium.
The volumes of "waste" that is generated, given the electricity produced, is not a lot. The entirety of the US' waste created, over the course of multiple decades, can fit on single football field/pitch, ten yards/metres high (that's the actual fuel bundles: the dry casks they're stored in would increase the volume).
France is just across the border, so Orano can do reprocessing with the "waste" to reduce its volume even further if desired, and extract the unused fuel from the waste.
It really never was that big of a problem. People make a big deal that it lasts 30,000 years, but there are many other types of waste, such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, etc, that will literally never go away, but we don't make people put those types of wastes in repositories that will last forever. Basically you just want to put it in a very remote place with a lot of earth over it. The good thing about nuclear waste is that it's so energy dense that there really isn't even that much of it.
Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.
In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons that will make the widespread use of nuclear energy possible: once your neighbor have built a reactor, you begin to share with them all the risks associated with nuclear energy, but you receive none of the benefits. This makes building a nuclear reactor more attractive to you, since you're already bearing the risks.
Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too.
For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?
Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.
> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened?
Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit.
The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.
"At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think."
Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.
Sure but the limited volume really puts an upper bound on the expense. You could package it in containers small enough for a single person to carry and then have people individually walk them down to the bottom of the mponeng mine and it would still be reasonably affordable.
It's an absurd thought experiment to illustrate that even when taken to an extreme the volume is small enough that a solution broadly remains feasible.
In germany alone, 500 000 m³ of radioactive material is to be disposed somehow by 2050. Having people carry that underground sounds insane. There is more to waste than fuel rods. And even they .. amount to a really high number if you factor in shielding.
I think you have a serious misconception. The long term storage we're talking about here is for the spent fuel rods (or alternatively the byproducts extracted from them if they are reprocessed). It's known as high level waste and there isn't very much of it.
> As a general rule, short-lived waste (mainly non-fuel materials from reactors) is buried in shallow repositories, while long-lived waste (from fuel and fuel reprocessing) is deposited in geological repository.
> Overall, the 60-year-long nuclear program in the UK up until 2019 produced 2150 m3 of HLW.
You should read up on the Asse II mine in Germany. They tried exactly this kind of naïve "just throw it in an old mine" approach, and it has turned into a giant headache as it is now slowly collapsing and trying to leak into the surrounding groundwater - if chemical reactions don't cause it to explode first.
This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick...
I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".
We don't have a lot of technology that we knew existed in earlier civilisations - the Aztecs, Mayans, pueblo peoples, the Easter islanders, to name just a few were doing things we have no idea how to do
When sealed several hundred meters underground in nonporous rock they do have such long lifespans. It's like observing that corn doesn't have a 10 year lifespan when left out on the counter and then objecting to canning it on that basis.
So just to be clear the concern here is that something buried 2+ miles underground, in a secure container, encased along with other secure containers in a concrete vault, all homed in nonporous rock, in a geologically stable area, is suddenly going to be subjected to an earthquake, against all odds a fault is going to open right through the waste storage area, again against all odds groundwater will appear, the reinforced vault will be weathered to the point of failure (over what timespan I wonder?), and the resulting leak of radioactive material that is multiple miles underground will then somehow affect humans living, what, somewhere within a few hundred miles? Does that really sound like a reasonable scenario to you? Because as far as I'm concerned it's pure concern trolling.
No? I don't see where you addressed these points in context? I am saying that I don't find what you're saying to be at all convincing but am of course open to reasoned debate if you think I've got something wrong. Being concerned about the scenario I outlined above truly seems absurd to me.
Do you see an obvious issue with the sequence of events I posed?
An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.
Yeah, i know about that one and it kind of proves my point, it's been active as a nuclear reactor for roughly a billion years if i recall correctly - every time water seeped into the rock it slowed the neutrons down and the reactor started up, created steam, which then evaporated and stopped the reaction
Newer reactors produce much less long-lasting waste. A half-life of only 100 or 200 years makes a tremendous difference to the old reactors where half-life was measured in 1000s of years
Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.
Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …
… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.
The fossil fuel industry quietly funneled money to these groups to discredit nuclear which competes with gas/coal for base load. Solar/wind only partially compete because at times they produce nothing so the grid still needs base load (usually "natural" gas these days).
Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!
And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.
430 GW a year on 20% (which it is not, as china has lots of desserts with no clouds) would still be a way bigger number than 110 GW that are planned to be reached in a few years.
Then here I might stand corrected, but it does not change the basic equation nore the invalidation of the claim above, that china is building nuclear like it builds solar and wind. It does not. Not even close.
Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?
A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?
Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.
Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.
> Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though
France got there first.
They built out such a massive infrastructure of Nuclear that they are a net provider of energy in Europe. They are also the only country to date that has officially pushed back on old safety models like LNT.
Switzerland is also working jointly with Denmark on a Thorium reactor and I’m sure in light of the continuing situation with Russia/Ukraine, and the fact that the Chinese have already built two Thorium reactors (a small one to work the kinks a much larger one that will go on line in 2029-2030) Danes/Swiss will be stepping up their efforts in this area.
I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build. Are we in the west gonna wait for the Chinese to build out Thorium Reactors, are we also gonna wait for high-speed rail to be built out by the Chinese too if it wasn’t for the war with Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese probably would have built out high-speed rail, all all the way to Europe, by the way, they’ve already built a rail system all the way to Tehran.
And the Chinese have built out a high speed rail system all the way to Ürümqi, China just east of Kazakhstan in western China. (They aren’t messing around).
There are some european success stories in high speed rail too (France). China doesn’t let itself entangled in planning restrictions. US and European countries love over regulation and litigations. That’s a choice, and it comes with a steep cost.
VS the cost today yes. Nuclear wasn’t seen as a prohibitively expensive form of energy, quite the opposite. South korea and China are making it work. But if you build a new prototype every time and get bogged down in decades of environmental surveys, lawsuits and ever changing over regulations, any infrastructure project becomes prohibitive, whether it is nuclear, high speed rail, or anything else.
As an Ontarian, the thought of spending $500B on a couple of reactors makes me furious. Ontario is not going to become competitive again with the most expensive electricity in the world.
Today's politicians can't even be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure, leading to things like the Ponte Morandi collapse, or the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, or the Carola Bridge collapse, and so on and so on.
They can't even properly maintain fairly trivial infrastructure, routinely leading to at most a few dozen deaths per incident. Why would you assume they'd do any better with nuclear reactors - where a second Chernobyl is the potential result of an incident?
I'll never feel comfortable with it. Especially after after humans proved they will even attack nuclear power plants in a war. You can only design for so much.
Any country that does not use nuclear using less energy dense alternatives. Compressing controllable energy production should be considered one of our top priorities.
It's not and that's fine, but it's very much part of the European economic area, and we have a great relationship as well as a lot of alignments with standards and so on. The EU wouldn't have no issues taking notes from the Swiss.
You're correct to point it out. Officially not. But basically yes. We have a free trade and they're part of our Schengen area, so for all intents and purposes there's almost no barriers to trade. I should have been more clear.
Whether or not that's the case, the problem is that if you put together all the nuclear, solar, wind and hydro we can manage, we will still have less energy than what we get easily with oil.
I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.
You can only spend a dollar once, so any money going into nuclear won't go into solar, wind, or hydro - which have far better payoff when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions.
Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days.
That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.
Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.
You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.
> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days
Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.
So how do you propose the energy is supplied in the 20 years it would take for the first nuclear reactors to become offline? Let me guess: gas turbines?
So we either fully rely on gas turbines for the base load for the next 20 years, orrrr we rely on gas turbines during the few days it is both dark and wind-less for the next 20 years.
> That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built
No, it can’t. We’re already building solar as fast as we can, the economics drive that. The marginal supply will come from something else. That margin is what we’re talking about, not the bulk. Most of the new energy will come from solar. But we can’t manufacture and install PVs quickly enough, particularly over the next 20 years, to close the gap.
We have statistics on solar performance at the huge countries levels. And it shows that, in reality, we're talking about 20x overbuild. Not 3x and not even 10x. And there is no way around it.
Wind and solar anti-correlation does not lowering this number. Number is still 20x, just it's more rare now, but it is still there.
Those are all less safe than nuclear. It's a simple fact, look it up.
All the places that can use hydro already do. Oh, and it's pretty damaging to the environment, it turns out.
Wind and solar are pretty cool, but also unreliable, so it's not so clear that they're really cheaper after you account for overprovisioning and storage costs.
If only there was a safe and reliable source of energy we could use to complement them...
> I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.
Japan was able to start construction on a new nuclear reactor and have its construction (and start commercial service) with-in five years, and did so every year from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s:
The first unit you build will be expensive, the second less so, the third even less. Economies of scale work just as well for nuclear plants as they do for widgets: Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, Unit 4 cost 30% less.
Turns out if you don't know what you're doing, things can get be expensive because you're learning lessons along the way, but if/once you do know what you're doing costs drop.
It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1].
At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.
It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death.
The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.
Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.
That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.
"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt.
Nuclear is cheap to operate. It's expensive to build and expensive to decommission. Any analysis that doesn't include those two costs is highly misleading.
> In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
The website does not open for me. Are the quoted prices consumer prices including tax or wholesale prices before tax?
If it’s the latter, 8 cents is not that cheap and comparable to the average price per kWh (all sources) in Germany. In most cases in most places, the lion’s share of electricity costs is tax and infrastructure refinancing, not actual production. Levellized cost of PV+storage is well below new nuclear virtually in every deployment scenario.
> For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
Because NG is one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity, if you are not producing NG yourself locally AND don’t have to pay for environmental costs.
Ontario's Financial Accountability Office, which reports to provincial parliament and is independent of the government, concluded that at least for the refurbs:
> * The FAO estimates that the Plan will result in nuclear generation supplying a significant proportion of Ontario electricity demand from 2016 to 2064 at an average price of $80.7/MWh in 2017 dollars. (For reference, the 2017 Nuclear Price is $69/MWh and the current price of electricity for most residential and small business ratepayers is $114.9/MWh.)
> * The Nuclear Price will be higher than the average price of $80.7/MWh during the majority of the time that the reactors are being refurbished from 2016 to 2033. Post refurbishment, ratepayers will benefit from a lower than average Nuclear Price.
> * Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
> * OPG will realize a financial return from the operation of the DNGS and PNGS. OPG is owned by the Province and any return would improve the Province’s fiscal position. There is no significant fiscal impact to the Province from the refurbishment of reactors at the BNGS as it is operated by Bruce Power, a private sector organization.
I was not able to find a similar report (pro or con) for new build, though I think the current plan with some SMRs in Ontario is dumb: if we decide on more nuclear, we should stick with big(ger) CANDU, as there's little point in small reactors in a large grid like Ontario.
Renewable programs have also cost Ontario ratepayers quite a bit of money, for not a lot of electricity generated:
Renewables don't need to fulfill everything all the time. If they need assistance from fossil fuels 10% of the time, that's a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions. The last 10% won't be the biggest issue to deal with.
So you can build expensive nuclear plants for that small fraction of the time, or you can continue to use existing fossil fuel plants for free. The difference to the carbon bottom line is small.
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
This is so shortsighted. We'd still have the nuclear waste problem and - more importantly - the cost. Germany alone is facing a bill of €26B to €45B for nuclear waste management, decomissioning and cleanup. All of that goes into your electricity bill, because the government pays only 25% of it: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-cos...
German Greens have managed the feat of presiding over extending strip coal while closing nuclear power plants. But hey, they fought for it since the 70s, and finally won; we all lost.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.
People take on dangers all the time if the benefit (perceived or otherwise) outweighs the risk. That just tells me nuclear's economics didn't make it a clear winner over fossil fuels.
People have more experience with hunting and with wildlife than they do with nuclear power. Though I’m not sure why whaling is included since commercial whaling is banned by most countries as a result of anti-whaling protests.
I'm not asking where they got funding. I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone. You don't find that strange at all?
The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it.
Environmentalists weren't just useful idiots then (and I hesitate to call people acting in good faith, without any self-interest, "idiots"). They're convenient fall guys today. The fossil fuel industry killed nuclear power and pinned it on the environmental movement. That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
Environmentalists did have the nuclear industry's help with a few high profile disasters. Plus the lingering connection to nuclear weapons. That makes it easier for people to take the threat seriously.
But that's still insufficient to explain it. If the fossil fuel industry had wanted nuclear power we'd have it. They could use lobbying to reduce the push for nuclear, and then blame it on the environmentalists. Who were happy to take a rare win.
> I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone
First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.
> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.
And yet you blame the messenger more than the money. If environmentalists didn't exist do you think fossil fuel wouldn't have found a different way to get the message out there? When money talks, people listen.
So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive. I'm certain there's ZERO correlation between regulations that make it expensive and regulations making it safe....................
So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?
> So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive
Yes, with extra steps.
Regulations, more so than their impact on price, cost calendar time.
Time, especially for already-lengthy and complicated infrastructure projects, costs volume.
And low volume means high prices and a slow pace of improvement.
Henry Ford wouldn't have built many automobiles, or improved them as quickly as he did, if every one needed to be individually permitted by multiple government agencies.
The failure of nuclear is that it never standardized and scaled to industrially-efficient volumes (outside of arguably France) at exactly the point that it could have technologically done so (~1970s). Had Offshore Power Systems^ begun producing floating reactors at volume in Jacksonville, FL in the late 70s, we'd be having a very different conversation about cheap American nuclear power today.
> The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety.
The program led to the Three Mile Island accident, which is one of the largest releases of radioactivity in US history.
Naval reactors are inherently safer due to their small size and unlimited supply of cooling water. A meltdown is virtually impossible, worst-case scenario you could always use a firehose and a diesel pump to inject sea water into the reactor. On the other hand: you really don't want to overfill the reactor: a naval reactor "going solid" rips itself apart, killing the ship.
Commercial reactors are the exact opposite. Overfilling them is not a huge deal as there are plenty of ways to relieve pressure, but underfilling them can easily lead to a meltdown. Even after shutdown it needs active cooling for a decent while to prevent residual decay from overheating it.
The TMI reactor operators were trained on naval reactors, but they were operating a commercial reactor. During the incident they were too busy trying to prevent it from overfilling to notice that it was actually cooking itself dry - so they intentionally shut down the emergency cooling system!
So no, saying that the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program has led to zero accidents is both wrong, and completely irrelevant to the subject here.
> ... which has adversely affected public health or safety.
Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.
>Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity
None of the theories put forward about the loss of the USS Scorpion have involved the reactor. Maybe they didn't discuss it because it wasn't relevant?
there are regulations that make it safe and the ones that make it expensive. its two different groups. radiation limits and design safety with meltdown prevention is one thing but then you get rules like radiation needs to be as low as possible until you run into a cost limit. that basically means setting a price floor for the whole project.
nuclear being expensive is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. the costs for certified equipment are high because the market is small and not competitive, because nobodys building nuclear, because everyone knows its too expensive to build and not worth it.
the only solution i see is massive state investment like what france was doing in the 70s. that would upset the market purists but its more practical than trying to push the industry with a neoliberal hands off approach.
Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists."
Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.
(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)
Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.
France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.
I'm not sure I agree but lets set that aside for now. Are you seriously suggesting that $50 billion per France equivalent over half a century would have been an unreasonable price to pay to avert climate change? It's just not a logically consistent or even remotely sensible position. The environmentalist movement undeniably got this one wrong and I say that as someone with views that would generally be categorized as such.
These €50 billion is just what EDF is in debt, not what building and operating these reactors actually cost. Just in the next 10 years EDF will have in invest about €150-200 billion to replace and refurbish their reactors. That's just to keep the current capacity, not to expand it.
Unfortunately "the environmentalist movement" didn't have the information regarding the dangers of climate change and the information about the near-zero threat from low level nuclear radiation in 1970ies. Hindsight is 20/20.
That said; planning and construction of new nuclear reactors peaked in the early 1970ies, before large scale accidents (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) really mobilized civil society against nuclear power.
The reason the West stopped building is because even with state support, it's not such a financially attractive investment. That's why "the East" continued building more and more reactors until the big incident. (Arguably their reactors were also much less safe and thus probably cheaper by quite a bit.)
Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal.
But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.
Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?
Or alternatively a reasonable person will accept the observation that sufficiently large problems with sufficiently bad consequences need to be socialized. However even then there is still going to be disagreement about where exactly to draw the line. That nuclear and climate change falls far to one side of it should not be a surprise.
> Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
No need to run the world: in the last decades, some environmentalists have been lobbying against nuclear energy and in the end, the people in many countries have become opposed to it by fear of it. And that feared is fuelled (among others) by environmentalists for sure.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
If it's about comparing energies financially (and many other dimensions actually), nothing gets remotely close to oil. But oil is limited and oil is destroying the world.
Also not to forget: everything nowadays depends on globalisation and therefore oil. We like to compare renewables to oil, but we forget that they totally depend on oil at the moment. Without oil, we don't build much renewables anywhere. So an important question is: without oil, do we need nuclear energy or not? I believe we do. I believe we also need renewables, to be clear.
Those regulations you despise were written in blood.
Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it.
Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.
> If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent.
I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
The effect environmentalists have on adoption is a rounding error compared to the humongous cost of nuclear power.
Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically.
Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.
Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap?
They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.
1. Nuclear has a negative learning curve. It’s gotten more expensive with time. Part of the reason is increasing geopolitical risks (the U.S. just launched a war on Iran because of the possibility it may upgrade nuclear material to weapon capabilities), lost knowledge and expertise, and also the increasing relative cost of financing in the cost of energy projects.
2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were much more likely to directly invest in energy projects. It didn’t have to compete with Labubus for private dollars.
3. Its current competition didn’t exist, given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten, and how much cheaper battery tech has gotten with signs all of them will only get even cheaper. And on the non renewable side, natural gas has become incredibly cheaper as well.
> given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten
In a world with a lot of oil. How does that evolve when we don't have enough oil anymore?
Feels like renewables are extremely distributed, which sounds like it may be harder to manage without the happy globalisation brought by accessible oil.
To be clear, I believe we also need renewables. But I also believe that we won't remotely replace oil, so we need absolutely everything we can imagine, and that includes nuclear energy.
1. I personally believe the “lost knowledge “ is overstated. Europe knows very well how to manage large scale infrastructure projects. It still has a healthy nuclear industry.
2. Once the vote is there(Switzerland is a direct democracy), the public funds will be there. Sweden has recently chosen to invest ~40B Euro.
3. Solar, really? In Switzerland?
Many parts of the industrialised world receive very little sun, especially in winter, where coincidentally, energy usage peaks.
And intermittent power generation like wind is no competition to nuclear.
These are very weak arguments. Good luck replacing Oskarshamn with solar panels…
For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.
Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.
The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.
It took 5 years from construction start to grid connection for Oskarshamn R3, at the time the reactor with the world’s highest rated output. Since it began operating it has produced 350TWh.
That nuclear power must take forever is a myth and is only due to dysfunctional politics.
That “you get a permit in the winter and it’s done by summer” is a totally bogus claim. Perhaps for some tiny installation compared to a power plant with 1.5GW output.
And now France target 2038 at the earliest for the first reactor in the EPR2 fleet. With a 11 cent per kWh CFD and interest free loans, summing to over 20 cents per kWh.
It is easy to dream about what could have been half a century ago, but that doesn’t change reality today.
Utility-scale solar projects in California are experiencing interconnection delays averaging 3 to 5 years, primarily due to grid congestion, slow utility study pipelines, and aging substation equipment.
Process works if you keep building, expanding and making it safer. If you don’t build it for decades, you’re basically starting from scratch.
It is a hard sell when you have to front a good chunk of money, without a track record of successful build ups. It applies to other infrastructure stuff like HSR.
The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively.
oh and dont get us started on the electricity zones and germany...
Turn on Barsebäck again... absolute asenine they shut it down. Will never happen, been too long, also owned by Uniper... (Germans)
And sadly S+MP+V will win this election it looks like. Say goodbye to any new nuclear power. Also it will be 2015 all over again but that is off topic...
The same way that France did it; by building quite safe nuclear in series with massive government subsidies. A bit like China today.
After the accidents showed that these designs where just not quite safe enough, redundancy in the safety systems were added. The thing is; as soon as those reactor designs got a bit more safe, they got much more expensive quite quickly. Just look at France's history of nuclear reactor development.CP0, CP1 and CP2 were somewhat cheap and they were able to churn out the things in quite a number.P4 and P'4 were already much more complex, more expensive and it just wasn't possible to mass produce these things like before. By N4 the economy of scale had broken down almost completely.
That's the problem with nuclear reactors. They are simple in principle, but fiendishly difficult in practice and enormously complex. So complex indeed that the learning curve doesn't yield any compounding returns. That's what we've seen play out in the last 50 years.
I don't know how things evolved in Sweden, but I assume that Swedish reactors don't have all the safety features of modern reactors. I guess that's what made them cheap, just like the CP-series in France.
Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.
The American regime has recently solved this problem by removing safety requirements - they have de-recognized the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage, which means the official fact is that there is a threshold of radiation that's safe to receive. That threshold is, of course, just above whatever one of the nuclear reactors they're about to build will emit. They removed the "as low as reasonably possible" design goal which means it's now allowed to dump radioactive waste into a river to save money
"They removed the "as low as reasonably possible" design goal which means it's now allowed to dump radioactive waste into a river to save money"
This is just an incredibly stupid lie that completely destroys your credibility.
The ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principle paired with hyper-sensitive detection technology requires nuclear operators to spend billions on redundant safety features and extensive permitting for infinitesimal health benefits. This regulatory burden prices nuclear energy out of the market.
> No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.
Ontario's Bruce A site (Units 1-4) have an age of ~45 years, and has just finished refurbishment (ahead of schedule and under budget) to run for another few decades:
Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.
I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".
"safe" is a spectrum. While coal is allowed to kill millions of people a year, the safety level of nuclear in the US was raised to "no matter whatever happens no one ever anywhere must have harm come to them" and that's not realistic. Solar kills orders of magnitude more people than nuclear! But we haven't regulated rooftop solar out of existence, plus that wasn't even an option 50 years ago. That's 40 years we didn't have to be poisoning the Earth with coal.
Thankfully the US has now removed the linear no threshold model and the As Low As Reasonably Achievable radioactive emissions goal which were irrational and made nuclear much more expensive than it should be.
Your link says increased modulation adds 1.5-3.75 million euros/year in maintenance costs. That's utterly insignificant for the electricity supply to a nation of 70 million.
I've become increasingly disillusioned with the modern environmental movement. I support efforts to reduce CO2 production, and nuclear is one of the best ways to do that. This is an absolute no-brainer. Instead, when I talk with activists, they have a much greater focus on people using less energy. As though that will have no human impact.
If it wasn‘t for the European Greens’ (partially oil lobby funded) anti-nuclear propaganda starting in the 60s, carbon emissions today would be much lower than they are.
Well. It is not cheap. Each new built large scale reactor needs tens of billions in subsidies. Money which could have multiple times larger effect, in a fraction of the time, if invested in renewables and storage.
I really hope Swiss people learned a lesson from Germany and vote to build nuclear power plant. We need more investment in research on how to build safe, efficient power plants and ways of re-using spent nuclear fuel
What kind of environmental impact does hydro have in Switzerland? I’d expect it’s less because they are in the mountains.
I’m against a lot of Hydro power in the US because the environmental damage is high. Plus I like to fish and they have huge impacts on the ecosystems. But these are relatively flat places compared to Switzerland.
Many of the dams in Switzerland have been built before the fifties and sixties, when environmental concerns were much lower. While most of the dams have been built high up in the mountains, a few villages have been buried by the dams.
Today, it would be infeasible creating new dams. The only thing we can do, is raise the height of some existing dams, adds pumping stations and optimise water flow between the dams.
Your link is to a random Facebook group, and the source isn't a link. I tried looking for more information in both English and Portuguese and found nothing.
I agree with you that you can't rely on hydro alone to power your country. It also seems like you're trying to be reasonable and suggest that any new nuclear production in your country needs to be done as ethically and environmentally friendly as possible.
Your statement about "We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time" really stood out to me.
Are Swiss folks maybe acting a bit NIMBY by not allowing nuclear in their own country, but are fine with buying French nuclear power? It seems a tad hypocritical to be against nuclear, while simultaneously using it as long as it's "not in my country".
I wouldn’t pin the irrational discourse on the left. Pro nuclear people are just as k=1 thinkers as well. We just need long term policy not short term panic.
> The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland
Does discourse from neighboring countries leak in as well? For example, German and Italian media's anti-nuclear sentiment versus French media's neutral to vaguely positive sentiment about nuclear.
French part of Switzerland is much more left leaning, so I can expect more anti-nuclear sentiment on this side. But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
But, Germany's decision after Fukushima to close down all nuclear reactors has had a strong impact on the 2017 votation that banned nuclear in Switzerland. So I guess the influence is there.
> the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for
Unless you personally agree with whatever your preferred party's line is on everything and generalize that sentiment, I'm not sure how to get to that conclusion.
> But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
People aren't really partisan like that in Switzerland. They'll happily elect people from one party then vote against the party on specific issues in referendums or initiatives.
For something like nuclear, people who vote for green party might be mostly aligned with the party because it's a key issue for them while people who vote for center or right parties won't really care what the party recommends.
So French Swiss or German Swiss aren't going to be consuming French or German news media? If so that's refreshing compared to Canadians and Brits who constantly try to butt into American media and culture wars (eg. Rebel News, UnHerd) and vice versa (eg. X)
Switzerland's multilingual situation might look primed for a balkanized culture war, especially if you are coming from a place where that is common. But 1) it's a country of 10m people and 2) the national identity is centered around being unified despite language differences.
Of course people make jokes and remarks about "those people" who speak a different language. But "those people" are probably 1h away by train, are probably coworkers, and their language was taught in your school (even if some didn't bother to learn).
We have national media (German: srf, French/Italian: rts, Romanche: rtr), people consume that, and a few medias that have multiple language versions like 20minutes.
We also have a few language specific medias (German: NZZ, Tagesanzeiger, Blick, ..., French: Le Temps, 24 heures, La Liberté, ...), but I think most people consume Swiss media, especially when Swiss politics and local afairs are absolutely not covered by French and German medias.
The funny thing is that people know more about what is happening in the neighbouring countries than in the other parts of Switzerland. The "national" media is very divided and only covers French-speaking regions in French, German-speaking in German, etc. as if they were local media.
Switzerland is like that. I remember asking (in my best German) the person manning a ticket counter at Zurich train station if they spoke French once, if a look could kill I'd be dead, lol.
It gives the strange feeling that although they decided to create a country together they don't want to interact with each others unless absolutely necessary.
That's not it. Everyone in Zurich studies French at school, if you speak slowly to them in French, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (if they are familiar with the context of course). Similarly, if you speak slowly in German to a French-speaking Swiss, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (again, if they are familiar with the context).
It's just harder to speak in another language than to understand it, so if you ask someone to speak...
Next time, ask them if they understand French :-).
The fact that so many European green parties have been so strongly anti-nuclear was always a bit of a head-scratcher for me. It seems so dumb on so many different fronts. Goes to show the power of uninformed public, wildly misleading or actively lying stereotypes and scaremongering.
Its bizarre that nuclear power is a left/right thing. It's clean, safe, and immediately displaces carbon emissions elsewhere. It doesn't require decades of storage and transmission improvements that may or may not come. It just works. Today.
One day nuclear will no longer be neasessary. Until that day comes it is essential. Anyone who disagrees is confusing wishful that being for physics.
No, it's only expensive compared to every other generation source that is not expected to price in externalities. When I get to vent my waste product into the open air my mwh is way cheaper!! Who could have guessed? How much does a natural gas plant that captures all waste output cost?
It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
1. Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?
2. The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years - what's the plan for managing it?
Yes energy generation (and independence) is important, no nuclear ain't it.
> Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?
This makes no sense. Russia has actual nuclear weapons, it can "obliterate" Ukraine (or Switzerland) on a whim with them, if they decide to. Also, as you can verify by looking at the containment zone of Chernobyl catastrophe, full blown meltdown/explosion of a nuclear reactor doesn't really "obliterate" a country size of Ukraine.
> The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years
No, it is not hazardous for "tens of thousands of years".
The time for nuclear power was 50 years ago. And it's sad due to unfounded fears and coal interests there weren't more built. I would love if historically we had build more nuclear power plants. I am against it now because we have other safer, cheaper, and more sustainable options.
If you start a plant today, it's probably a decade before it comes online. At this point, solar is more than enough for most places if we invested in it and subsidized it like we do for coal and oil. Batteries are improving rapidly and another decade will be a massive difference. I just don't see it making sense to start a new plant.
2) Any country that is not US absolutely needs to invest in nuclear technology. This is for your own security. In addition to providing energy security, it also provides physical security (with a bit more work).
Without nuclear, your country will remain vulnerable to:
1) Direct attacks
2) Sanctions which destroy your economy and quality of life of your citizens
3) Fossil fuel disruptions, either intentional or malicious
With nuclear + solar, you have an unbeatable combination of all forms of security. Every country wastes lots and lots of money on many useless initiatives. Nuclear might seem costly, but security is somewhat important.
The rest of the world on clean energy will ultimately help people in US, because there will be less foreign adventures and oil will be a lot cheaper when all that demand is destroyed, supply chains are not disrupted by these wars.
With nuclear energy, you are dependent on whoever has uranium. This is not a theoretical risk, and already has political and economic consequences for the few countries with a large nuclear energy share [1]. It would be much worse if a significant amount of global energy was produced with nuclear energy.
I think solar panels in space (where it's always sunny and the panels can be paper thin and orders of magnitude more efficient) with wireless transmission to Earth would be ideal. But I'm sure there are technologies out there that are either secret, dangerous-to-know or just suppressed that never get the attention they deserve due to vested interests. I also like the idea of speeding up radioactive decay with lasers or (safely??) shooting radioactive waste into space.
"Nuclear power is a hell of a way to boil water."
But good luck finding a better alternative.
Solar panels require very high heat to manufacture and are difficult/costly to recycle. Channeling or capturing energy from a different dimension would be best. I wonder how the ancients did it... or investigate downed UFOs... or take a trip into the future. But then stay quiet because it's more than just a crisis of energy, it's a crisis of conscience!
I'm pretty nuclear, but I don't understand how having nuclear power prevents vulnerability to direct attack? If anything it would concentrate your risks - your energy now comes from fewer, more centralized and more fragile sources
You made it sound like any country that wants nuclear weapons can get them.. just look at Iran. I think existing nuclear weapons club is very interested in keeping membership pretty tight
This seems clearly not very true; Iran didn’t seem very at the mercy of the US this year. There is a ton of resistance to actually using nuclear weapons, seemingly making them practically irrelevant.
Also, for a single Country getting the capabilities might be a plus but if some 100+ countries have nuclear weapons, all countries are in a worse position than today. This is a sub zero sum game.
I tracked down the source once and almost all of the fossil fuel deaths boiled down to deaths due to particulate matter in developing countries. It is highly preventible and only occurs because of no oversight or corruption. If we scale nuclear and have profit maximisation as objective and have no standards in factory, it will have significantly worse fate.
This is going to be a huge waste of time and money until we realize that building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then. Instead we could also just join a French project, who have way more experience.
We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
There will be a referendum anyways, so I think it's unlikely the ban will actually be lifted.
It is when it's tied to "and I expect they're going to ask for giant subsidies from taxpayers".
Which nuclear inevitably does, both in the form of direct requests for money and by refusing to pay for adequate insurance to compensate everyone who will be damaged in the event of a meltdown externalizing the risks.
If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.
(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)
That's not why they were banned, and in any case lifting a ban on building something that nobody will build doesn't seem like good use of legislators time.
> we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then"
Seems like wishful thinking. If anything with the current electrical trends there will be even more demand for energy in the future and unless some miracolous clean energy source is invented, nuclear (or fossil fuel) will need to be used
> we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then
That's a very, very risky bet you're taking here. We know nuclear energy really well, and you're suggesting we ignore it for something that we will "figure out" later. Meanwhile the clock is ticking.
> We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
This is so limited that it's not at all an alternative, though.
Hydro power is often brutal for the local environment. There has been a whole lot of expensive and careful undoing of hydro power around the world in recent years in attempt to save various local species from extinction. There are second order effects too like how silt is typically deposited in an unblocked vs blocked waterway and what that means for downstream land or water quality.
> building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then.
That's a helluva prediction.
Thorium reactors would be practically limitless in fuel supply, but we aren't getting them without seriously funded nuclear research. That is far less likely during a band on commercial stations.
The same reactors nuclear powers with decades of experience haven't deployed?
We will get two or three revolutions in solar power and battery technology before a single thorium reactor is viable. You could invest all the R&D budget of thorium reactors in perovskite panels and it would generate more MW per CHF invested.
It's a world-wide competition to generate the most expensive electricity! The record is currently held by Vogtle in Georgia US, but Ontario Canada is trying to take the crown by spending $500B on nuclear.
Is there a cleaner, more consistent technology for baseload?
At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.
Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.
And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.
"Baseload" is load, not generation. It's not necessary -- for example the small northern grids that only have diesel generators operate fine even though they have no generators that don't have the capacity for quick cycling.
Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheaper plants and more expensive plants that could start up quicker, it would lower costs. The typical grid was baseload coal and gas peakers. But ~20 years ago gas peakers became cheaper than baseload coal and any need or desire for baseload generation went away.
China is building a lot of coal plants to complement their solar buildout. Notably these are not base load plants. Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night.
Similarly, many new nuclear plant designs are not base load designs; they are designs that can be safely and quickly turned on and off.
P.S. the correct term for generation is "non-dispatchable", not "baseload"
> Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night
That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.
The answer is because we still do not know how to supply expanding electricity demand with wind, solar and batteries. The side of the story that people on this website love to bring up is the fact that China happens to be the largest builder of solar and wind, which is true, but the increased electricity demand is being met via coal, for the most part.
Because it was only in 2025 that batteries became cheaper than coal, so the lead times involved mean they are still building coal.
They're very rapidly ramping up battery bank installation, it's too early to tell if they're also ramping down coal plant installations, but it seems likely.
And it's still building nuclear plants a decade after it decided to concentrate on solar + coal. Plans have lead times and inertia, and China doesn't want to put all of it's eggs in one basket. They'll keep building coal and nuclear at a low rate for a long time to ensure they never lose the core knowledge on how to build them so they're always available as an option.
The increased demand is absolutely and categorically not being met by coal. Look it up, chinas total coal emissions have declined the last few years, despite overall demand growth.
you'll be so happy about being price competitive when the conditions are bad for like a week and the country just doesn't run (or rely on other countries price gouging you for what your country needs to exist.)
Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.
Why do you need both? It's possible to get 99.99% reliability with wind & solar & batteries & weather modelling. There are multiple ways to handle a week long dankelflaute without nuclear: overbuilding, continental scale distribution, lots of batteries, etc. All are cheaper than nuclear.
It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid, even a nuclear dominated one. Local distribution has many single points of failure.
That's exactly when pumped hydro shines. Increasing the storage reservoir capacity is cheap. It's the turbines and infrastructure that's expensive, but that doesn't change if you're only increasing the capacity.
All the cheap storage capacity with natural flow have been taken.
Pumped hydro doesn't need natural flow, because it uses pumps. All it needs is a height differential. Here's 22,000 in Australia alone. There are millions worldwide.
"Why do you need both, it's possible with technologies we don't have at scales we don't control with predictions weeks ahead on a rapidly changing and unpredictable weather model"
Yeah, uh, I'm going to go with the "building a nuclear plant is the safest solution" answer, thanks. Technosolutionism is fun up to a certain point.
>It's possible to get 99.99% reliability [...] It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid
Notwithstanding the fact that lol you're happily saying that you're perfectly fine you get 1 hour of complete downtime every year, which fucks over many industries and services, you're ignoring multiple facts: 1/ to ensure safety, that means rolling brownouts when you're at 95% capacity, great solution, 2/ 99.99% works exactly like it does in software: you don't get tiny seconds long drops, you get gigantic, energy grid collapsing catastrophic failures, that are impossible to restart, grid sync because every renewable island is isolated.
>It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability
What kind of incompetent country are you living in? I have had exactly ZERO minutes of power outages for the past 5 years. I'll be generous and include the 30 minutes of downtime for maintenance. The country wide average blackout time is 2m30s, .43 power cuts / person / year. That's 99.996% stability country wide, and that's heavily weighted down by the places that get fucked by a tree collapsing on a transformer station
The marginal cost of batteries grows more than linearly.
When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.
When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.
Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power.
If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.
So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.
Per Ember Energy reports, a cost optimal new build grid is between 90% - 97% solar/wind/battery, and between 3% to 10% gas peaker depending on how much sun/wind your locale gets.
But you can't replace the gas peaker with 3% or 10% nuclear because in essence that gas peaker is supplying 100% of the power 3% to 10% of the time.
So you'd have to build nuclear plants that can supply 100% of the power. But once you have that you might as well use nuclear power 100% of the time because the rest is irrelevant. But that's about as far from cost-optimal as you can get.
As you mentioned, using batteries for seasonal storage is madness. So to get to 100% carbon free you have at least 2 other options:
1. use a different form of seasonal storage. China is experimenting with this. In 2026 they will double the world's pumped hydro storage capacity. But doubling isn't a lot -- the world doesn't have much pumped hydro. But it does mean they might start doing it at China scale in a few years.
2. Overbuild to avoid the need for seasonal storage. Solar works on cloudy days and in the winter. It just doesn't work very well. So you need a lot of it. Which is expensive, but still a heck of a lot cheaper than batteries for seasonal storage.
In reality, most places will probably say that 95% or 99% carbon reduction is good enough and keep their backup natural gas generators around for the occasional dankelflaute.
every single one of Ember's analyses are based on historical situations. That is certainly useful, and serves to demonstrate an important point - that wind and solar make economic sense.
There is not a single analysis out there that tackles the twin problems of meeting growing electricity demand with a power source that depends on an uncertain and changing climate.
You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.
This is exactly where nuclear shines, because although it is expensive, it insulates a country against the vagaries of external forces. Whether or not that guarantee is worth the price tag is the question a lot of governments are grappling with and they mostly seem to agree that the value is indeed worth the cost.
> You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.
Yes, these are things we know with a high degree of statistical confidence. Many locations have hundreds of years of hourly weather records.
We know that Europe has never had an hour where there wasn't significant sun or significant wind somewhere on the continent any hour in the past 30+ years. The same can be said for North America, and Asia.
Yes, if you put the cost of commissioning and decommissioning the reactor onto your taxpayers instead of including it in the cost of power, nuclear can be very cheap. I didn't try and translate the German ; but that's the trick Ontario Canada uses to false claim that nuclear power is cheap.
Existing nuclear power plants can be very cheap at $30 – $40 / MWh
New nuclear power plants would be much more expensive at $180 / MWh or more, due to strict modern regulations. Even with these regulations, there is no nuclear plant that is safe against a terrorist crashing an airplane into it.
The unsolved permanent repository problem is left to future generations.
Finally, building a new nuclear power plant will easily take a decade or more.
Cool, the price of solar right now is $30-$85 / MWh, and that range is dependent on whether you got storage included in the bill or not.
And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production.
Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years.
Right now, solar and other renewables produce enough energy to meet about two thirds of our demand. Solar alone produced around 55GWh of the needed 169GWh yesterday.
Look at new year's day though: consumption was 192GWh (14% higher than yesterday) and yet solar only produced 11.4GWh and that was an unusually good day for winter.
You can't talk about the price of solar, even solar with storage, without talking about the climate it's in. Assuming your prices are for summer or a mild climate like California, you need to multiply those by around 6x to get a system that can replace nuclear for a baseline load in Switzerland.
That brings the price to $180-$510/MWh.
FWIW: I live in Switzerland and have solar panels and a battery on my house. I sell the obscene amount of excess solar I generate in summer to the grid which covers much of the cost I incur buying from the grid in winter. That power is generated by nuclear.
No, my point is that the price is inaccurate because it reflects peak/best conditions output and in Switzerland that isn't accurate. To generate the nominal output in winter, you need 6x as many panels as you would need in another climate.
Sizewell C, its £38bn current price tag is looking very very shaky - £60bn final cost wouldn't surprise me. And our electricity bills are going up again in order to help fund it. Lovely
We still have to deal with the consequences of a referendum hold not so long after che Chernobyl accident which made it illegal to build and operate nuclear power plants.
It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach.
Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how are you going to cool down your reactors? Nuclear in Italy is a non-starter.
Solar, wind, and even hydroelectricity are too dependent upon the environment to make up the entire electricity generation capacity of any major industrial country. With renewables, even with batteries, the actual production is within a range. Couple that with demand also being in a range you get uncomfortable possibilities at play. And while colder water is definitely preferable for cooling, I'd have to imagine that if the bodies of water were actually becoming too hot to cool a nuclear reactor system there'd be bigger problems than energy production.
The limit is not how cold the water needs to be for the power plant, but how hot it can be for the river ecology to not take (too much) damage. Even in Germany power plants regularly need to be shut down.
> 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to shut down their nuclear power plants partly or fully because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm (Barber, 2022; Limb, 2022; Miller and Vladkov, 2022). Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature (European Parliament and European Council, 2000; IKSR, 2022b). The resulting unplanned outages — and the efforts by nuclear operators to avoid such disruptions — highlight pressing concerns about the sustainability of nuclear energy, particularly its impact on river ecosystems in an increasingly warming world (see Fig. 1).
I'd say "Supplementary Information for Strategic deployment of
solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe
throughout the energy transition"[1] fits the bill. It lays out various paths to 100% renewables (which in Italy, like in Spain, is heavily solar) by 20250
It's technically possible to replace rotating mass with batteries using a "grid-forming inverter", which is an inverter that converts the battery DC to AC with frequency varying depending on the grid load, simulating how that rotating mass would behave ("synthetic inertia"):
This competes with the traditional giant flywheel option ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser ), which has the advantage of being a simple and proven technology, and handling brief overload better, but the disadvantage of having moving parts. It's not clear which option is currently best. Both are in current use.
And as a third answer: You actually don't need to take the flywheels of the power plants offline, when you take the rest of the power plant down. The locations for them are perfect, as the whole grid has historically been build around them.
Nuclear energy is really the energy of the future, fission still has bright days ahead of it. the startup market for SMRs is going to boom once the core challenges will have been solved, sure that we will see many ETH founders go into that world
The thing is, so far it seems to remain the energy of the future rather than the energy of the present. Somehow the solved problems and lessons learned have just a tiny bit more before everything is resolved and ready for that big nuclear deployment.
Every SMR startup is failing. The more they progress, the more they revise their costs upwards.
SMR make as much sense as space datacenters. You can gaslight investors, you can gaslight HN, you can gaslight a national parliament full of lobbyists, but you can't gaslight thermodynamics.
"What about the costs, both in terms of Capex to build them and the levelised cost of the power they produce?
Gadomski said: “We are very suspect of projections of costs from companies because they're inclined to be more favourable, as opposed to being more realistic. I think that getting a good cost estimate is something that is not possible right now because we haven't built any.”"
>I don't see evidence of even one startup failing there
"SMR developers will all want to avoid the fate of NuScale, the sector trailblazer that saw a pioneering US power deal cancelled when its estimated LCOE soared to $89/MWh from a previous $58/MWh."
Just a 100% cost mistake. Oops.
And even if they could have reached their 58$/MWh target, let's see what is the cost of competition...
"Firm wind-plus-storage costs in 2025 ranged from around $59/MWh in Inner Mongolia to $88/MWh to $94/MWh across Brazil, Germany, and Australia, with costs projected to fall to roughly $49/MWh to $75/MWh across those markets by 2030."
Oops oops.
"Construction timelines are also shortening, with projects typically built within one to two years of securing permits and grid connection."
Oops oops oops.
Renewable is running circles around nuclear. Every renewable technology is beating forecast. Every nuclear technology is breaking costs predictions and deadlines.
Not only that, but the landscape of SMRs research and development is becoming very rich [0]. I think we are going to see a renaissance of reactor technology in the coming decade, and it will be well deserved.
How are SMR's "gaslighting themodynamics"? I mean, sure, I can accept that they're not economical with current tech, but it's not a frigging' perpetuum mobile, it's feasible technology.
The value propositions of SMRs are logistics and re-use of existing infrastructure. The idea is that you could have easily transportable reactors that you can plop down in an existing coal plant, and then reuse the turbine, dynamo, etc. that are already in place.
The fact that we haven't seen more widespread use of SMRs suggests that you're right. But it's important to point out that there are cost saving opportunities that could potentially reduce the net price per watt despite worse thermodynamic efficiency.
But they'll never be small enough to be truly portable. It'll be closer to another Akademik Lomonosov [0] than a truck-sized diesel generator, which severely limits its deployment options.
The additional per-site engineering required to reuse things like turbines and dynamos is almost certainly going to kill any savings it would have. If you're already shipping a building-sized reactor, what's one more turbine? Realistically the main reusable component is the grid hookup itself - but that would incentivize building a large-scale reactor on the site.
As would reusing the turbines, for that matter: you can't exactly power the turbines of a 100MW coal plant with a 10MW reactor, and shipping ten inefficient 10MW reactors to the site just so you can reuse the existing ancient turbine isn't exactly an attractive option either.
Your small nuclear reactor is going to need almost as much engineering , plumbing, safety mechanism, personnel, maintenance, etc... as your big nuclear reactor.
> almost as much engineering , plumbing, safety mechanism, personnel, maintenance, etc
Sure, that is economics, not thermodynamics. I don't necessarily agree with the SMR manifesto, but it is conceivable that improved financing, construction, operation and oversight could make an SMR cheaper than a larger reactor.
Siting of an SMR is somewhat different (albeit related) to the SMR concept itself. You might cluster them together (like the plans for 3 RR SMR at Wylfa and 3 at Ringhals in Sweden).
The mindset that makes people stuck in time. Sorry but SMRs are potentially very cheap. Not at this point. ,but when operated on scale they will be. You need to start
I mean... you've got to have faith in your theory before testing it out. I am not having any opinion here about this, but the cycle in my mind is theory, belief, test, updated model of reality. I can imagine similar things said before we managed to have powered flight, "Pshhhsst! We'll never fly! The law of gravity forbids it."
You do need to have unreasonable goals for things once in a while. In this case, I don't have a particularly fixed stance about SMR's, but the claim that "Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical" feels a bit stronger than it is warranted. Never is a damn' looooong time. And I can easily imagine things being less efficient, but having other advantages that make them more economical. Claiming it's impossible is just stretching.
One is regulatory. At least in the US, every nuclear reactor that produces at least 100 MW needs to carry a 375 million dollar insurance policy at minimum. Under 100 MW there is an alternate schedule that ranges from 5 million to 75 million scaling based on output. But the net result is that it's still more profitable to built a single large reactor, since a 1 GW reactor is less to insure than 10 100 MW reactors. This is written into law, it would require Congress to change it.
Second is that nuclear reactor efficiency tends to improve with size. The ratio of thermal watts to electric watts tends to be better with large reactors. I'm not super well versed on the engineering tradeoffs here by my rough understanding is that waste heat scales with surface area while useful energy extraction scales with volume.
In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't seem to be too expensive. According to the NRC, insurance is per site, and additional reactors on a site don't increase the insurance nearly as much as the first. The example they give is $1.1 million annual premium for a $500 million policy, with multi-reactor sites going up to $1.5 million. They also mention property insurance ($1.06 billion policy) and they didn't discuss the premiums on that, but as it's not liability insurance it's probably cheaper.
The big costs are still going to be the cost of siting and building the reactor, the fuel, and the ongoing cost of running it. They pay off over a very long time horizon, so it's also the opportunity cost.
Just one so far and it's not particularly small compared to a more conventional reactor.
Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.
SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.
You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.
So a whole lot of sense given the entire US Navy uses them and I already have one datacenter operating up in space (small test unit that over 3 months has provided ZERO issues) and a bigger one heading up into orbit next year when it's done being made.
"but you can't gaslight thermodynamics"
No but you can certainly conflate them like you're doing right now.
The Navy uses highly enriched uranium for its reactors, something like 70-80% enrichment. This is a non starter for civilian use, on account of proliferation concerns. That, and the enrichment requirements drive up fuel costs.
What does the enrichment of uranium have to do with humans working in proximity? In both low-enriched land based plants and in marine nuclear power plants, the radioactive materials are contained in the pressure vessel and inner cooling loop.
So in other words: a non-naval SMR which doesn't use HEU is going to be substantially larger - which would make it substantially more expensive, and therefore not representative of civilian SMRs?
Who said anything about expense? Why does "bigger" equal "more expensive?" Lead, concrete, etc. are cheap on land, but volume is a precious resource on a ship. HEU isn't the only reactor fuel out there, either.
And of course, all non-naval reactors are naturally going to be larger: they aren't surrounded by a practically-infinite fluid heatsink.
Ok, this is interesting. I am skeptic about DC's in space, but I do appreciate people actually doing stuff. What is it computing up there. How did you get it up? How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary.
Hyperspectral satellite imagery - think ASTER/LANDSAT/MODIS but more modern, for surficial minerals study.
"How did you get it up?"
How else? Paid a rocket company to launch it into orbit after proving various flightworthiness tests and getting various certifications and permissions from relevant gov't authorities.
"How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary."
K-band. Don't need tons of power, just a good LoS from ground on your target. And yea, not Geostat, I'm in LEO.
Right, so a regular satellite. That's indeed as relevant to the multi-100kW-scale "space datacenter" idiots like Musk are proposing as naval SMRs are to commercial power plants.
All satellites are regular satellites, there is literally nothing special about anything in orbit outside of what it carries - it's still just a falling body in space.
100kw is literally nothing to generate in space. At typical silicon efficiencies that's football field in size, and about 70% that if you jump to more expensive multi-junction cells. I can make a folding panel the size of a compact car that'd unfurl out to cover that. That's maybe 4 hours in NX just retooling my current design. The only limitation is the capabilities of the launch vehicle.
I've already got one small (single 4U) datacenter in orbit. It works. It works GREAT. It can scale up to constellation quantity.
And I don't have to waste any water for cooling or constantly pollute the air for power generation or throw extra waste heat into our atmosphere, as a side bonus.
It makes plenty of sense to those with the education. What's hilarious is I'm doing all this on a GED.
you are in this thread a lot, so i am guessing you must be very familiar with the industry. maybe you can help me understand:
is the wikipedia on SMRs incorrect/lying when they say that there are commercially operating SMRs since 2020?
and how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.
>how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
Or solar.
And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.
>Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics.
true, you said "gaslight thermodynamics", which i have no idea what that means, so i took a guess at what you were implying.
>never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
is efficiency really the only metric to be considered? i feel like available space, availability of alternatives, time to complete construction, etc. are worthwhile to consider.
>And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments worldwide considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania. but i am not an expert. you are talking like you are one, which is why i am asking questions.
>i feel like available space, time to complete construction
All of these favor again bigger reactors.
>considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania.
All of the Swiss energy companies are asking to be bailed out in advance of the investment in nuclear.
Sweden recently did the same: in order for companies to agree to make new reactors, the government had to promise them a price floor for the electricity they produce. The price floor suggested is more than twice the current price on the spot market. That means that, for the lifetime of those reactors, Swedish taxpayers will be subsidizing production of nuclear power. I thought the idea was that they would be profitable? What happened to the political right’s love of the free market? When politicians go fixing prices with this kind of ”advance bailout”, it just makes it look like they are trying to get a nice retirement job in the nuclear power sector…
You’re right, the total system costs include a lot of things, including disposal of spent fuel. Which is apparently so expensive, nuclear can’t compete with renewables fairly.
That's not true. Disposal of spent fuel was always included in the price of electricity (for example in Germany, but many/most others as well) and is negligible in cost.
Finland just built a spent-fuel repository for ~ € 1 billion. For the entire country. Just the single EPR at Olkiluoto 3 will produce electricity worth €100 billion over its lifetime if you assume a price of 10 cents/kWh.
So at 10 cents, it would be 1% of the price of electricity if Olkiluoto 3 had to finance the whole thing by itself.
What part isn’t true? That disposal of fuel is part of the total systems cost?
Or that the new nuclear can’t compete without subsidies? I think both are evident truths.
The aforementioned subsidies aren't just for the electricity it produces, it is also for the electricity it could produce. The nuclear plant has a right to sell electricity to the grid at a certain price. Market price too low? The government pays the difference. No demand? The government buys the unused production capacity.
In practice this means that during periods of excess you are shutting down dirt-cheap solar and wind just so you can run a heavily-subsidized nuclear power plant. Nuclear doesn't pick up the gaps left by solar and wind, solar and wind pick up the gaps left by nuclear!
There are two ways of achieving economies of scale: making things bigger or making more of them.
For small quantities, the former is usually more effective -- making things bigger lets you make fewer of them, reducing costs.
For large quantities, a factory can enable insane economies of scale.
SMR proponents are talking about building dozens of reactors. That fits very firmly in the "small quantity" column where economies of scale almost always favor building things bigger.
I think the promise of SMR is that the 1/5th reactor can be built in 1/2 the time. And you build five of them in parallell. And you have your power sources gradually online over about the same time as one ”big bang” build would take.
I don’t think it’s going to work out that way, but that’s how it’s being sold.
Even like that, it is not clear-cut.
1/5 in 1/2 the time is still 2.5 shorter per worker, and building in parallel require multiplying expert builders, which is not easy (as it takes time to acquire the expertise and you don't want to learn a trade to build one project and have nothing to do next).
But, yes, I get it is how it is sold. Just that even sold like that, people with common sense should say "wait a minute, that's obviously not that simple".
Just a guess (I'm not the previous user), but I guess you need to look at the space _per GWh_?
If a big nuclear reactor takes 10x more space but has 20x more capacity, then it means not having much space favors the big nuclear reactor rather than building 10 small ones that will take twice more space.
its probably my fault for not making myself clear. i mean when the available space is constrained to a specific amount of space that cannot be exceeded.
just picking random numbers:
i have 1 square mile available. a big reactor takes 4 square miles. i cannot fit a big reactor, despite the bigger reactor being more efficient.
well, I don't think that there is a real problem of "1 square mile is available but not 4 square miles" (this is a different sentence than "there is not enough space"). Especially as small reactor also need to be placed very specifically. So even then, it is still possible that the advantage is for big nuclear plant, as they are still more compact per GWh.
>"1 square mile is available but not 4 square miles" (this is a different sentence than "there is not enough space").
how are these different? one is an example, one is general, but they communicate the exact same point. if you have something that requires 4 sq. miles, you cannot fit it into a place that is 1 sq. mile in size because there is not enough space to fit it.
>as they are still more compact per GWh.
i am really struggling here... if i cannot fit something large, whether the large thing is "more compact per GWh" does not matter. i only have so much physical space to work with. if its too big, its too big.
for a more easily visualized example, you cannot fit a reactor from three mile island into a submarine. efficiency doesnt come into the equation, because physical space constraints get in the way first.
Well, if you have 1000 places of 1 square mile and 0 space of 4 square miles, the available space is 1000 square miles.
If you have 100 places of 4 square miles, the available space is 400 square miles.
You cannot say that the first sentence means the same thing that the second sentence, and you cannot say that "there is not enough space" is only something you can say in the first-sentence situation and not in the second-sentence situation.
Maybe what you meant to say is not "there is not enough space", but "there is plenty of small space but not a lot of large space" (which I doubt is true in the real world: space occupancy is usually regrouped in dense areas, leaving non-dense areas).
> if i cannot fit something large ... i only have so much physical space to work with
First, the idea that, for a domestic power plant, you only have limited space, seems very unrealistic. The real world is not a submarine or a 7/11: you want your power plant at the periphery of cities, not squeezed between 2 buildings in the middle. There is only disadvantage of doing so: you cannot distribute high power lines from the middle of the city safely, you probably need facilities to deal with the fuel, probably need water for cooling, probably need a security perimeter as you have around any typical factory, the cost of the square meter is more expensive, ...
But secondly, you need the power plant to produce some power. If your country needs X GWh, and you need either 1 large power plant of 4 square miles or 10 SMR of 1 square mile and you just have few places where you can put a power plant, the "the unit itself is more compact" does not matter . I only have so much physical space to work with. If the surface needed to get X GWh using SMR is too big, it's too big.
> you cannot fit a reactor from three mile island into a submarine
Yep. Similarly, you cannot fit a SMR in a bicycle. But how is that relevant? In real life, domestic power plant do not have the constraints of being in thigh places (on the opposite, it is better for a power plant to be in regions that also happen to not have thigh places).
>Maybe what you meant to say is not "there is not enough space", but "there is plenty of small space but not a lot of large space"
my bad, i forgot i was on HN where this type of pedantry is the national sport. it sure sucks any tiny little bit of enjoyment one might get out of having a conversation. it's evident from the rest of your comment you knew exactly what i meant.
>First, the idea that, for a domestic power plant, you only have limited space, seems very unrealistic [...] But how is that relevant? In real life, domestic power plant do not have the constraints of being in thigh places
part of the point of SMRs is to be able to have them in space-constrained places where you otherwise cannot build a large facility. that's the appeal! google and meta aren't looking at them so they can power san fransisco or the country with multiple GW. they want to power a datacenter. i can think of other examples of space-constrained places where an SMR is appealing and a traditional facility is impossible, but you've managed to kill any interest i had in having a conversation.
I think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be.
Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to deploy and cost will be significantly reduced.
We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs and have been for a very long time. Off the top of my head ship power has been exported to local areas for disaster relief
Solar is absolutely fantastic and your average person should not be hawking at solar for your home to offset your power bill. The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
I don't think the likes of Westinghouse, Siemens, Rolls Royce and GE are duped. They are trying to solve a very hard problem!
This is such a silly argument. Battery and solar technologies are progressing regardless of people building nuclear. It's simply not the case that we can stop investing in nuclear and use that money to accelerate battery/solar.
This isn't a silly argument, this is a problem of allocation of resources.
We could have had mass solar deployment since the 70s. We chose not to, and allocate the money elsewhere. Nuclear will take away billions in public money, put it into the hands of nuclear industries, to get electricity at twice the going rate, maybe, in twenty years. A white elephant and a waste of effort.
All the R&D and industrial capacity building we have done since the 70s could have been accelerated if we had invested in it as much as we invested in nuclear, or oil, or gas, or coal. With public money.
> For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop
This is a horrible argument. Yeah, let’s not spend money improving technology. We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.
>We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.
We didn't for decades. The photoelectric effect is known since the XIXth century. Solar panel research could have had far more money behind it since the 70s and the first oil crisis. It was a choice not to. And the current US and Swiss governments are choosing to prop up some industries -coal, nuclear- at the expense of others, with public money that don't grow on trees.
I think you have a misunderstanding of economies of scale.
There are two ways of achieving economies of scale:
1. make things bigger
2. make more of them
Making things bigger generally is more effective when n is small. You need fewer sites, fewer approvals, each of the steps in the process is done fewer times.
When n is large, you can build and optimize a factory for them and achieve economies of scale that way.
Nuclear plants got large to take advantage of economies of scale because n is small. Nobody's building millions or even thousands of SMR's.
There's no measure by which nuclear energy is the "energy of the future". It's too complex, too expensive and it doesn't scale. SMRs are proving to be a fever dream with ever rising costs and the number of nuclear reactors in operation is decreasing year by year and both Wind and PV are now each producing more electricity than nuclear.
Shutting down nuclear power plants prematurely was very foolish (looking at you Germany). But other than that, it’s true.
When you boil the issue down to the fundamental facts, our challenge is simply: add as much power production as fast as possible. We have no other hope to tackle the issue but to optimise for this. Nuclear is a dangerous distraction. Solar+wind is now growing faster than nuclear ever did at its peak and they’re showing no signs of slowing down. It’s the only way to get more power fast enough.
We are building power for a future where we cut all CO2 emissions. Not just those from electricity. Our second biggest priority (well third after EVs, but I’m not too worried about EVs right now, it’s a self sustaining transition) is to bring down the capital costs of hydrogen plants. That’s the key to bringing down CO2 emissions in several sectors of industry. This pairs perfectly with variable power. We’ve already seen green ammonia fertiliser plants paired with renewables and now with the Iran crisis there will be higher pressure to build more of them to be self sustained. This way also lets us distribute production which is nice to be less vulnerable in case of war.
Once green hydrogen production has reached critical mass, and growth of renewables have pushed gas power plants into more of a backup role, with low fuel consumption, they will naturally switch to hydrogen. Many of the newer ones are already ready for hydrogen and others have an upgrade path. Perhaps hydrogen consuming industry will co-locate with gas power plants to share production/storage infrastructure. This path has very low capital costs besides the ones we anyway need to make the hydrogen necessary to decarbonise industry. The gas power plants are already built in most countries that will need them.
That's a foolish thing to say because building enough nuclear, even with the fairy tale prices and times people make up, would take soooo much longer and cost sooo much more than green energy.
Even more importantly, it's very hard to compromise and downscale a project when the inevitable fossil fuel lobbyists vote against you. It's a lot easier to half a solar park project than a nuclear project.
I'm amazed that the main debate on how clean or dangerous nuclear energy is still circles around the plants themselves and storage of spent energy.
I believe that glaring oversight here is that enriched nuclear fuel doesn't grow on trees. Somehow no one ever seems to talk about how efficient and clean the mining of these rare earths is and in which countries that happens.
Nuclear being a clean energy is a myth as far as I know. Actually relevant information would be how the necessary mining for uranium etc. compares to coal. I suspect it is only slightly better
Nuclear lifecycle calculations include mining. The human cost is terrible, but a separate problem (we could theoretically have ethical mining practices that don't produce more CO2).
Keep in mind that the energy density of nuclear fuel is astronomically higher than that of coal, so even if the processes were equivalently wasteful (and I'm fairly certain they are not) coal would still cause significantly more damage. The process also differ significantly:
Uranium is often pumped out of the ground after being chemically extracted.
Coal is almost always carted out after being blasted.
Look into things like lithium mining (for batteries; yes, I am aware that other options exist, but lithium is still a very common one). That one is straight up nasty.
To add to what the other comment said, you have to take into account a reactor is normally refueled every 18-24 months. A coal plant, for example, takes in trains of coal a day.
Like the F-35 fighter jet, this is just another victory for lobbyists in the industry who will be able to siphon public money into over-budget, deadline busting white whale projects that will never recoup its costs.
Especially nuclear. It is now economically non-viable.
Civil engineering, power equipment (ABB is a big firm in Switzerland), Energy companies (the market is Switzerland is a constellation of local monopolies, who have already announced they won't invest their own huge money reserves in nuclear, it will have to be all public money and garanties), etc.
Civil engineering and power equipment companies also profit from other plants. In fact, there are specialized power companies for wind and solar.
If private energy companies won't invest, then either don't invest public funding, or invest but with focus on developing long-term technologies. After all, the primary reason for nuclear being uneconomic today is lack of investment. If solar and wind can be made profitable, I don't see how nuclear is any different.
Still, the positive note of this is the ban lift, not whether new reactor will actually be built.
Can't speak for all countries, but lobbying for green energy in the USA, according to PACs, is higher than nuclear. I don't think Switzerland is different.
> If solar and wind can be made profitable, I don't see how nuclear is any different.
Nuclear is fundamentally way more complicated than wind and especially solar. Nuclear is 10s of kilometers of high pressure piping, 1000s of tons of concrete, exotic pressure welding. Solar on the other hand is brain dead simple and amenable to mass production in a way that nuclear can never be. As such, nuclear will never see the same scale of cost reductions.
It it turns out like the F-35 it would be amazing. F-35 is much better and safer than what came before and more important CHEAPER per unit than previous generations.
Nuclear is about the next 50+ years. The economy will explode long before that. Nuclear plants are a way to produce energy in a world without cheap oil. That changes the economical considerations a lot.
The pro-nuclear propaganda in this discussion reminds me of the tobacco companies that claimed smoking was harmless, or of Monsanto, which insisted that its pesticides were safe, and so on. It is always the same pattern: obvious facts are denied, doubts are exaggerated, legitimate concerns are downplayed, and blatant lies are spread. I wonder how many undercover lobbyists for the nuclear industry are active here on HN.
Switzerland, Norway and Austria are probably the country that needs nuclear the less, but anything to start the discussion in other European countries is good.
Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.
Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart.
50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission.
Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise.
To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potential losses of hydro power as glaciers melt, nuclear + solar is the only real path for switzerland.
Why hasn't Switzerland deployed solar/wind? That seems like a pretty big miss in general. The Swiss grid has almost no wind which is strange for such a mountainous nation. And solar is also quite low which is also strange given how much empty land exists in Switzerland along with it's relatively low latitude.
Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:
The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.
People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
It's not a real problem. If it were actually a problem you should be able to walk under a wind turbine and find a bunch of dead birds/bats. The reality is you might find 1 or 2, but not enough to actually observe any sort of impact on the population. Outdoor cats are a far bigger menace to birds and bats.
So yeah, you build a ton of those turbines. Because by the time you can deploy 1 1GW plant (10 to 20 years) you can install 10 or 20 times that much power generation via wind. By the time the nuclear plant is operational, you can be talking about refurbishing some of the early installed turbines.
A nuclear plant requires fuel sourcing, waste management, engineering and planning, constant management and monitoring, security, and a fairly large construction footprint for the likes of the cooling towers.
Wind requires someone to go grease the gears once a year.
> If it were actually a problem you should be able to walk under a wind turbine and find a bunch of dead birds/bats.
That's not how it works, but thanks for not thinking about it for more than a few seconds. It is documented, you can read about that. In Germany, tens of thousands of bats are killed by wind turbines every year. For birds, they do have camera systems that detect bird migrations and stop the turbines.
So yeah, it is very much a real problem, you just have to read about it.
> Wind requires someone to go grease the gears once a year.
So it's not only the birds problem: you don't know how wind turbines are maintained either!
They do and it's a problem, but it's a minor issue compared to, say, cars or rat poison. Both kill lots of birds, but somehow when it's wind turbines people suddenly care about the birds. See also: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/technology-articles/...
People that repeat these lies are very incurious. It's incredible how quickly and easily this lie can be debunked yet it still comes up at the same time wind does. It's almost as bad as the "wind turbines cause cancer" BS. Fortunately people usually have enough common sense to see how ridiculous that one is. But not always.
> Fortunately people usually have enough common sense to see how ridiculous that one is
The problem is actually that people don't have enough attention to actually read about it. People are stuck in "I am a smart adult, I don't have to think, whatever I believe is right".
Those are actual problems and wind turbines actually deploy mitigations for them. Possible for birds, not for bats. Many endangered bats are killed as a result.
Sure, as compared to not giving a shit about the living condition of, say, billions of chickens, it may sound like it doesn't matter. But not everybody wants to live on a lifeless planet surrounded by the worst species ever (I mean humans).
> It's almost as bad as the "wind turbines cause cancer" BS.
If you genuinely believe it is, then you vastly overestimate your common sense.
Are you aware that tens of thousands of endangered bats are killed every year just in Germany (by wind turbines)? It is an actual problem for that species.
Are you aware that wind turbines have detection systems for bird migrations and stop to avoid killing too many birds? If it was not an "actual problem", why would they spend money in actual solutions?
As you are Swiss, where would you get the uranium from? I expect that the Swiss Alps have some mine, especially in the south west (I didn't check) but is that enough? You might end up swapping a dependency from foreign providers of oil and gas with a dependency from foreign providers of uranium.
to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.
Like I said in another comment: nuclear only makes sense if you build it at scale, because you need very specific skills and knowledge that is hard to get to build it securely, on time and cheap. Ideally you would have one company/conglomerate that would get one plant off the ground per year across the EU, but currently that isn't possible.
I will probably vote in favor of nuclear, but you have to admit that us not having any uranium and having huge solar and pumped hydro potential up in the alps makes Switzerland pretty bad match for nuclear.
...You guys have mountains everywhere, which means dirt cheap hydro energy storage for solar and wind?
I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.
I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.
I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.
I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....
I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.
Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale
Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.
We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)
Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.
Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule.
The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).
Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.
Almost the latter - I can almost live without pulling anything from the grid. The huge caveat being that my system is way oversized for a normal house, since my building is multi-use (including commercial tenants who obviously only need power during the day). I am definitely injecting more during the summer though, of course.
Oh wow, I didn't realize that! That's crazy, basically everyone that borders them are EU members. I was also under the impression (but haven't checked) that it was pretty easy to cross the swiss border both into and out of the EU.
> I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.
Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?
Build a solar plant in the Sahara desert and ship the energy long range,
Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that.
I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years.
In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears.
I think we (as in Switzerland) are preparing for a future in which there is not much snow melt/precipitations to fuel hydro production year round.
In fact, if the AMOC weakens/stops then there will be a drastic drop in precipitation across Europe and funnily enough maybe the temperature drop so much that the little snow there will be won't melt in big enough quantities.
Of course this is just a ban lift, meaning that there are no concrete plans to build one or more, but if there is a need to move "fast" (nuclear is not, I know) at least there is one less hurdle. I sincerily hope we invest in other technologies, especially now that Sodium batteries seem on their way to solve grid level storage, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad move per se.
It is no coincidence that countries which need it least can unban it. Deindustrialization activists will focus their efforts on countries where the ban matters.
Small land area, mountainous, northerly latitude… it’s not that wind and solar won’t work, but I don’t think you can automatically compare costs to giga-scale solar farms in spacious and sparsely populated equatorial countries. Even if more expensive, nuclear will have a niche, and it’s madness to rule it out.
Yes, it may be more of a symbolic gesture for Switzerland's own needs but it's still good to correct the historical error of prohibiting a broad range of potentially viable approaches from ever being considered.
- We have a lot of hydro, that are very cheap to produces and for some of the power plants we fill up water by using solar and wind when that is very cheap and generate power back when it's demand for it (meaning selling it expensive)
-Norway export more then we are importing. But that could shift in the coming years.
-Nuclear power are expensive, so with the current prices it do not make sense to have nuclear in Norway. Thought that could change (see point 2)
- not sure what you mean by "little land usable", you can absolutely be correct. in terms of size we are bigger then Germany. But I'm not sure how much usable land there is vs other countries. We do not have that big population but it's spread out and no one wants a wind park in their neighborhood
Technically yes, but also no. The European electricity market have way, way to many rules and caveat to draw any conclusion, especially France with ARENH and other distortions.
It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.
I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.
France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.
Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.
You should take note that you’re uninformed or intentionally spreading false information and misrepresenting reality.
Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant.
It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability to think beyond a 4 year horizon or not.
Everybody knows about the upfront cost, but the size and long tail of costs after the plant has been built, or when unforeseen events occur, is largely hidden from all financial statements. So much so that people actually believe that nuclear power is cheap, when it's not.
But the truth surfaces of course - you can look at the financials of EDF in France (nationalized in 2022 with 60+ bn euros in debt), KEPCO in Korea (145 bn in debt), or incidents like Asse II in Germany, Sellafield in the UK, Rancho Seco in the US.
Billions of taxpayer money covering costs caused by the nuclear industry, and not appearing anywhere in any statement of estimates of nuclear power costs. Large, double-digit plant operators basically or literally bankrupt.
This to me is the bottom line. If nuclear power was cheap and profitable, people would be in line to build them as soon as they get approval! Instead, they want money.
The truth is that the industry sees no way to profitability here, except when they get access to current and future taxpayer money. This has always been the case for nuclear power and still is.
This argument cherrypicks legacy cleanup sites and distressed utility balance sheets, then treats them as proof that nuclear electricity is inherently uneconomic.
The real issue is narrower: new nuclear is capital intensive and hard to finance without long term revenue guarantees, while old waste sites can impose large public cleanup costs.
Decommissioning and waste are included in serious cost models and regulatory funding requirements, existing nuclear life extensions can be among the cheapest firm low carbon power sources, and KEPCO/EDF’s debts reflect tariff policy, fuel shocks, outages, state interventions, and investment cycles. Not simply “nuclear power is unprofitable.”
The honest conclusion is that nuclear needs strong regulation and disciplined project delivery, not that nuclear is categorically fake-cheap.
Aka what I said earlier: you need the ability for strategic long term thinking and planning and execution.
There's no false information there. Nuclear is complex and so expensive that despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel. It's also slow, with building times up to more than a decade.
France tried it. Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives, makes about €3 billion per year in profits and has to invest about €150 billion in new reactors, upgrades, refits and infrastructure.
It always amuses me when nuclear power is the one area where the left becomes Very Concerned about excessive government spending.
despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel
Except for France which came up with the clever strategy of "not banning it", but that was apparently a mistake and they should have just used fossil fuels?
Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives
€50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
I'm not actually that concerned about excessive government spending. I just don't like wasteful spending, and that's what nuclear is.
Wind and PV build up much faster, are orders of magnitudes less complex and provide cheaper electricity.
There is just no reason to build nuclear.
> €50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all.
I like the idea that fossil fuel should take the hit from the impact on the environment, but don't see why nuclear should at the same time get a free pass for Chernobyl and Fukushima. Surely nuclear needs to take the hit from those as well in order to make the comparison apples-to-apples?
It hasn't made a significant contribution because of panic after the various accidents and the "environmentalists" deciding to advocate against it when it was the clearest path to accomplishing their stated goals.
Energy security is something I expect the government to invest my tax dollars in especially energy generation that is resilient to international politics and reduced carbon emissions.
Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
> Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
It is reasonable to have a many-year strategic reserve of uranium for what you need. A modern reactor is going to go through 20 tonnes of enriched fuel a year and they refuel every 18-24 months. 5-10 years of security and stability is much, much better than oil and gas.
> The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
There isn't enough room in my house for anymore people but there's enough room for a new couch. How can these things both be true? Probably because the two have entirely different requirements and "there isn't room" is shorthand for many, many things.
Not saying they're right, just that this is a bad counter argument, especially since the alternatives all have the same problem.
> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
Yes, you need water capacity for cooling, about 2x as much as a gas plant for the same output. Definitely a trade-off. I don't know or care enough about Swiss water access to argue here.
If you don't know that nuclear plants are routinely shut down in the heat of summer because the cooling water is too hot, you should learn more before opining on the topic.
Slight hyperbole, but nuclear reactors in Switzerland and France shut down more and more often because the water needed to cool them down is already too hot:
> It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.
Note though that those limits exist just like the emission limits for WiFi: it was a sane number when it was decided. It's not clear at all that raising the temperature a little more will "kill all life in the rivers". It would probably deserve some research.
No, it isn't a made-up number. We know pretty well when do fishes die en masse, as we have seen it in periods of extreme heat before. The research has been done and is how the limits have been defined.
The estimated levelized cost of electricity changes dramatically with financing cost: from roughly the low-$100s/MWh under cheap capital to well above $200/MWh under high capital-cost assumptions. But wasn't that the case for wind and solar too?
For solar I believe it's profitable without subsidies in most parts of the world by now. It's the fastest growing power source by far worldwide and it wouldn't be if it had to be financed by subsidies.
I don't know enough about wind to say either way about that.
But both wind and solar have the benefit of being able to just abandon the plants if they turn out to lose money. Which you of course cannot do with a nuclear plant.
Rancho Seco in the US has had a taxpayer financed security crew for 36 years without producing any electricity. That costs eats away at the profits (if any) generated by the plant when it was operational, but nobody keeps track of that.
The costs are not relevant to the nuclear operator and are not retroactively counted as costs for the electricity, since the government pays.
But they pay with our money. And our children's money. And their children's money.
Well, wind and solar were absolutely subsidy-driven. The difference is that after subsidies, they became cheap and modular, and I hope nuclear becoming modular and cheaper as well.
Rancho Seco.... what an insane story. Didn't know about that. So if your have a bad nuclear project, people are basically stuck with it, unlike replacing solar panels or wind turbines.
I think it's possible that the actual construction of nuclear power plants could become cheap if they were mass produced, but I don't think that's the real problem.
The inherent long-lasting dangers of the fuel and waste are the real cost, and we are still in the first few percent of years where we have to pay for those. In 100 years, the french might be on synthesized fuels from solar and there will be a multibillion budget post dealing with the old nuclear plants that haven't generated anything for years.
Many plants are in the "downpayment of the construction costs" phase and current calculations are made on the idea that once paid for, nuclear is cheap. But that's not true.
There are costs for every nuclear plant that will come due 50-70-100+ years down the line and they are very rarely considered.
The "stuck with it" aspect is what bugs me the most. Once a few politicians today decide to get rich from building nuclear, many, many generations of people are robbed from the ability to make any decision on the matter afterwards. They get stuck with it.
Not opposed to defence in principle. But Switzerland's army has proven, repeatedly these last few years, that they are incompetent. From understanding a multi-billions contract before signing it to selecting relevant technology (drones that fundamentally cannot fly in a civilian airspace, etc).
Not only incompetent: the way the F35 was handled really looks like corruption from the outside. And for some reason the head of the defence ministry AND the head of the army left not so long after that...
Everyone here is arguing about solar vs nuclear like it's an either-or thing. everyone in the energy industry (who's not biased) knows that a healthy mix of different fuel types depending on various factors is the way to go.
All countries should also invest in nuclear submarines, not just for security, but also as a source of power.
Imagine having ports all around the country where a sub can plug in and provide power. Instead of building massive ports to ship stored energy (coal, oil, gas) from somewhere else in the world, its much easier to just have a plug in port and access nuclear energy.
All countries have their own fleet, but can also tap into a global fleet. There is a small problem with clean energy, long term seasonal storage and disruptive events. Germans have a word for it. Dunkelflaute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
With EV batteries as an enormous reservoir of energy storage (dump all excess production when electricity is priced negative; use the EV batteries instead of peaker plants) and nuclear subs, the transition to clean energy can be complete.
Well, current nuclear subs are, roughly, in the order of 200MW thermal and 30MW electric. That's good for moving a submarine but pretty low for a city. There's already a wind turbine (DEC 26MW) capable of 36MW, which is crazy.
Switzerland seems like a country where they wouldn't have trouble hiring enough very responsible serious people capable of running nuclear plants. Aside from being able to acquire fuel is there any reason they are not near 100% nuclear?
They built their existing nuclear plant in order to hide their nuclear weapons program. So the point really wasn’t energy generation. Nuclear weapons is the main reason countries build nuclear power.
There are people which want the best we can do (eg, no Ng, coal, etc) in electricity generation. Sensible reductions, that sort of thing. Then there are those that just want no electricity to be used at all, ever, period.
They'll complain about hydroelectric(carbon in cement production), about things which can happen with nuclear(accidents), about birds in windmills, about the production methods of making solar panels, and so on. To such people, doing anything is bad for the environment, so therefore, every type of power generation is bad.
To listen to such people is, of course, madness, as is listening to all extremists. We should simply ignore them completely, but of course the news exists, fake protestors exist which are paid, and so on and so forth.
Lots of people in this thread look at this as a pro/anti-nuclear debate. But few people consider the fact that the first election from the said nuclear plant will be produced 25 years from now in the very best case. Plus, nuclear plants have a huge cooling problem during summertime.
Combined with Italy's change of heart, hopefully approved and put into law before July 2026, this is going to mark the revival of nuclear energy in Europe. Here for it
that's just lifting the ban and is pure virtue signaling. none of the electricity producers in switzerland actually want build nuclear power plants, because they are way too expensive.
This is at best the concept of a vibe shift. Even if they started sprinting now, it would be 20 years before anyone would see the results of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear is so much more expensive than solar and wind that building one is certain to raise electricity prices.
Whether people like it or not, nuclear power is the path forward for the foreseeable future; at least until nuclear fusion becomes a reality. With incoming AI/automation, ya’ll need all the power ya can get.
With basically almost nothing coming online for decades and the handful of projects that do come online being late, hundreds of percent over budget, and delivering only a relatively tiny amount of power (relative to the equivalent of hundreds of new reactors worth of solar/wind/battery every year), it's hard to maintain that nuclear has any role whatsoever to play. No amount of magical thinking is going to change that any time soon.
The AI revolution will be mostly over by the time any substantial amount of new reactors come online. Whatever power they'll use, it will mostly not be nuclear. It's a lot of gas right now that will likely shift to a mix of much cheaper solar and wind. Nuclear powered AI will be a rounding error.
Maybe somebody will figure out how to do new nuclear plants in under a decade (good luck!). That would be spectacularly fast. But if it's not planned and approved right now (and very little is), we're basically talking the 1940's for any significant new capacity to come online. That would still be a tiny fraction of the yearly growth in renewables. That probably will accumulate to about three orders of magnitude more power generation in the time until then. With hundreds of GW added per year, we are talking at least a few TW of generation cumulatively.
"Decades" is an extreme POV. Big tech companies are actively investing into nuclear power. Unlike those green renewables you described, nuclear runs almost nonstop. At least 90%+ of the time! Let's not forget about China, who can do it faster and cheaper compared to western standards.
Obviously short term we'll be forced to use gas, renewables, etc. But saying nuclear will be irrelevant is wrong.. Reliable 24/7 clean power without the need for massive amounts of batteries or land is ideal.
Yeah what the hell, I want tiny and small nuke-batteries so we can finally get cars and phones that doesn't need charging anymore, would solve a lot of problems and surely won't introduce any new ones.
What you really need is 24/7 power supply, it might become a luxury to have uninterrupted electricity exactly as it is a luxury to have enough of fresh water.
When you're in one place, you'll just have a battery+solar I bet, but for when on the go, maybe for days, having a tiny nuclear battery that lasts N years would be great.
It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing:
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
- nuclear waste is not a problem
- nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
- we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
There really is no excuse for people to be misinformed. If you actually want to understand this issue start here, but there are many other sources out there that can also help:
That’s a strange way of wording “Germany burns more coal today than they would be if they hadn’t replaced their nuclear power plants with coal power plants”. Jumbling up the word order doesn’t make Germany replacing their nuclear plants with coal plants a good thing.
What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery.
If Germany eventually got more renewables, great. That does not retroactively mean that they didn’t replace nuclear with coal. That’s just replacing nuclear with coal and then doing something else afterward.
It’s like if someone left their first wife and got married to someone else, then did that a second time, you wouldn’t say that, based on who they’re married to today, they left their first wife for their third. That intermediate step happened.
> What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery.
Still waiting for examples of countries that did that.
Also, that's not replacing nuclear with coal. Plants age out and are replaced even if one is not replacing one kind with the other. We retire pickup trucks and build sports cars; that doesn't mean sports cars are replacing pickup trucks.
The reason people are not aware of it is because it's utter tripe.
In the US, coal generation has been falling for twenty years because it's more expensive than wind and solar. Same reason nuclear is being phased out - grid operators can get power cheaper via wind, solar, import/export, and battery storage.
- nuclear waste, after a period of the order of ~10e2/3 years is only dangerous if ingested. So it's as dangerous as any other poisonous substance after that point. There is no need for radiation shielding from that point.
- nuclear waste is very dense and so physical surface storage is cheap, and a solved problem (see: dry storage casks). We can fix leaks if/when they happen. Waste is concentrated
- current nuclear power stations (light water reactors) burn about 3% of their fuel leaving 97% unused in waste. There are nuclear power solutions which would burn most of the fuel (leaving very little for waste). So if we developed these technologies (see molton salt reactors being one of them) then nuclear waste would no longer be called "waste" as it would suddently become an extremely valuable feedstock for use in reactors.
- related to the prior point: why is it that we think we will not find a use for this very valuable and rare reasource in the future. We should think of nuclear "waste" storage as "rare element storage" which will be very useful under some states of the world. We just don't know how yet.
- as with any technology it should also be compared to the alternative when considering it's fitness: waste from the alternatives is far worse
100-1000 years order of magnitude. I can't remember exactly, but it's well within our ability to engineer and manage, rather than the signs that try to answer the "how do we communicate danger to later species" types of timelines
In 2015-2016 I did some mechanical engineering work at BWXT, designing nuclear waste containers for the Bruce Power CANDU reactor refurbishment program.
I learned that the spent fuel storage is pretty trivial for a few reasons:
1. The amount of fuel waste produced by a reactor is volumetrically tiny. So it's not too expensive to just have a relatively small guarded yard of sealed storage casks next to the reactor, where the fuel can sit and decay until safe for offsite disposal (typically around 60 years).
2. Safe waste storage containers are relatively easy to make. Most containers only need to be a thick stainless steel inner liner and a stainless steel outer liner filled with a special mixture of concrete. The nuclear waste is dropped in, the lid is bolted shut, then the container can be safely left in a guarded open yard for >100 years. They are safe by virtue of just having ridiculously thick welded stainless steel walls. We designed them to fall off a train going over a bridge, fall 300ft onto solid rock, and not break.
3. Reactor technology keeps getting better at extracting more energy from fuel. So what was "waste" in a past decade, can be put back into a reactor that is better at pulling energy out of the fuel. For this reason, there hasn't actually been much actual "fuel waste" in the history of the nuclear industry. It's all just being stored for future use by better reactors.
For the parts of the plant that cannot be put into landfill then storage like any other waste. Given how long they last, and how much energy they output, the waste is still very low per unit energy. Try this:
Why would you decommission them after all that investment instead of re-fitting? What would the ecological consequences would be if you demolished the Hoover Dam? Some things just have to be built to last as long as they physically can.
They could do what the fossil fuel industry does and just disperse it into the atmosphere until it disappears behind background radiation.
Realistically deep geologic storage is absolutely fine, and even if it's not happening now, all of the waste can be safely stored above ground for hundreds of years.
After the Fukushima disaster, radioactivity was detected in the seawater off the west cost of America. This, of course, threw people into a panic, despite being detectable only with very sensitive equipment and was not a danger to anyone or anything.
To be more specific, you would not have been able to detect Fukushima waste based on radioactivity, as the radioactivity would not have been detectable above the normal background radiation.
They could only identify the waste by it's distinct radiological profile. Otherwise it was just another source amongst millions of ionizing radiation that bathes us every day.
Basically, nuclear waste from power generation is a much smaller problem than people assume it to be, the solutions for managing it are already in place, and there have been few/if any accidents that have ever caused contamination from waste disposal.
Also I'm not an industry shill, but orphan sources from industrial/medical radiography have killed and injured more people than nuclear plants and their waste. Yet there's hardly the amount of opposition to those systems that you see for nuclear power, despite nuclear power having a far more significant impact on the healthiness and stability of global populations if we stopped banning it.
I feel the same frustration but for the opposite reason. I am entirely confident you must be misinformed, not me.
I suggest you read actual bookkeeping statements from nuclear operators, national budget items, historical records about radiation incidents, nuclear deposits, agreement texts and the like, instead of reading books that can only be true if they adhere to the information in such sources.
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
It it is inherent to nuclear power, because you really need to spend the money and effort to keep it safe. It's very dangerous.
Here is where people usually say "but stats show it's killed fewer people per GWh generated than other sources". But that's not relevant at all. Nuclear power is dangerous entirely independently of that statistic. The reason so few have died is precisely that we spend all that money keeping it safe!
A gun is dangerous even before you shoot someone with it. It's not safe because nobody has shot it yet.
Science will tell you in detail what would happen if radioactive waste was spread in a populated area. There is so much information, please read up on it. So far it hasn't happened. Even Chernobyl was very far from a worst-case scenario.
- nuclear waste is not a problem
Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily.
The US gov spends millions per year guarding abandoned nuclear waste. They don't do it for no reason.
Again, you need to realize that it is actually dangerous. That's why it's expensive. You need to spend LOTS of money to keep it safe.
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
People have died from radiation exposure every decade since it was discovered. People die from minutes of exposure to barely visible amounts of radioactive elements.
Please follow your inclination to be informed. Don't take my word, don't take Jacks, go to the records of actual events and base your opinion on that.
My take - In 2026 we have developed a type of glass that can fetch electricity entirely for free from sunshine and store it in a container of the most abundant element on earth, or even use the surplus carbon from the atmosphere to generate synthetic fuel that can store energy for years.
That's where we should spend time, money and effort.
The only fair way to compare the cost to solar and wind, is if wind and solar producers would have to make power guarantees 24/7 and cover the cost of the production gaps (hint: this makes solar and wind very expensive).
Not sure if that's fair. Sometimes the sun actually does shine, and while you won't get rich selling energy during that time, having electricity available essentially for free during some of the peak hours is worth something. Someone will eventually find a use for free energy. If nothing else, at least we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.
When the sun shines sure you can power down other power stations, but you still need to maintain them and have them around for when the sun doesn't shine. So when you have lots of intermittent energy it means that you actually cannot shelve your old technology - you still have to maintain it, but now you're paying for the maintenance over less capacity used. This is only one of the reasons why prices are going up in heavy renewable grids.
The UK is a grid that is adding lots of renewables and building some nuclear plants, so the site provides good data around the costs for the added transmission, storage and subsidies (for both renewables and nuclear) needed for a renewables heavy grid supplemented with nuclear.
Gas peaker plants are designed to be turned on and off regularly. They can go from cold shutdown to full load in less than an hour, with some able to do it in less than 10 minutes[0].
A decent bunch of that is going to be sheer inertia as you have to spin up a heavy chunk of metal. Keep that rotating (which is actually a good thing in renewable-heavy grids!) and it can be done even faster. Similarly, keeping some parts warm costs very little energy and allows even faster ramp=up.
But that's actually not relevant because battery storage is far more attractive for that kind of short-term demand. The renewable grid will need gas plants which can fill in the gap left when it is both dark and wind-less - which due to meteorology is trivially known 72 hours in advance, leaving plenty of time to prepare the plant for use.
> - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.
Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world vastly cheaper than nuclear.
> - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
All of which are fundamentally expensive.
> - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
Every kw of nuclear production we create is resources we could have instead put into adding more than 1 kw of solar backed with batteries at this point. Moreover the other renewables would come online and displace fossil fuel usage faster. Thus spending money on nuclear results in a more polluted higher CO2 world, not the other way around.
There was a time when nuclear was the cheapest way to build clean energy, that time has passed and isn't coming back.
> - the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
Many people have died from radiation exposure. Many people have gotten cancer from radiation exposure years later. Many many square kilometers of earth have been rendered uninhabitable by distribution of radioactive isotopes. This is misinformation and spreading it is frankly dangerous. A very healthy dose of respect is required whenever handling radioactive materials and people should not be told otherwise.
> Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.
The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now.
If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear power industry it's literally 31 - and 28 came from Chernobyl. It's a fraction of rounding error compared to every other energy type.
Nearly all of the dangers of radiation were cooked up by the oil and gas industry based on a series of now discredited fruit fly studies in the 1950s.
Chernobyl killed 30 or 31 directly (i.e. acute radiation poisoning), and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed... I don't know where your 28 number comes from but there's no dispute that the direct number is higher than that...
There's been a handful of other purely civilian disasters that killed people with radiation from sources meant for nuclear power, and a large number of military ones.
But if we're looking for civilian radiation deaths the majority outside of Chernobyl aren't nuclear power, they're radiotherapy, because the nuclear power industry was appropriately regulated after the early mass casualty events resulting from military nuclear reactors (e.g. the Kyshtym disaster at 200 to 8000 deaths) and the Windscale Fire at (100 to 240 deaths) and it's harder to regulate the more wildly distributed health care applications.
That we're handling things with appropriate care isn't evidence that they're not dangerous.
> and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed
That's the thing, these numbers have been extremely inflated. The LNT model we've used for nuclear safety has never withstood any serious scrutiny. If anything, we've learned humans are extremely resilient to non-acute exposure.
Excess death numbers at places like Fukushima and Chernobyl have found almost no noticeable change in cancer rates, even for people with serious exposure.
Ironically, if you compare excess death numbers to traditional fuel sources (coal, gas, etc) they are much worse.
$100 / kWh capacity, over 10000 cycles, is $0.01 kWh delivered. It's dirt cheap.
Also that's not the cost though. You're looking at vehicle packs not stationary storage packs at that cost. We've seen stationary storage packs get down to $50/kWh last year - with an average pack price of $70: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...
And prices continue to decay. Those are the most expensive prices you'll ever see going forwards.
And there's other benefits. Batteries distribute well, letting us lower grid related costs by making more constant use of the chokepoints in the grid for instance.
What choices make nuclear expensive that we could actually get rid of WITHOUT IMMEDIATELY increasing risk (which is low because of regulation)?
Moreover, it's crazy that so much regulation was provably written in blood paid by workers and public after a company got greedy. Sure, let's build 50 AND reduce regulations.
Finally, the biggest fucking thing: It is MORE expensive NOW than the green alternatives, AND green energy has proven over the years to actually keep it's promises of improvements, compared to fission and SMRs, which are always just 5 years away.
Renewables have been incredibly effective at providing more capacity at good cost, but they still have drawbacks. Aside from the obvious variability everyone harps on, location does play a nontrivial role. Switzerland is not as good a candidate for solar or wind as many other countries due to constraints in usable land and availability (valleys have more shade than steppes for instance). I don’t think anyone needs to be saying no to renewables when they consider investing in nuclear. The two technologies serve very different purposes in an electric grid. Base load is still a problem even with battery storage, and it makes a lot of sense to have reliable power available that is not from fossil fuels to deal with that demand. There is plenty of fossil fuel based generation to replace, it doesn’t have to all be nuclear or renewables, in fact all one or the other doesn’t make much sense.
It’s true nuclear is expensive. It’s also true a lot of that expense was the regulation that has made it so incredibly safe. It’s unlikely a cheaper but still safe enough compromise will be reached in countries with existing regulatory structures quickly, but there is certainly room to improve over time.
* every dollar spent on building new nuclear will be put to use so late it effectively increases CO2 emissions
* A country like Poland is the biggest emissions perpetrator in Europe, and the fact they are building nuclear means they will stay that way for literally decades
* The fossil fuel exporter countries are pushing nuclear as their agenda. Why do you think that is?
* Not a single country has a working permanent solution currently for waste storage.
* The UK cannot clean up Sellafield at all. They had the bright idea to process waste and are now sitting in hundreds of billions of pounds of estimated costs to dispose of it.
The reason is that your body has mechanisms to fix the problems of radiation. For example, when you drop a stone in water would you say that you "break the surface of the water"?
Our DNA is very similar - DNA damage occurs naturally. Our body has processes that fix DNA strand breaks. Radiation that occurs because of most exposure that has ever occurred is so minimal that the body's natural defences against radiation damange means that the harm is precisely zero. The body literally repaired itself much like that water surface repairs itself.
Harm does occur however when the rate of radiation exposure exceeds our body's ability to repair itself. However this threshold is well above any threshold we regulate around.
For more information the key words are "dna double strand breaks" and "LNT vs SNT"
You can't look at the early plants built in the US that were "turnkey" plants. These were bid at prices not reflecting what they would cost to build, but what was necessary to compete with coal. The vendors took a bath on these plants.
end non proliferation rules. its blocking nuclear adoption way more than environmental movements ever did esp in developing countries. and imo its better for a lot of countries to have nuclear weapons than just a few, if they have to exist at all.
Switzerland is a small country. 3000 square kilometers of the earth is uninhabitable because of nuclear accidents. That would be almost 1/10 of Switzerland. Probably not a good idea.
They have a pretty small population, but wind will likely be intolerable because it will harm views[0]. Solar requires surface area as well. So that leaves hydro, which they'll have to pump during the summer months to ensure they have coverage for winter, or nuclear. Or fossil fuels, of course. Gas is still probably optimal for them. I suppose that's the nature of things. We all care very much about the climate, but we do care about our views more.
0: I personally like the look of wind turbines but I understand many don't. The appearance is likely why the Trump administration canceled such projects.
my summarized thoughts when reading through this comment section and being swiss myself - have y'all ever heard of solar and wind[0]? i know that battery storage is a challenge, but hey, we constantly glaze ourselves as having great universities, lots of wealth, stability, precise engineering etc.
so let's put our strength into battery storage. invest in research towards it. research it ourselves. build out renewable energy. sponsor such things in foreign places we steal, ehrm, i mean, trade resources from.
this whole nuclear debate feels like a defeat. well, we tried, seems too hard, let's got back to ye' olden times.
i am also aware that we use french nuclear power as a backbone constantly and still boast as being so advanced and green, but that's also helping my point.
[0]or fusion, or just a different way to boil water without creating waste we have to bury in a mountain and think about how we want to make sure that nobody every accidentally opens the toxic caves in the next thousands of years.
While I'm sold on the fact that modern nuclear can be built & administered safely in the face of natural disasters, and is a net good environmentally, I'm worried about corporate cronyism's corrosive effects on safety (a la Fukushima) and future instability in the form of cornered animals (e.g. Putin, Trump) acting erratically by bombing civilian infrastructure.
Tangentially related: the Swiss built a research-focused nuclear reactor in a cavern. It had a meltdown in 1969, and they were able to keep the decontamination/decommissioning efforts to a minimum by just entombing the thing in concrete.
Honestly, so long as the water table isn't too close, that's not a terrible place to put a nuclear reactor.
If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.
And as usual the nuclear brainwashed lobby on HN still think it's 1990 and nuclear is cost effective.
It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision
Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year
Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence
You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand.
They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh.
If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh
So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.
One of the little gems the Russians pulled off in the twenty aughts when they were flooding nonprofits in the USA with dirty money was hijacking the green movement to promote fracking. (Because surely ANYTHING is better than those dastardly electrons or whatever the fuck radiation is made of)
Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants, and with advances in breeder technology new plants doesn't nessecarily mean new mining operations, which often are quite harsh on the surrounding area.
japan actually seems averse to any kind of change in a way they aren't. do swiss atms close at a certain time of day? do many takeout places want you to fax orders? there's a lot of things that go beyond "conservative" in japan in the risk averse sense into just being stuck in the 80s.
Swiss will get nukes, denmark will get nukes, sweden will get nukes, finland will get..poland, ukraine, germany, armenia, georgia, armenia, turkey, vietnam, japan, south korea, emirates all gonna get, saudi already got.. [this list is incomplete, you can help to complete this list by doing a empire]. Ironically during the cold war a ton of countries went and became almost nuclear powers. Now thos world is so back baby and the reality denial and loud noises do nothing. Almost as if this plot device never had any connection to anything.
The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.
Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.
We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
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