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Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy

myspy 5y ago
So what is the current state of affairs with nuclear on CO2 neutrality? Last I heard, in its life time it is not CO2 neutral due to mining and storing the fuel. Are these solved problems?
- caoilte 5y ago
  It's negligable at current levels, but at some point in the next 40 years we will start to run short of easily mineable uranium. Some of the other ways we might have to mine uranium then are carbon intensive. But research is being done. So it depends.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  Consider this: Hambacher Forst and return to brown coal in Germany is a direct effect of moving away from nuclear. That would be a great background to the total CO2 math.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  Almost nothing human technology does is "CO2 Neutral". The question isn't CO2 neutrality, but "How much worse is the alternative". And when the alternative is to burn Coal, Oil and Gas, Nuclear power wins by a landslide. Secondly: Fossil Fuels have to be mined, transported and stored as well. The components of Wind and Solar energy farms have to be constructed from resources which have to be mined and processed. Power plants, be they coal, nuclear, solar, whatever, need to be constructed and maintained.
- rory 5y ago
  By that standard, no energy source is carbon neutral since wind and solar also require mining and construction. To our best estimate, the footprint of nuclear is a bit higher than solar and wind, but much closer to them than fossil fuels. e.g.: https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low-carbon-footprints https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low... Edit: see page 539 here for a better comparison https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  It really is all relative, it can essentially be carbon negative in a sense if you use coal as a baseline for damage and ability to reverse global warming.
jakozaur 5y ago
I think ramping up usage of gas is a bad policy. Even taking a little bit longer, but jumping from coal to renewables make more sense than using gas as bridge fuel. We should either go nuclear or renewables with storage. There are still some good spots for hydro-storage as well as batteries are getting cheaper each year.
Faelian2 5y ago
Honestly, the battle Nuclear vs Renewable is quite sad when we look at the sources of energy over time. https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years?country= https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years?country= Coal is not even going down.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Yeah they're just pushing it mostly on poorer countries to bear the brunt of coal burning so they can keep their air clean.
guerby 5y ago
https://archive.is/jNMjM https://archive.is/jNMjM
throwawayffffas 5y ago
On a relevant note first plasma in ITER is still 3 years out. https://www.iter.org/construction/construction https://www.iter.org/construction/construction
- pfdietz 5y ago
  And it won't use tritium until 2035 or later. And it will never be able to breed tritium, or operate on DT for more than a few weeks total. And it's on a technological dead end to anything that could be competitive, even with fission.
  - throwawayffffas 5y ago
    I am not any kind of expert in the matter, but I don't buy the technological dead end argument. But still if everything worked perfectly I would hazard we would still be at least 20-30 years out of a commercial project that would cost billions and take a decade to build.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      That you don't buy it doesn't mean it's not true. ITER has horrific power density, some 400x worse than the reactor vessel in a fission power plant. Given that the non-nuclear part of the a fission and DT fusion plant will be similar, making the reactor itself much larger and much more complex, and therefore much more expensive, cannot be a win. The less experimental follow-ons to ITER (PROTO, DEMO) are still massively too large. This generic problem with DT fusion reactors has been known since at least the 1980s.
      - schnitzelstoat 5y ago
        The UK's STEP project uses a higher aspect ratio ('spherical tokamak') to reduce the required size of the machine. The initial investigations from MAST are encouraging, but we'll see how it goes. Of course, this stuff will be ready for commercial use in like 2050 assuming everything goes to plan (which is rare unless it's really prioritised like the Manhattan Project, Apollo Missions etc.) So regardless, something will have to be done prior to then - either we find better energy storage solutions for renewables or we expedite the construction of replacement/new fission plants or both.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
A lot of assumptions wrapped up in that short headline. "Europe is losing ICE vehicles, just as it needs to transport people."
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  Except ICE vehicles are not providing a unique firm low carbon capability like nuclear is.
roenxi 5y ago
It is - frankly - shocking that elite culture has drifted so far into the world of make believe that something as simple as energy security has become a political battleground. If there was a single issue that the entire political body of a country has a stake in, that is the issue. And yet, somehow, we're seeing Europe in this position where they're trying to go it without energy. The figures out of the UK [0] are jaw dropping to me. 44% reduction in energy production, 20% in electricity and with a growing population! The country must be populated entirely by monks and ascetics if they are putting up with this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#O...
- automatic6131 5y ago
  Yup, Brit here. It beggars belief. And the leaders will continue to be so stupid, because the other party will also make this mistake too.
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    What happened to the nuclear reactor built with the help of China, with George Osborne's approval?
    - stuaxo 5y ago
      It is still being built and they have a very good deal that means every house hold in the UK will be paying over the odds to give it guaranteed profits for decades to come.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Rent seeking intensifies.
      - yodelshady 5y ago
        per ofgem, wholesale prices have been greater than Hinkley's £92/MWh since October. And that's before we add heating to the winter electric load. Conservatively, and I am really trying here, you're doubling grid load. If we go by my household, you're adding a zero. I can find multiple >12 hr periods in this fairly mild winter where wind has essentially failed on demand (<5% satisfaction). I'm sorry but if someone says "storage" when talking about even that sort of shortfall they're lying.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Politicians and the people who support them push for many self-damaging policies based purely on ideologies, just because they sound good (getting rid of nuclear, going green) without considering the direct consequences of these actions (how do we serve our energy needs until we become fully green?). That's like selling both your kidney to buy a prosthetic robot arm and wonder why you're not feeling well despite the upgrade. Sadly you can't argue on the pros of nuclear as you'd get drowned out by the "But Chernobyl blew up" shouts. Rich anti-nuclear countries like Austria call themselves green while supplementing their energy needs via imports from coal burning Czech Republic and nuclear powered Slovenia. Laughable. This loophole in the EU should be stopped. If you import dirty energy you should also be responsible for the equivalent CO2 emissions you imported and not be allowed to call yourself green when clearly you just outsource your pollution.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  > without considering the direct consequences of these actions And the best example of that in Germany is Hambacher Forst. Return to coal is a direct result of moving away from nuclear. Nuts.
  - emsign 5y ago
    Germany did not return to coal. That's simply not true. The coal under Hambacher Forest isn't even needed and it won't be used up either.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >Germany did not return to coal. Germany's buying cheap energy from coal burning Poland so it might as well have. Call it outsourcing of coal burning if that makes it easier to take in.
      - zuzun 5y ago
        A net import of 250,000 MWh in the past month. That's not even 1% of Germany's electricity production. Germany produced 4x as much electricity from photovoltaics even though the sun wasn't shining.
fsflover 5y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798065.
squarefoot 5y ago
Building thousands nuclear plants for every country wouldn't suffice if most of their energy is wasted to mine cryptocurrencies -> make money -> build more mining farms that require more power -> more power plants -> more money, etc. It should be clear now that this endless loop is not going to scale and energy prices are going to soar no matter how many nuclear plants we build, because all available one will be used anyway by people who could still sustain higher energy prices. The problem is not the lack of energy. Actually we'd have plenty if someone didn't waste most of it for just one damn thing that produces nothing of real value in return while slowly killing the planet.
- ryan93 5y ago
  Crypto uses less than 1% or something. What are you talking about?
  - llampx 5y ago
    Its the HN pet peeve.
    - rufusroflpunch 5y ago
      HN is generally so incredibly uninformed on this topic.
  - stuaxo 5y ago
    It has a pathetic amount of transactions. If it's adopted to any extent it will need a lot more than that.
    - danuker 5y ago
      As the inflationary BTC miner reward halves every 4 years, the miner income will gradually shift to primarily transaction-fee-based. I suspect this will drive down the available energy budget.
  - paganel 5y ago
throwaway10122 5y ago
Germany spent something like a trillion euro on renewables and still produces much more CO2 per capita per year than France who spent 200 billion on nuclear (and whose nuclear industry is forced to bail out competitors now) One would think "green" movements (greenpeace, and modern green parties) have been infiltrated by coal/oil/gas lobbies as so far the only winner out of no nuclear yes wind policy is Vladimir Putin and not the environment
- raphaelj 5y ago
  Past spending are actually not relevant, as renewable got significantly cheaper, while nuclear got more expensive. Solar is today 5x less expensive than it was in 2010[1]. --- [1] https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2020/Jun/IRENA_Costs_2019_EN.pdf?la=en&hash=BFAAB4DD2A14EDA7329946F9C3BDA9CD806C1A8A https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...
  - steeve 5y ago
    Rain water will always be cheaper than tap water.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    And a large part of why it's cheaper is because Germany spent so much, driving the costs down the production learning curve. The whole world, including Germany, will benefit tremendously from that spending.
  - thrown_22 5y ago
    Coal is free underground which is in the same league as saying that solar is cheep at noon. That something this simple is never talked about when it comes to renewables is a monument to peoples ability to ignore the obvious.
    - dang 5y ago
      You've been posting comments that get flagged, then deleting and reposting them many times—in one case, over a dozen times! That's abusive, and we ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so if you'd please stop doing it, we'd appreciate it. Also, if you could please stop posting flamewar comments in the first place, that would be good, because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
danjac 5y ago
The problem is that for much of the current generation of politicians in power, particularly in Germany, all thought about nuclear power has been frozen in time since 1985. Furthermore you have bought-and-paid-for members of the establishment like Gerhard Schröder who have a vested interest in shutting down nuclear power plants.
- myspy 5y ago
  We could've partially solved the problem with steady construction of wind farms which were politically held back in the last 10 years.
  - ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
    Wind generally can't provide base load due to its sporadic nature. They really aren't substitutes until we get cheap energy storage
    - Entalpi 5y ago
      This. We need nuclear to keep the base load green. Wind and solar need batteries to be base load providers. Building out both battery and renewable infrastructure at the same time is a tall order.
      - rekoil 5y ago
        Yeah this is what most people are not getting in this whole debate. That and the fact that it's really costly to transmit electricity over long distances, even at extremely high voltages. The best solution is a bunch of smallish nuclear reactors spread out over the continent for base power production, wind/solar/hydro (is wave electricity a thing? I remember it was discussed a bunch of years ago in relation to green production) wherever those make sense, and high voltage transmission lines to allow load balancing. But we don't have that, and it takes a long time to build so we should get started now, but instead they will say "oh we should have built that 20 years ago now it's too late"... :(
DrBazza 5y ago
From my aged perspective, this is reaping the "green benefit" from the 70s and 80s, when there were world wide activists campaigning against nuclear power for "reasons" (largely the Cold War). If you think green activists are something new, it's because you're "young". We're reaping what we sowed back then: the "brainwashing" of the public that unquestioningly accept that nuclear power is 'bad' and tightly linked to nuclear weapons and death. Despite the fact that nuclear power stations do not have to produce "weapons grade" plutonium/whatever and, I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face, has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation and produce the lowest amount of CO2 (i.e. zero, other than construction). It's entirely likely more people die in a day world wide from fossil fuel pollution and production than have ever died from nuclear accidents. > The trouble, as ever, is time. “Any investment decisions you make now aren’t going to come to fruition until the 2030s,” said Osbaldstone, the research director at Wood Mackenzie. “Nuclear isn’t an answer to the current energy crisis.” As the saying goes "the best time to build X was yesterday". Careful what you wish for. The millions of tons of CO2 we could have avoided emitting in Europe... > “Nuclear isn’t an answer to the current energy crisis.” Sorry, but to use an old quote, nuclear is the worst solution to the current energy crisis, apart from all the others.
- dachryn 5y ago
  ironically, that same could now be said about our gas crisis in Europe, where we handover immense leverage into the control of Russia.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  > I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face, has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation and produce the lowest amount of CO2 (i.e. zero, other than construction). Will you stop repeating this if I explain why it's false? So first up, the stat is usually fatalities per TwH, since that skews things in Nuclear's direction, not just number of fatalities which would be won by some obscure but not very successful power source. Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date. You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower. Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data. Of course if you have a limited amount of money to spend, then you'll generate more energy and save more lives with whatever the cheaper form of energy is, so we should really take that into consideration too. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
emsign 5y ago
Nucler power is just too risky of an investment. You can set up a solar park in weeks, nothing compared to the decades of lobbying, nimby-backlash, getting the planning permissions, financial risks and pouring billions into the nuclear plant. And you still need massive tax cuts and securities from the tax payers for it to be profitable, not to mention the government to help you out if the darn thing goes pop. A d Murphy know a nuclear power plant is one of the most complex machines we humans can built. Why would you do that as an energy company. Ask Tepco if they are happy. They aren't. The only countries that still build nuclear are the ones that massively promote it for political reasons and it's often countries with an or wanting to have an arsenal of atomic weapons, go figure. Nuclear is a dead horse unless.
- ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
  Nuclear costs so much because we haven't built reactors in decades. If we had been focused on nuclear innovation and deployment consistently since the 50s, then (a) we would have smaller nuclear facilities by now that are much easier to deploy and can't melt down and (b) operationalizing and deploying nuclear in general would be much cheaper. You have a headwind to doing an activity when you rarely engage in an activity. Chernobyl really messed us up in this regard, sadly.
  - caoilte 5y ago
    How about 3 mile island or Fukushima or countless other times where we got lucky. Nuclear disasters are an inevitability with such a complex technology. I'm all in favour of more research into MSRs, but it could easily not work out to be efficient enough to scale. And solar/wind/storage/smart grid solutions are already here and demonstrably up to the job.
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  Incredible you get downvoted for this. You are absolutely correct; nuclear is disappearing because it is too costly and basically only makes sense if you want weapons. Look at the projects in the UK - delays for decades and massive budget overruns. Or Turkey if you to see something that is driven by dubious reasons ...
phicoh 5y ago
The problem is simple. For decades, Russia was supplying natural gas reliably and for a reasonable price. Generating electricity with natural gas is trivial. So shutting down old nuclear power and replacing it with wind/solar backed up by gas was not a crazy idea. Was is a crazy idea is then letting 'the free market' take care of the gas supply. Where is gets more complex, natural gas is not just used to generate electricity, but also to provide heat for lots of homes. Keep old nuclear power plants running doesn't do anything for keeping people warm. In short, Europe has a natural gas problem, not so much a nuclear power problem.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  There are project that use waste heat from nuclear power plants for district heating: https://keepwarmeurope.eu/news/?c=search&uid=Nsjnork8 https://keepwarmeurope.eu/news/?c=search&uid=Nsjnork8 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325110704_Construction_of_heat_pipeline_from_Temelin_Nuclear_Power_Plant_to_the_city_of_Ceske_Budejovice_A_Financial_Analysis_of_from_an_Investor_standpoint https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325110704_Construct...
- mobilio 5y ago
  And on other side coal power plants are hit with expensive CO2 quotas.
- mcjiggerlog 5y ago
  > Keep old nuclear power plants running doesn't do anything for keeping people warm. "According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, about 43 nuclear reactors around the world—mostly in Eastern Europe and Russia—provide district heating in addition to generating electricity." (https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/ https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...)
  - phicoh 5y ago
    You have to compare district heating to about 7 million households using natural gas for heating in The Netherlands alone. So keeping a few nuclear power plants open has hardly any effect on the amount of natural gas that is used.
WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
ogogmad 5y ago
If democratic countries build more nuclear power plants, then won't that encourage less democratic countries to also build nuclear power plants, and then eventually nuclear weapons? "We're not making nuclear weapons, only nuclear power plants" is what countries like Iran say. And many other countries would like them to stop. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving a wider perspective.
cycomanic 5y ago
What is it with framing this in terms of nuclear power. Many of the nuclear plants are being shut down because they are either end-of-life or were recently shut down because they were uneconomical. Sure we can argue that we were not prepared for the recent uptick in energy demand as well as exceptionally low wind last year. However, one can just as well argue that this was a failure not to build more wind and solar capacity. The bigger issue is that nobody wants to build nuclear power without massive subsidies, because it is simply not economical. So shouting now, "you should have build more plants" is easy, but that would have meant higher electricity prices, because that's what would be needed to economically run nuclear power.
- mcjiggerlog 5y ago
  > Many of the nuclear plants are being shut down because they are either end-of-life or were recently shut down because they were uneconomical. This is simply not true. The main reason plants are being shutdown is because Germany, Belgium and Spain are closing them before end-of-life due to political pressure.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    For those who want to know more, VisualPolitk EN has covered it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYagGAgHfQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYagGAgHfQ0
- martin_a 5y ago
  Also don't forget to calculate the cost for maintenance, dismantling and safe storage of nuclear waste for probably hundreds/thousands of years. We currently do not have _any_ viable solution other than "put it somewhere in a mountain" to get rid of nuclear waste. Nobody would propose a technology or product where this is the only solution to take care of the waste, nevertheless this seems to be fine for nuclear power. What we really need to do is invest heavily in research and developement of storage systems of all kinds, building a more decentralized power grid (solar on every roof where possible e.g.) and getting rid of fossil fuels along the way. Everythings needs to run parallel, not one after another.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Not just nuclear, the Netherlands is stopping all it's gas production. Europe is a very diverse continent. Something that tends to be forgotten in American perception. A country like the Netherlands has practically unlimited amount of money to import oil and gas from abroad while people in Greece are reduced to burning wood to keep warm in winter.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
There are no blackouts in Europe. There's no energy shortage. This is not Texas. There's a cost problem, however. With gas specifically. And that reflects in the electricity prices currently because there are quite a few gas plants. Until recently, nuclear was the undisputed king of cost. There was nothing more expensive in the market. And that's before you count the cost of long term storage, security, and decades of government subsidies. I guess, for this year it might look quite alright compared to gas. But that is probably a temporary effect before it goes back to its undisputed status as being the most costly thing in the market. Replacing an expensive thing with an even more expensive thing is not a solution to reducing cost. It doesn't make sense. Europe needs cheap power, not expensive power. And it's getting plenty of that from renewables. It's far ahead of most other places in the world in terms of deploying wind and other renewables. The nuclear phase down in Germany is actually happening without any disruptions to energy supply. The grid seems plenty resilient (again, rolling blackouts are not a thing here). Also, there's a healthy growth of other capacity and it's a very competitive market with lots of innovative companies making lots of money. Nuclear was always a relatively minor part of the energy economy in Germany. We're talking about some 20GW of capacity in total of which some 8(?) GW remains which is on track to disappear later this year. Compared to the new capacity that has been added in (mainly) wind and solar form since the nuclear phase out started 12 years ago that is nothing. About 3x the amount of nuclear capacity Germany ever had was added in wind energy alone since then. Probably in the next few years more will come online than Germany ever had in nuclear capacity. People probably have more solar on their roofs than ever existed in nuclear capacity. That was growing at a pace of almost 0.5GW per month last summer apparently. The reasons electricity prices are high is because the EU is overly dependent on natural gas, which until recently was vastly cheaper than nuclear (and coal plants). The current geo-political situation with particularly Russia is disrupting oil and gas prices. Not because there is a shortage but because Russia is trying to pressurize the EU to do what it wants. The cheapest solution to that is diplomacy. And given that apparently gas prices dropped 11% or so after Russia kindly started providing gas through Ukranian pipelines again, that seems to be working. The likely long term effect will be an acceleration of replacing gas with other things. That was already happening anyway. Higher prices will make it happen faster.
- elric 5y ago
streamofdigits 5y ago
Imagine this dismall planet dotted with decrepit nuclear plants, even as the societies that are supposed to keep them safe collapse either of their own accord, or due to interminable warfare. When deciding on the wisdom of adopting a technology that will shape our fate for the next century you don't condition on the best (or even expected) scenario, you condition on the worst plausible scenario. For a long as we haven't solved our obvious and serious socio-economic pathologies it is actually safer to keep burning carbon. At least that damage is in-principle reversible.
kebos 5y ago
https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ - overly good day for renewable production in the UK, my thoughts: 1. Wind is really cost effective for the UK and loads more is due to come online 2. EPR reactors keep running massively over budget e.g. Flamanville 3 3. Research money is heading into the best ways to store grid level energy. All in all I am very hopeful and not against Nuclear at all but I just can't ignore the charts today. Such a nice thought that a good % of my flat is being powered with little consequence!
- rekoil 5y ago
  Oh it's windy today? Great! I guess it'll be windy every day in the future, let's replace all energy production with wind farms! /s I know this is not what you're saying, but that's pretty much how I imagine some people think, especially "green" politicians.
  - VyperCard 5y ago
    Yeah, but that’s in your head.
- rullelito 5y ago
  I have friends with the same dilutions. "We just need to build loads of tiny mechanical generators and enough batteries to store a few days worth of our countries electricity consumption" How someone can say this (and still claim to be green) is beyond me.
tyronehed 5y ago
akamaka 5y ago
It's mind-boggling to me that so commenters are blaming fear and brainwashing for the demise of nuclear power, when the answer is crystal clear in the numbers. As of this year, the cheapest wind and solar farms have a lower total cost than the marginal cost of the average nuclear plant.[1] That means that in many places, it is cheaper to immediately shut down the nuclear plants and direct the money that was spent on operating costs into construction of renewables. Yes, we should certainly keep the better-designed existing plants up and running, and build some new ones where the conditions are favorable, but in most places in the world it doesn't come close to making sense. [1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > As of this year, the cheapest wind and solar farms have a lower total cost than the marginal cost of the average nuclear plant.[1] That means that in many places, it is cheaper to immediately shut down the nuclear plants and direct the money that was spent on operating costs into construction of renewables. Except that in this situation fossil fuel-based generators keep running. We should be keeping nukes for as long as possible, and shutting down coal and gas first. The new renewable pick up the slack for coal/gas, and once all of the latter are gone then you start shutting down nuclear.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  Even if you fill the entire world in solar panels and wind mills, we won't have reliable 24-hours energy. That means you can't rely of constant supply of it, which means you'll need something as a backup. Nuclear is one of the most reliable sources. The world has enough uranium for at least a few hundred years, which in practice could be much much longer depending on if we can keep installing more renewable plants. So, why not use nuclear as a backup? There is nothing even close to a better option than that.
  - akamaka 5y ago
    I’m definitely in favor of keeping and upgrading existing plants and building some new ones, but there’s no source of energy that has 100% availability. A few years ago, France had 1/3 of its reactors offline at the same time for maintenance. Indeed we would have to build enormous overcapacity with wind and solar to achieve 100% uptime, but until we perfect energy storage, that’s true of any energy source today.
antman 5y ago
Oh great a discussion about international ethics, sure let's dive into the narrative and choose teams. Or not. Anyway, my understanding of the big picture using the mental framework I got from a previous HN post of short and long con(thanks HN) The short con: Environmental ethics, the other team is illogical. The long con(Nuclear Lobby): Those that support nuclear have invested and given subsidies to their respective industries disregarding the fact that it is not that safe. The definition of safety is based on the insurance which if I recall was capped at 100mil and the rest is insured by peoples taxes if something happens. If it wasn't capped the concept of nuclear would not be feasible. The long con(Non nuclear Lobby aka Germany): The previous German counselor (whose politics as I see them from afar where mostly based on human sentiment except when against industry) overshot anyone's assumption of the feasibility of a non nuclear policy and subsidized heavily non nuclear. Then they tried to support by European Lobbying and legislation. The whole thing backfired and they need to buy energy from abroad which has caused a steep increase in prices and a passive policy against Russia. So natural gas needs to also be defined as "kind of environmental" or Germany has no real policy. If it works, and since they are the entry of natural gas for Europe, they can friction everybody towards any policy that makes sense in the future. Also: The environment something something (I have phased out, EU or any large country does not plan based on ethics, just based on short term reelection goals). Also 2: EU refused to pre agree with Russians for natural gas prices and the gas price skyrocketed forcing more environmental policy that smaller countries in EU must adopt early. French threw a wrench in German's works who are exposed to their non nuclear investments. Also somehow Russians fault? Sure... Also 3: Two actual targets of environmental policy: Reduce gas emissions, Reduce nuclear meltdown danger. Pick and choose depending on which country's media you are exposed to and their respective owners financing. Also 4: 30% increase in non service production due to covid did not help prices I assume. Guess: They will find an understanding somewhere in the middle, they are financially exposed, which means politically exposed and no one will remember after the a new round of articles from the media. In the meantime we are paying for no reason.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Why are you even here if you don't want to discuss/debate? There are literally a hundred other articles on here _today_ you could go read and comment on.
LatteLazy 5y ago
Let's get real, nuclear is a solution in search of a problem. It's low carbon, but we've decided not to cut our emissions, so why bother? It would rescue us from Russian gas reliance. But cost 10 times more and won't be ready till 2040 so why bother? (Plus you can't replace domestic gas supplies with electricity...). It's reliable for base load, but we already have that from gas so why bother?
- funklute 5y ago
  > but we've decided not to cut our emissions What? Where do you have this from?
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    We've increased our emissions almost every year for decades. A few years back, in Paris, we signed a "you do you" agreement to all decide for ourselves whether to cut our emissions and not to complain if others don't cut them. We're well on schedule to blow through all the ppm concentrations (I think we blew through the 1C rise one last year some time?) It's like this weird open secret where we all agree something should definitely be done, and then do nothing. Like 100 people are a car crash all hoping someone else will get involved or something.
MrPatan 5y ago
Qui bono?
cletus 5y ago
This is a key point: > Plants, though, take a decade or more to construct at best and the risk is high of running over time and over budget. Finland’s new Olkiluoto-3 unit is coming on line after a 12-year delay and billions of euros in financial overruns. I'll expand on this further: do you know how many of the world's nuclear power plants (~660 IIRC) were privately funded and built without (significant) government subsidies? The answer is zero. This is not just a construction issue, it also affects maintenance [1]. Sure lets continue researching smaller, modular reactors that can be constructed more cheaply and in less time. But we're not there yet. None of the research projects, prototypes or proposals are anywhere close to commercial viability yet. Most of them don't even exist yet. Personally I'm bearing on fission power. Plants take too long to build. They're too expensive to build and maintain. I don't trust humans or corporations for long-term management and maintenance, particularly in countries without strong government. We don't have a good story for the long term storage or disposal of enrichment waste or power production waste. The significant systems required around mining, fuel processing, spent fuel processing, maintenance, fuel replacement, inspection and oversight (eg the NRC) are significant and won't scale to the required level. The article is right though: this is political and the politics are bad for nuclear. It will take the likes of China to mass deploy nuclear once these problems are solved to change any opinions in the West. [1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nuclear-power-wont-survive-without-a-government-handout/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nuclear-power-wont-surv...
- q1w2 5y ago
  Your source does not say anything about gov't subsidies for nuclear plant construction. Nuclear plants are built, like any power plant or major project, with corporate/state/municipal bonds. These aren't really handouts. They are fixed income instruments that allow corporations to spread the cost of construction over the life of the project. Nuclear reactors are profitable. The challenges are those we create to stop them. Lawsuits, protests, political work stoppages, etc...
ucha 5y ago
Nuclear is obviously key to energy independence etc... but the very common take these days of "Nuclear power is the safest energy production technology available, just look at historical data" is deeply misguided. It's very hard to accurately estimate the risk of a nuclear power-plant disaster because looking back at the past and extrapolating data from there is non-sensical when the risk is so fat-tailed. Sure, Chernobyl, Fukushima and ever Three Mile Island killed a few thousands at most in aggregate but for anyone familiar with the history of Chernobyl, the story is quite different. 10 days after the main explosion, a leak caused a large amount of water to accumulate under the melting core. Had the melting core reached that pool of water, it would have caused a massive steam explosion that would have spread radioactive particles over most of Europe and Russia making them uninhabitable. Thankfully, three men risked their lives to enter the power-plant and closed a valve preventing more water from accumulating under the core. Now, you could say that current reactors are safer, which might be true, but before Chernobyl, such a disaster was also thought to be impossible. Even if there is a 10% risk of contamination of a whole continent over a century, does it make sense to take it? One could argue that such risk would be acceptable if it prevents climate change. But acknowledging the existence of these enormous risks is a required step to have an honest debate.
- thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
  > spread radioactive particles over most of Europe and Russia making them uninhabitable JFC, this is the perfect capture of the level of debate surrounding nuclear If it was true, don't you think every single country in the world would obtain such a world-destroying weapon? If it was true, then a single nuclear reactor would be able to power the whole world for eternity
  - ucha 5y ago
    Uh that makes no sense. > If it was true, don't you think every single country in the world would obtain such a world-destroying weapon? Countries already have nuclear weapons. They can very well spread radioactive material over large landmasses but what's the point? > If it was true, then a single nuclear reactor would be able to power the whole world for eternity I have no idea how you deduced this but it's wrong.
noelhecht 5y ago
ajnin 5y ago
> As the Fukushima disaster unfolded in Japan in 2011, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a dramatic decision that delighted her country’s anti-nuclear movement: all reactors would be ditched. What couldn’t have been predicted was that Europe would find itself mired in one of the worst energy crises in its history That's just not really true, plenty of people warned that with Germany closing nuclear and coal plants at the same time it would need to rely on external sources for energy, France for electricity, and with NordStream 1 and 2 projects, the reliance on Russian gas for Germany rose to around 50%. It was pretty obvious that becoming dependent on a not always friendly foreign power was a bad idea, but with Germany being so dominant in Europe no one dared to oppose it. Now Russia is playing this card fully.
ho_schi 5y ago
Please stop wining and make progress :) Current situtation: The energy sector (in Germany) was never eager to use nuclear fission power, they were pushed into it by politics in last century. The environmentalist movement is weird - in Germany. People want wind turbines but they don't want wind turbines in reach of 2 kilometer. What is stupid, because it is a minor thing compared to nuclear power plants, coal power plants or whatever harm a wind turbine can do (collapsing, hitting a bird...). One example of how people can completely lose their mind are the "Startbahngegener" in the late eighties, shot a cop to dead. Because? They were against a new runway at one of the biggest, busiest and oldest airports in Europe. The runway is not an issue and made sense. We need to handle climate change anyway, whatever we do. Nuclear fission power plant? If it blows up you, your country, your kids, the neighbor countries and everyone else is fucked. We increase the chance with every nuclear fission power plant further. It is not a matter of "if", it is a matter of "when". Outlook: At least in Germany. Built wind power plants, build more, store energy as hydrogen (whatever the energy loss is, it is better than not to store) and if possible use NUCLEAR FUSION. Yes Nuclear FUSION! It is much saver, creates only a minimum of nuclear waste after shutdown and in case of control loss and blowup the damage is probably on minor level. Wendelstein[2] - an experimental nuclear fusion project which shall test only but not create energy - is doing progress. Interestingly, this works without the usual international affairs which require involving some companies from every country. But we invest to less. There is no guarantee in success, but nuclear fusion is on any level better than nuclear fission. Sadly politics in cold war were no interested in fusion - nuclear fission was easier to develop and usable for weapons. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tötungsdelikte_an_der_Startbahn_West https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tötungsdelikte_an_der_Startbah... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X Heads up! Not down!
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Sounds like a business opportunity for France to start prepping for the demand for nuclear in a few years when people are paying 1 euro per kwHr

So what is the current state of affairs with nuclear on CO2 neutrality? Last I heard, in its life time it is not CO2 neutral due to mining and storing the fuel. Are these solved problems?

caoilte 5y ago
It's negligable at current levels, but at some point in the next 40 years we will start to run short of easily mineable uranium. Some of the other ways we might have to mine uranium then are carbon intensive. But research is being done. So it depends.
rad_gruchalski 5y ago
Consider this: Hambacher Forst and return to brown coal in Germany is a direct effect of moving away from nuclear. That would be a great background to the total CO2 math.
usrbinbash 5y ago
Almost nothing human technology does is "CO2 Neutral". The question isn't CO2 neutrality, but "How much worse is the alternative". And when the alternative is to burn Coal, Oil and Gas, Nuclear power wins by a landslide. Secondly: Fossil Fuels have to be mined, transported and stored as well. The components of Wind and Solar energy farms have to be constructed from resources which have to be mined and processed. Power plants, be they coal, nuclear, solar, whatever, need to be constructed and maintained.
rory 5y ago
By that standard, no energy source is carbon neutral since wind and solar also require mining and construction. To our best estimate, the footprint of nuclear is a bit higher than solar and wind, but much closer to them than fossil fuels. e.g.: https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low-carbon-footprints https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low... Edit: see page 539 here for a better comparison https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
stjohnswarts 5y ago
It really is all relative, it can essentially be carbon negative in a sense if you use coal as a baseline for damage and ability to reverse global warming.

jakozaur 5y ago

I think ramping up usage of gas is a bad policy. Even taking a little bit longer, but jumping from coal to renewables make more sense than using gas as bridge fuel. We should either go nuclear or renewables with storage. There are still some good spots for hydro-storage as well as batteries are getting cheaper each year.

Faelian2 5y ago

Honestly, the battle Nuclear vs Renewable is quite sad when we look at the sources of energy over time. https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years?country= https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years?country= Coal is not even going down.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Yeah they're just pushing it mostly on poorer countries to bear the brunt of coal burning so they can keep their air clean.

guerby 5y ago

https://archive.is/jNMjM https://archive.is/jNMjM

throwawayffffas 5y ago

On a relevant note first plasma in ITER is still 3 years out. https://www.iter.org/construction/construction https://www.iter.org/construction/construction

pfdietz 5y ago
And it won't use tritium until 2035 or later. And it will never be able to breed tritium, or operate on DT for more than a few weeks total. And it's on a technological dead end to anything that could be competitive, even with fission.
- throwawayffffas 5y ago
  I am not any kind of expert in the matter, but I don't buy the technological dead end argument. But still if everything worked perfectly I would hazard we would still be at least 20-30 years out of a commercial project that would cost billions and take a decade to build.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    That you don't buy it doesn't mean it's not true. ITER has horrific power density, some 400x worse than the reactor vessel in a fission power plant. Given that the non-nuclear part of the a fission and DT fusion plant will be similar, making the reactor itself much larger and much more complex, and therefore much more expensive, cannot be a win. The less experimental follow-ons to ITER (PROTO, DEMO) are still massively too large. This generic problem with DT fusion reactors has been known since at least the 1980s.
    - schnitzelstoat 5y ago
      The UK's STEP project uses a higher aspect ratio ('spherical tokamak') to reduce the required size of the machine. The initial investigations from MAST are encouraging, but we'll see how it goes. Of course, this stuff will be ready for commercial use in like 2050 assuming everything goes to plan (which is rare unless it's really prioritised like the Manhattan Project, Apollo Missions etc.) So regardless, something will have to be done prior to then - either we find better energy storage solutions for renewables or we expedite the construction of replacement/new fission plants or both.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

A lot of assumptions wrapped up in that short headline. "Europe is losing ICE vehicles, just as it needs to transport people."

acidburnNSA 5y ago
Except ICE vehicles are not providing a unique firm low carbon capability like nuclear is.

roenxi 5y ago

It is - frankly - shocking that elite culture has drifted so far into the world of make believe that something as simple as energy security has become a political battleground. If there was a single issue that the entire political body of a country has a stake in, that is the issue. And yet, somehow, we're seeing Europe in this position where they're trying to go it without energy. The figures out of the UK [0] are jaw dropping to me. 44% reduction in energy production, 20% in electricity and with a growing population! The country must be populated entirely by monks and ascetics if they are putting up with this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#O...

automatic6131 5y ago
Yup, Brit here. It beggars belief. And the leaders will continue to be so stupid, because the other party will also make this mistake too.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  What happened to the nuclear reactor built with the help of China, with George Osborne's approval?
  - stuaxo 5y ago
    It is still being built and they have a very good deal that means every house hold in the UK will be paying over the odds to give it guaranteed profits for decades to come.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Rent seeking intensifies.
    - yodelshady 5y ago
      per ofgem, wholesale prices have been greater than Hinkley's £92/MWh since October. And that's before we add heating to the winter electric load. Conservatively, and I am really trying here, you're doubling grid load. If we go by my household, you're adding a zero. I can find multiple >12 hr periods in this fairly mild winter where wind has essentially failed on demand (<5% satisfaction). I'm sorry but if someone says "storage" when talking about even that sort of shortfall they're lying.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

Politicians and the people who support them push for many self-damaging policies based purely on ideologies, just because they sound good (getting rid of nuclear, going green) without considering the direct consequences of these actions (how do we serve our energy needs until we become fully green?). That's like selling both your kidney to buy a prosthetic robot arm and wonder why you're not feeling well despite the upgrade. Sadly you can't argue on the pros of nuclear as you'd get drowned out by the "But Chernobyl blew up" shouts. Rich anti-nuclear countries like Austria call themselves green while supplementing their energy needs via imports from coal burning Czech Republic and nuclear powered Slovenia. Laughable. This loophole in the EU should be stopped. If you import dirty energy you should also be responsible for the equivalent CO2 emissions you imported and not be allowed to call yourself green when clearly you just outsource your pollution.

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
> without considering the direct consequences of these actions And the best example of that in Germany is Hambacher Forst. Return to coal is a direct result of moving away from nuclear. Nuts.
- emsign 5y ago
  Germany did not return to coal. That's simply not true. The coal under Hambacher Forest isn't even needed and it won't be used up either.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Germany did not return to coal. Germany's buying cheap energy from coal burning Poland so it might as well have. Call it outsourcing of coal burning if that makes it easier to take in.
    - zuzun 5y ago
      A net import of 250,000 MWh in the past month. That's not even 1% of Germany's electricity production. Germany produced 4x as much electricity from photovoltaics even though the sun wasn't shining.

fsflover 5y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798065.

squarefoot 5y ago

Building thousands nuclear plants for every country wouldn't suffice if most of their energy is wasted to mine cryptocurrencies -> make money -> build more mining farms that require more power -> more power plants -> more money, etc. It should be clear now that this endless loop is not going to scale and energy prices are going to soar no matter how many nuclear plants we build, because all available one will be used anyway by people who could still sustain higher energy prices. The problem is not the lack of energy. Actually we'd have plenty if someone didn't waste most of it for just one damn thing that produces nothing of real value in return while slowly killing the planet.

ryan93 5y ago
Crypto uses less than 1% or something. What are you talking about?
- llampx 5y ago
  Its the HN pet peeve.
  - rufusroflpunch 5y ago
    HN is generally so incredibly uninformed on this topic.
- stuaxo 5y ago
  It has a pathetic amount of transactions. If it's adopted to any extent it will need a lot more than that.
  - danuker 5y ago
    As the inflationary BTC miner reward halves every 4 years, the miner income will gradually shift to primarily transaction-fee-based. I suspect this will drive down the available energy budget.
- paganel 5y ago

throwaway10122 5y ago

Germany spent something like a trillion euro on renewables and still produces much more CO2 per capita per year than France who spent 200 billion on nuclear (and whose nuclear industry is forced to bail out competitors now) One would think "green" movements (greenpeace, and modern green parties) have been infiltrated by coal/oil/gas lobbies as so far the only winner out of no nuclear yes wind policy is Vladimir Putin and not the environment

raphaelj 5y ago
Past spending are actually not relevant, as renewable got significantly cheaper, while nuclear got more expensive. Solar is today 5x less expensive than it was in 2010[1]. --- [1] https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2020/Jun/IRENA_Costs_2019_EN.pdf?la=en&hash=BFAAB4DD2A14EDA7329946F9C3BDA9CD806C1A8A https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...
- steeve 5y ago
  Rain water will always be cheaper than tap water.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  And a large part of why it's cheaper is because Germany spent so much, driving the costs down the production learning curve. The whole world, including Germany, will benefit tremendously from that spending.
- thrown_22 5y ago
  Coal is free underground which is in the same league as saying that solar is cheep at noon. That something this simple is never talked about when it comes to renewables is a monument to peoples ability to ignore the obvious.
  - dang 5y ago
    You've been posting comments that get flagged, then deleting and reposting them many times—in one case, over a dozen times! That's abusive, and we ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so if you'd please stop doing it, we'd appreciate it. Also, if you could please stop posting flamewar comments in the first place, that would be good, because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

danjac 5y ago

The problem is that for much of the current generation of politicians in power, particularly in Germany, all thought about nuclear power has been frozen in time since 1985. Furthermore you have bought-and-paid-for members of the establishment like Gerhard Schröder who have a vested interest in shutting down nuclear power plants.

myspy 5y ago
We could've partially solved the problem with steady construction of wind farms which were politically held back in the last 10 years.
- ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
  Wind generally can't provide base load due to its sporadic nature. They really aren't substitutes until we get cheap energy storage
  - Entalpi 5y ago
    This. We need nuclear to keep the base load green. Wind and solar need batteries to be base load providers. Building out both battery and renewable infrastructure at the same time is a tall order.
    - rekoil 5y ago
      Yeah this is what most people are not getting in this whole debate. That and the fact that it's really costly to transmit electricity over long distances, even at extremely high voltages. The best solution is a bunch of smallish nuclear reactors spread out over the continent for base power production, wind/solar/hydro (is wave electricity a thing? I remember it was discussed a bunch of years ago in relation to green production) wherever those make sense, and high voltage transmission lines to allow load balancing. But we don't have that, and it takes a long time to build so we should get started now, but instead they will say "oh we should have built that 20 years ago now it's too late"... :(

DrBazza 5y ago

From my aged perspective, this is reaping the "green benefit" from the 70s and 80s, when there were world wide activists campaigning against nuclear power for "reasons" (largely the Cold War). If you think green activists are something new, it's because you're "young". We're reaping what we sowed back then: the "brainwashing" of the public that unquestioningly accept that nuclear power is 'bad' and tightly linked to nuclear weapons and death. Despite the fact that nuclear power stations do not have to produce "weapons grade" plutonium/whatever and, I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face, has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation and produce the lowest amount of CO2 (i.e. zero, other than construction). It's entirely likely more people die in a day world wide from fossil fuel pollution and production than have ever died from nuclear accidents. > The trouble, as ever, is time. “Any investment decisions you make now aren’t going to come to fruition until the 2030s,” said Osbaldstone, the research director at Wood Mackenzie. “Nuclear isn’t an answer to the current energy crisis.” As the saying goes "the best time to build X was yesterday". Careful what you wish for. The millions of tons of CO2 we could have avoided emitting in Europe... > “Nuclear isn’t an answer to the current energy crisis.” Sorry, but to use an old quote, nuclear is the worst solution to the current energy crisis, apart from all the others.

dachryn 5y ago
ironically, that same could now be said about our gas crisis in Europe, where we handover immense leverage into the control of Russia.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
> I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face, has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation and produce the lowest amount of CO2 (i.e. zero, other than construction). Will you stop repeating this if I explain why it's false? So first up, the stat is usually fatalities per TwH, since that skews things in Nuclear's direction, not just number of fatalities which would be won by some obscure but not very successful power source. Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date. You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower. Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data. Of course if you have a limited amount of money to spend, then you'll generate more energy and save more lives with whatever the cheaper form of energy is, so we should really take that into consideration too. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

emsign 5y ago

Nucler power is just too risky of an investment. You can set up a solar park in weeks, nothing compared to the decades of lobbying, nimby-backlash, getting the planning permissions, financial risks and pouring billions into the nuclear plant. And you still need massive tax cuts and securities from the tax payers for it to be profitable, not to mention the government to help you out if the darn thing goes pop. A d Murphy know a nuclear power plant is one of the most complex machines we humans can built. Why would you do that as an energy company. Ask Tepco if they are happy. They aren't. The only countries that still build nuclear are the ones that massively promote it for political reasons and it's often countries with an or wanting to have an arsenal of atomic weapons, go figure. Nuclear is a dead horse unless.

ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
Nuclear costs so much because we haven't built reactors in decades. If we had been focused on nuclear innovation and deployment consistently since the 50s, then (a) we would have smaller nuclear facilities by now that are much easier to deploy and can't melt down and (b) operationalizing and deploying nuclear in general would be much cheaper. You have a headwind to doing an activity when you rarely engage in an activity. Chernobyl really messed us up in this regard, sadly.
- caoilte 5y ago
  How about 3 mile island or Fukushima or countless other times where we got lucky. Nuclear disasters are an inevitability with such a complex technology. I'm all in favour of more research into MSRs, but it could easily not work out to be efficient enough to scale. And solar/wind/storage/smart grid solutions are already here and demonstrably up to the job.
throwaway4good 5y ago
Incredible you get downvoted for this. You are absolutely correct; nuclear is disappearing because it is too costly and basically only makes sense if you want weapons. Look at the projects in the UK - delays for decades and massive budget overruns. Or Turkey if you to see something that is driven by dubious reasons ...

phicoh 5y ago

The problem is simple. For decades, Russia was supplying natural gas reliably and for a reasonable price. Generating electricity with natural gas is trivial. So shutting down old nuclear power and replacing it with wind/solar backed up by gas was not a crazy idea. Was is a crazy idea is then letting 'the free market' take care of the gas supply. Where is gets more complex, natural gas is not just used to generate electricity, but also to provide heat for lots of homes. Keep old nuclear power plants running doesn't do anything for keeping people warm. In short, Europe has a natural gas problem, not so much a nuclear power problem.

m4rtink 5y ago
There are project that use waste heat from nuclear power plants for district heating: https://keepwarmeurope.eu/news/?c=search&uid=Nsjnork8 https://keepwarmeurope.eu/news/?c=search&uid=Nsjnork8 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325110704_Construction_of_heat_pipeline_from_Temelin_Nuclear_Power_Plant_to_the_city_of_Ceske_Budejovice_A_Financial_Analysis_of_from_an_Investor_standpoint https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325110704_Construct...
mobilio 5y ago
And on other side coal power plants are hit with expensive CO2 quotas.
mcjiggerlog 5y ago
> Keep old nuclear power plants running doesn't do anything for keeping people warm. "According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, about 43 nuclear reactors around the world—mostly in Eastern Europe and Russia—provide district heating in addition to generating electricity." (https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/ https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...)
- phicoh 5y ago
  You have to compare district heating to about 7 million households using natural gas for heating in The Netherlands alone. So keeping a few nuclear power plants open has hardly any effect on the amount of natural gas that is used.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

ogogmad 5y ago

If democratic countries build more nuclear power plants, then won't that encourage less democratic countries to also build nuclear power plants, and then eventually nuclear weapons? "We're not making nuclear weapons, only nuclear power plants" is what countries like Iran say. And many other countries would like them to stop. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving a wider perspective.

cycomanic 5y ago

What is it with framing this in terms of nuclear power. Many of the nuclear plants are being shut down because they are either end-of-life or were recently shut down because they were uneconomical. Sure we can argue that we were not prepared for the recent uptick in energy demand as well as exceptionally low wind last year. However, one can just as well argue that this was a failure not to build more wind and solar capacity. The bigger issue is that nobody wants to build nuclear power without massive subsidies, because it is simply not economical. So shouting now, "you should have build more plants" is easy, but that would have meant higher electricity prices, because that's what would be needed to economically run nuclear power.

mcjiggerlog 5y ago
> Many of the nuclear plants are being shut down because they are either end-of-life or were recently shut down because they were uneconomical. This is simply not true. The main reason plants are being shutdown is because Germany, Belgium and Spain are closing them before end-of-life due to political pressure.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  For those who want to know more, VisualPolitk EN has covered it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYagGAgHfQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYagGAgHfQ0
martin_a 5y ago
Also don't forget to calculate the cost for maintenance, dismantling and safe storage of nuclear waste for probably hundreds/thousands of years. We currently do not have _any_ viable solution other than "put it somewhere in a mountain" to get rid of nuclear waste. Nobody would propose a technology or product where this is the only solution to take care of the waste, nevertheless this seems to be fine for nuclear power. What we really need to do is invest heavily in research and developement of storage systems of all kinds, building a more decentralized power grid (solar on every roof where possible e.g.) and getting rid of fossil fuels along the way. Everythings needs to run parallel, not one after another.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Not just nuclear, the Netherlands is stopping all it's gas production. Europe is a very diverse continent. Something that tends to be forgotten in American perception. A country like the Netherlands has practically unlimited amount of money to import oil and gas from abroad while people in Greece are reduced to burning wood to keep warm in winter.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

There are no blackouts in Europe. There's no energy shortage. This is not Texas. There's a cost problem, however. With gas specifically. And that reflects in the electricity prices currently because there are quite a few gas plants. Until recently, nuclear was the undisputed king of cost. There was nothing more expensive in the market. And that's before you count the cost of long term storage, security, and decades of government subsidies. I guess, for this year it might look quite alright compared to gas. But that is probably a temporary effect before it goes back to its undisputed status as being the most costly thing in the market. Replacing an expensive thing with an even more expensive thing is not a solution to reducing cost. It doesn't make sense. Europe needs cheap power, not expensive power. And it's getting plenty of that from renewables. It's far ahead of most other places in the world in terms of deploying wind and other renewables. The nuclear phase down in Germany is actually happening without any disruptions to energy supply. The grid seems plenty resilient (again, rolling blackouts are not a thing here). Also, there's a healthy growth of other capacity and it's a very competitive market with lots of innovative companies making lots of money. Nuclear was always a relatively minor part of the energy economy in Germany. We're talking about some 20GW of capacity in total of which some 8(?) GW remains which is on track to disappear later this year. Compared to the new capacity that has been added in (mainly) wind and solar form since the nuclear phase out started 12 years ago that is nothing. About 3x the amount of nuclear capacity Germany ever had was added in wind energy alone since then. Probably in the next few years more will come online than Germany ever had in nuclear capacity. People probably have more solar on their roofs than ever existed in nuclear capacity. That was growing at a pace of almost 0.5GW per month last summer apparently. The reasons electricity prices are high is because the EU is overly dependent on natural gas, which until recently was vastly cheaper than nuclear (and coal plants). The current geo-political situation with particularly Russia is disrupting oil and gas prices. Not because there is a shortage but because Russia is trying to pressurize the EU to do what it wants. The cheapest solution to that is diplomacy. And given that apparently gas prices dropped 11% or so after Russia kindly started providing gas through Ukranian pipelines again, that seems to be working. The likely long term effect will be an acceleration of replacing gas with other things. That was already happening anyway. Higher prices will make it happen faster.

elric 5y ago

streamofdigits 5y ago

Imagine this dismall planet dotted with decrepit nuclear plants, even as the societies that are supposed to keep them safe collapse either of their own accord, or due to interminable warfare. When deciding on the wisdom of adopting a technology that will shape our fate for the next century you don't condition on the best (or even expected) scenario, you condition on the worst plausible scenario. For a long as we haven't solved our obvious and serious socio-economic pathologies it is actually safer to keep burning carbon. At least that damage is in-principle reversible.

kebos 5y ago

https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ - overly good day for renewable production in the UK, my thoughts: 1. Wind is really cost effective for the UK and loads more is due to come online 2. EPR reactors keep running massively over budget e.g. Flamanville 3 3. Research money is heading into the best ways to store grid level energy. All in all I am very hopeful and not against Nuclear at all but I just can't ignore the charts today. Such a nice thought that a good % of my flat is being powered with little consequence!

rekoil 5y ago
Oh it's windy today? Great! I guess it'll be windy every day in the future, let's replace all energy production with wind farms! /s I know this is not what you're saying, but that's pretty much how I imagine some people think, especially "green" politicians.
- VyperCard 5y ago
  Yeah, but that’s in your head.
rullelito 5y ago
I have friends with the same dilutions. "We just need to build loads of tiny mechanical generators and enough batteries to store a few days worth of our countries electricity consumption" How someone can say this (and still claim to be green) is beyond me.

tyronehed 5y ago

akamaka 5y ago

It's mind-boggling to me that so commenters are blaming fear and brainwashing for the demise of nuclear power, when the answer is crystal clear in the numbers. As of this year, the cheapest wind and solar farms have a lower total cost than the marginal cost of the average nuclear plant.[1] That means that in many places, it is cheaper to immediately shut down the nuclear plants and direct the money that was spent on operating costs into construction of renewables. Yes, we should certainly keep the better-designed existing plants up and running, and build some new ones where the conditions are favorable, but in most places in the world it doesn't come close to making sense. [1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

throw0101a 5y ago
> As of this year, the cheapest wind and solar farms have a lower total cost than the marginal cost of the average nuclear plant.[1] That means that in many places, it is cheaper to immediately shut down the nuclear plants and direct the money that was spent on operating costs into construction of renewables. Except that in this situation fossil fuel-based generators keep running. We should be keeping nukes for as long as possible, and shutting down coal and gas first. The new renewable pick up the slack for coal/gas, and once all of the latter are gone then you start shutting down nuclear.
ComradePhil 5y ago
Even if you fill the entire world in solar panels and wind mills, we won't have reliable 24-hours energy. That means you can't rely of constant supply of it, which means you'll need something as a backup. Nuclear is one of the most reliable sources. The world has enough uranium for at least a few hundred years, which in practice could be much much longer depending on if we can keep installing more renewable plants. So, why not use nuclear as a backup? There is nothing even close to a better option than that.
- akamaka 5y ago
  I’m definitely in favor of keeping and upgrading existing plants and building some new ones, but there’s no source of energy that has 100% availability. A few years ago, France had 1/3 of its reactors offline at the same time for maintenance. Indeed we would have to build enormous overcapacity with wind and solar to achieve 100% uptime, but until we perfect energy storage, that’s true of any energy source today.

antman 5y ago

Oh great a discussion about international ethics, sure let's dive into the narrative and choose teams. Or not. Anyway, my understanding of the big picture using the mental framework I got from a previous HN post of short and long con(thanks HN) The short con: Environmental ethics, the other team is illogical. The long con(Nuclear Lobby): Those that support nuclear have invested and given subsidies to their respective industries disregarding the fact that it is not that safe. The definition of safety is based on the insurance which if I recall was capped at 100mil and the rest is insured by peoples taxes if something happens. If it wasn't capped the concept of nuclear would not be feasible. The long con(Non nuclear Lobby aka Germany): The previous German counselor (whose politics as I see them from afar where mostly based on human sentiment except when against industry) overshot anyone's assumption of the feasibility of a non nuclear policy and subsidized heavily non nuclear. Then they tried to support by European Lobbying and legislation. The whole thing backfired and they need to buy energy from abroad which has caused a steep increase in prices and a passive policy against Russia. So natural gas needs to also be defined as "kind of environmental" or Germany has no real policy. If it works, and since they are the entry of natural gas for Europe, they can friction everybody towards any policy that makes sense in the future. Also: The environment something something (I have phased out, EU or any large country does not plan based on ethics, just based on short term reelection goals). Also 2: EU refused to pre agree with Russians for natural gas prices and the gas price skyrocketed forcing more environmental policy that smaller countries in EU must adopt early. French threw a wrench in German's works who are exposed to their non nuclear investments. Also somehow Russians fault? Sure... Also 3: Two actual targets of environmental policy: Reduce gas emissions, Reduce nuclear meltdown danger. Pick and choose depending on which country's media you are exposed to and their respective owners financing. Also 4: 30% increase in non service production due to covid did not help prices I assume. Guess: They will find an understanding somewhere in the middle, they are financially exposed, which means politically exposed and no one will remember after the a new round of articles from the media. In the meantime we are paying for no reason.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Why are you even here if you don't want to discuss/debate? There are literally a hundred other articles on here _today_ you could go read and comment on.

LatteLazy 5y ago

Let's get real, nuclear is a solution in search of a problem. It's low carbon, but we've decided not to cut our emissions, so why bother? It would rescue us from Russian gas reliance. But cost 10 times more and won't be ready till 2040 so why bother? (Plus you can't replace domestic gas supplies with electricity...). It's reliable for base load, but we already have that from gas so why bother?

funklute 5y ago
> but we've decided not to cut our emissions What? Where do you have this from?
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  We've increased our emissions almost every year for decades. A few years back, in Paris, we signed a "you do you" agreement to all decide for ourselves whether to cut our emissions and not to complain if others don't cut them. We're well on schedule to blow through all the ppm concentrations (I think we blew through the 1C rise one last year some time?) It's like this weird open secret where we all agree something should definitely be done, and then do nothing. Like 100 people are a car crash all hoping someone else will get involved or something.

MrPatan 5y ago

Qui bono?

cletus 5y ago

This is a key point: > Plants, though, take a decade or more to construct at best and the risk is high of running over time and over budget. Finland’s new Olkiluoto-3 unit is coming on line after a 12-year delay and billions of euros in financial overruns. I'll expand on this further: do you know how many of the world's nuclear power plants (~660 IIRC) were privately funded and built without (significant) government subsidies? The answer is zero. This is not just a construction issue, it also affects maintenance [1]. Sure lets continue researching smaller, modular reactors that can be constructed more cheaply and in less time. But we're not there yet. None of the research projects, prototypes or proposals are anywhere close to commercial viability yet. Most of them don't even exist yet. Personally I'm bearing on fission power. Plants take too long to build. They're too expensive to build and maintain. I don't trust humans or corporations for long-term management and maintenance, particularly in countries without strong government. We don't have a good story for the long term storage or disposal of enrichment waste or power production waste. The significant systems required around mining, fuel processing, spent fuel processing, maintenance, fuel replacement, inspection and oversight (eg the NRC) are significant and won't scale to the required level. The article is right though: this is political and the politics are bad for nuclear. It will take the likes of China to mass deploy nuclear once these problems are solved to change any opinions in the West. [1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nuclear-power-wont-survive-without-a-government-handout/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nuclear-power-wont-surv...

q1w2 5y ago
Your source does not say anything about gov't subsidies for nuclear plant construction. Nuclear plants are built, like any power plant or major project, with corporate/state/municipal bonds. These aren't really handouts. They are fixed income instruments that allow corporations to spread the cost of construction over the life of the project. Nuclear reactors are profitable. The challenges are those we create to stop them. Lawsuits, protests, political work stoppages, etc...

ucha 5y ago

Nuclear is obviously key to energy independence etc... but the very common take these days of "Nuclear power is the safest energy production technology available, just look at historical data" is deeply misguided. It's very hard to accurately estimate the risk of a nuclear power-plant disaster because looking back at the past and extrapolating data from there is non-sensical when the risk is so fat-tailed. Sure, Chernobyl, Fukushima and ever Three Mile Island killed a few thousands at most in aggregate but for anyone familiar with the history of Chernobyl, the story is quite different. 10 days after the main explosion, a leak caused a large amount of water to accumulate under the melting core. Had the melting core reached that pool of water, it would have caused a massive steam explosion that would have spread radioactive particles over most of Europe and Russia making them uninhabitable. Thankfully, three men risked their lives to enter the power-plant and closed a valve preventing more water from accumulating under the core. Now, you could say that current reactors are safer, which might be true, but before Chernobyl, such a disaster was also thought to be impossible. Even if there is a 10% risk of contamination of a whole continent over a century, does it make sense to take it? One could argue that such risk would be acceptable if it prevents climate change. But acknowledging the existence of these enormous risks is a required step to have an honest debate.

thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
> spread radioactive particles over most of Europe and Russia making them uninhabitable JFC, this is the perfect capture of the level of debate surrounding nuclear If it was true, don't you think every single country in the world would obtain such a world-destroying weapon? If it was true, then a single nuclear reactor would be able to power the whole world for eternity
- ucha 5y ago
  Uh that makes no sense. > If it was true, don't you think every single country in the world would obtain such a world-destroying weapon? Countries already have nuclear weapons. They can very well spread radioactive material over large landmasses but what's the point? > If it was true, then a single nuclear reactor would be able to power the whole world for eternity I have no idea how you deduced this but it's wrong.

noelhecht 5y ago

ajnin 5y ago

> As the Fukushima disaster unfolded in Japan in 2011, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a dramatic decision that delighted her country’s anti-nuclear movement: all reactors would be ditched. What couldn’t have been predicted was that Europe would find itself mired in one of the worst energy crises in its history That's just not really true, plenty of people warned that with Germany closing nuclear and coal plants at the same time it would need to rely on external sources for energy, France for electricity, and with NordStream 1 and 2 projects, the reliance on Russian gas for Germany rose to around 50%. It was pretty obvious that becoming dependent on a not always friendly foreign power was a bad idea, but with Germany being so dominant in Europe no one dared to oppose it. Now Russia is playing this card fully.

ho_schi 5y ago

Please stop wining and make progress :) Current situtation: The energy sector (in Germany) was never eager to use nuclear fission power, they were pushed into it by politics in last century. The environmentalist movement is weird - in Germany. People want wind turbines but they don't want wind turbines in reach of 2 kilometer. What is stupid, because it is a minor thing compared to nuclear power plants, coal power plants or whatever harm a wind turbine can do (collapsing, hitting a bird...). One example of how people can completely lose their mind are the "Startbahngegener" in the late eighties, shot a cop to dead. Because? They were against a new runway at one of the biggest, busiest and oldest airports in Europe. The runway is not an issue and made sense. We need to handle climate change anyway, whatever we do. Nuclear fission power plant? If it blows up you, your country, your kids, the neighbor countries and everyone else is fucked. We increase the chance with every nuclear fission power plant further. It is not a matter of "if", it is a matter of "when". Outlook: At least in Germany. Built wind power plants, build more, store energy as hydrogen (whatever the energy loss is, it is better than not to store) and if possible use NUCLEAR FUSION. Yes Nuclear FUSION! It is much saver, creates only a minimum of nuclear waste after shutdown and in case of control loss and blowup the damage is probably on minor level. Wendelstein[2] - an experimental nuclear fusion project which shall test only but not create energy - is doing progress. Interestingly, this works without the usual international affairs which require involving some companies from every country. But we invest to less. There is no guarantee in success, but nuclear fusion is on any level better than nuclear fission. Sadly politics in cold war were no interested in fusion - nuclear fission was easier to develop and usable for weapons. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tötungsdelikte_an_der_Startbahn_West https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tötungsdelikte_an_der_Startbah... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X Heads up! Not down!

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Sounds like a business opportunity for France to start prepping for the demand for nuclear in a few years when people are paying 1 euro per kwHr