7 ms·

What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper tha

What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

robertlagrant 2y ago
I'm confused. The way you've phrased this certainly doesn't sound like it couldn't be the future.
- EcommerceFlow 2y ago
  I've heard for years that if we just had "tons" of Nuclear plants, our energy costs would essentially be too cheap to meter. Yet France is not experiencing this even at 75% Nuclear.
  - WheatMillington 2y ago
    Where did you hear that? I've only ever heard about how nuclear is both capital and opex intensive and very expensive.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      It was a common BS claim in the Reagan years, as to why we didn't need to invest in renewables back then. "Why bother, soon all this nuclear energy will basically be free". This has nothing to do with what anyone actually said. Just ask any 60-something, mild conservative. The meme exists, even though the actual quote was slightly more mealy mouthed. It was always nonsense anyway. Electricity generation is mostly a deregulated market in most places, so nobody would spend billions on a Nuclear plant that wasn't guaranteed to make back it's money. It was always a thought terminating cliche.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        From Wikipedia[0], admittedly: > Most reactors began construction by 1974; following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and changing economics, many planned projects were canceled. More than 100 orders for nuclear power reactors, many already under construction, were canceled in the 1970s and 1980s, bankrupting some companies. How does that square with your recollection? Or were lots of nuclear power plants being constructed in the 1980s, and the article is very wrong? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    You're remembering a (mis-)quote of a speech given in 1954[0]. And even if it weren't a misquote, "Living up to a quote from 1954" is not how we judge whether a power source is still worth investing in for the future. [0] https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2015/09/too-cheap-to-meter-the-infamous-nuclear-power-misquote https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2015/09/too-cheap-to-meter-t...
  - serial_dev 2y ago
    As far as I know and even learned as a (since failed) physicist, a country needs a good mixture of energy sources. Mind you I went to a university that's nuclear energy focused and even they didn't advocate for full on only nuclear. In my opinion, if someone says we should just have all nuclear, it means they are dealing in absolutes, maybe God in politics and debate, but they ignore that reality is much more complicated, as technology meets economics and politics (and much more). (Again, AFAIK) nuclear energy is great when it comes to meeting the "baseline" requirements, roughly the level below which energy consumption of a region never drops. It is because nuclear energy cannot be scaled up and down quickly, so it's not adequate for peaks. To balance the peaks and keep the network stable, you need energy sources that can increase their output in seconds (or less?). That's also one of the issues with wind and solar, you can't choose when it is available and when it isn't, so coal etc is still needed to make sure that energy production and consumption is practically equal at all times.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Nuclear is very poor for baseline requirements. Baseline requirements should be met by the cheapest source and more expensive sources should only be added as required to follow demand.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        If you price in pollution, doesn't nuclear become the cheapest base load provider?
        bryanlarsen 2y ago
        No, not even close.
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        Fancy elaborating?
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    If anyone told you that they were lying to you.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    Presumably once it gets cheap enough it becomes profitable to sell it internationally which caps the price? Besides, you still have to pay back for the construction and the fuel, it's never gonna be free.
  - Herz 2y ago
    The words of a human shouldn't necessarily represent reality, especially when the human in question is a politician and not a scientist. Your argument doesn't make much sense. Furthermore, no one could have predicted the mass protests, scandals, and fears that nuclear energy has sparked over the decades. These factors have significantly reduced the hype and investment in the sector.
henearkr 2y ago
The determinant factor in this article is the renewable electricity sudden flow. Nuclear fission reactors have problems in other domains like being a huge liability during a military conflict, and dependance on uranium supply from the Sahel.
gumby 2y ago
Indeed. The op ex of nuclear is surprisingly high (esp when compared to wind solar), then on top of that is the cost of financing the very long build. Also, nuclear plants in France are starting to suffer from water shortages; since an overheating plant is a problem it means that they take water at the expense of other uses, which is an externality they currently don't pay for because the economics of these plants is so terrible already. I really want to like niclear but I have never been able to see the math work (and I've been paying intermittent attention for 40 years).
givemeethekeys 2y ago
There's a cost associated with construction and maintenance - labor and materials aren't free. Then, there's everything else - you'd have to look at their budget to see if the proceeds from electricity are funding other programs.
johnzim 2y ago
I mean.. They literally just became too cheap to meter by application of 33% more generation? Functionally they could get there by just building a few more reactors.
- more_corn 2y ago
  The “just” word is doing a lot of work here and masking multiple billion euro investments, decades long planning and build projects, risk and opportunity cost. How about instead we “just” invest in grid scale and distributed battery storage and double down on wind and solar?
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future? Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more. The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural gas and coal) or are unreliable (solar and wind). I actually don't believe nuclear is "the future" because I think renewables + battery storage will be more economical going forward and less politically dicey. But France is currently the envy of the world for their energy generation save for some countries with unique environments that allow for a lot of carbon-free generation (e.g. Norway with hydro and Iceland with geothermal).
- briandear 2y ago
  Why isn’t wind and solar politically dicey? Nuclear is only politically dicey due to ignorance. I’d rather one nuclear plant than having the landscape covered with huge windmills — windmills made out of materials that aren’t recyclable. Solar is even worse. Nuclear doesn’t affect wildlife like wind and solar.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Spending $20B for $1B worth of generating capacity is and always should be politically dicey.
  - dmoo 2y ago
    Until it does…
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Nuclear elicits outrage from customers forced to pay for it because it's so expensive. How do you propose muting them politics?
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I agree that the safety fears and waste disposal issues around nuclear are overwrought, but still: I would much prefer solar and wind farms (even with the downsides you mention) over the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. Even if the probability of something like that is 0.0000000001% or whatever, the consequences are so severe that it just doesn't seem worth it when there's a good-enough alternative. Also consider that nuclear is expensive (both in capex and opex)! The whole "too cheap to meter" nonsense from the 1950s never came to fruition. I get that opinions differ on this (clearly you have a different take), but that's fine; reasonable people can disagree. (To be clear, I don't believe solar/wind is the be-all, end-all. Base load generation is still a problem there, and neither source is reliable or consistent in the way that something like nuclear is.)
digdugdirk 2y ago
Their grid was still constructed on a capitalistic model. Investment in electricity generation stations in return for payments from electricity consuming users over time. Build too much nuclear (or any other power generation) and you lower the returns of the previous investors. The easy answer is that financiers don't want it, so it won't happen.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
yongjik 2y ago
The nice thing about nuclear is that you can plan how much electricity you're going to generate. (Well, not counting project delays and stuff...) Ergo, if you're using nuclear and energy became "too cheap to meter" then someone was not doing their job properly. If Tesla overestimated market demand and has to give away cars for free, would you say it means Tesla is the car of the future?
helsinkiandrew 2y ago
> yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter" French nuclear power is run by EDF, which although 85% owned by the French government has “a mandate to make a profit for its shareholders”
- guerby 2y ago
  EDF is 100% owned by the french government since 20230608: https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/08062023-letat-redevient-lactionnaire-unique-dedf/ https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/08062023-letat-redevient-lac...
  - helsinkiandrew 2y ago
    But it still makes a profit and pays tax on it. https://www.edf.fr/sites/groupe/files/epresspack/7068/PR-FY-2023-V16.02.2024.pdf https://www.edf.fr/sites/groupe/files/epresspack/7068/PR-FY-...
Retric 2y ago
France is its own unique thing because of how the government paid for so many things out of pocket they ended up losing money selling at wholesale rates. Safe Nuclear ended up being a lot more expensive than earlier predictions. It’s not some design issue that you can fix with small modular reactors or whatever. Every time anything significant goes wrong people kept adding systems to prevent it happening again. Sometimes that’s something physical like a wall or redundant system, and other times it’s longer procedures and more paperwork. This has been great for avoiding another SL-1, 3 mile island etc, but mitigating every possible risks isn’t cheap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 For example there was once an expensive issue where foreign material fell into the spent fuel pool where fixing it significantly extended an outage at a single reactor so now everyone working on anything at any reactor takes significant steps to mitigate that risk. Great things working as intended except now something that might have cost 100k now costs significantly more because of that mitigation effort. Extend that to any significant issue across hundreds of reactors and 50+ years and suddenly triple checking to avoid every fuck up means doing anything is really expensive. Worse very little of it is wasted effort, there’s just far more ways to fuck up in practice than in theory. PS: I do believe it’s possible to have safe and cheap nuclear power, it’s just going to look very different than what we’re doing today.
photochemsyn 2y ago
Operating costs for a coal-fired power plant, a nuclear reactor power plant, and a solar-battery power plant (requirement: steady power output 24-7) are all pretty comparable these days. Upfront constuction costs on nuclear are higher than others, so nuclear comes out near the top of the cost envelope. A lot also depends on variable costs of uranium ore and the fuel rod production process. While a 1 GW coal plant might burn as much as 4 million tons of coal a year, a comparable nuclear power plant only consumes some 30 tons of fuels rods per year - but depending on ore quality and U-235 enrichment level, that might translate to 300,000 tons of uranium ore that needs to be mined and converted into fuel rods through an expensive multi-step process. Coal is much dirtier in terms of average daily emissions (though there's always the catastrophic failure risk with nuclear). Solar / wind / storage operating costs are limited to maintenance and battery replacement, which can still be considerable.
gwervc 2y ago
Because the price of electricity is (unfairly) based on gas price by EU regulations, imposed by Germany. One of the propositions of one party running for the next election is to renegotiate this so we can use our cheap electricity as the competitive advantage it is.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
That's because it's a state run system and it really isn't that cheap. The nuclear operators are shielded from market rates by the government. The way that works is that they get a guaranteed price per kwh in long multi year deals, regardless of what the market does. That's actually true in most countries that operate nuclear plants. Without those guarantees, it's to risky of a thing to do financially for investors. What they charge customers in France is also controlled by the government (and not the same thing). The difference is simply made up by tax payer money. Of course being connected to the rest of the European market and also having a lot of their own renewables, this just means that bill is getting larger and larger for the French government whenever there is a surplus of wind and solar. Which is probably happening quite often now. Here are some details on a deal the French government struck with nuclear operator EDF recently: https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication-listing/france-strikes-an-agreement-with-edf-over-nuclear-energy-prices https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication... It's indeed a great example why commercial nuclear plants without extensive state support is not really a thing. Most places that have nuclear plants, also feature heavy government involvement and state funding. That plant that Bill Gates is involved with that recently started construction work, only still exists because of extensive state involvement.
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
Why would any commercial energy producer, of any variety (nuclear, coal, solar, wind, etc), put money into building excess capacity to the point that the marginal profit of extra production is zero?
Krssst 2y ago
In countries using only intermittent renewable, we get news articles in the exceptional event that the grid did not need much fossil fuel generation for a day. In France, we get those in the exceptional event that we need more than a little fossil generation for a day. It's expensive, but seems to actually work at removing fossil generation from the grid almost completely. Negative prices meant the grid is inefficient to me; that's not a good thing. When you build a factory you want it operating as much as possible, otherwise ROI falls. That's worth more than a few plants.

robertlagrant 2y ago

I'm confused. The way you've phrased this certainly doesn't sound like it couldn't be the future.

EcommerceFlow 2y ago
I've heard for years that if we just had "tons" of Nuclear plants, our energy costs would essentially be too cheap to meter. Yet France is not experiencing this even at 75% Nuclear.
- WheatMillington 2y ago
  Where did you hear that? I've only ever heard about how nuclear is both capital and opex intensive and very expensive.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    It was a common BS claim in the Reagan years, as to why we didn't need to invest in renewables back then. "Why bother, soon all this nuclear energy will basically be free". This has nothing to do with what anyone actually said. Just ask any 60-something, mild conservative. The meme exists, even though the actual quote was slightly more mealy mouthed. It was always nonsense anyway. Electricity generation is mostly a deregulated market in most places, so nobody would spend billions on a Nuclear plant that wasn't guaranteed to make back it's money. It was always a thought terminating cliche.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      From Wikipedia[0], admittedly: > Most reactors began construction by 1974; following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and changing economics, many planned projects were canceled. More than 100 orders for nuclear power reactors, many already under construction, were canceled in the 1970s and 1980s, bankrupting some companies. How does that square with your recollection? Or were lots of nuclear power plants being constructed in the 1980s, and the article is very wrong? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  You're remembering a (mis-)quote of a speech given in 1954[0]. And even if it weren't a misquote, "Living up to a quote from 1954" is not how we judge whether a power source is still worth investing in for the future. [0] https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2015/09/too-cheap-to-meter-the-infamous-nuclear-power-misquote https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2015/09/too-cheap-to-meter-t...
- serial_dev 2y ago
  As far as I know and even learned as a (since failed) physicist, a country needs a good mixture of energy sources. Mind you I went to a university that's nuclear energy focused and even they didn't advocate for full on only nuclear. In my opinion, if someone says we should just have all nuclear, it means they are dealing in absolutes, maybe God in politics and debate, but they ignore that reality is much more complicated, as technology meets economics and politics (and much more). (Again, AFAIK) nuclear energy is great when it comes to meeting the "baseline" requirements, roughly the level below which energy consumption of a region never drops. It is because nuclear energy cannot be scaled up and down quickly, so it's not adequate for peaks. To balance the peaks and keep the network stable, you need energy sources that can increase their output in seconds (or less?). That's also one of the issues with wind and solar, you can't choose when it is available and when it isn't, so coal etc is still needed to make sure that energy production and consumption is practically equal at all times.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Nuclear is very poor for baseline requirements. Baseline requirements should be met by the cheapest source and more expensive sources should only be added as required to follow demand.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      If you price in pollution, doesn't nuclear become the cheapest base load provider?
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        No, not even close.
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        Fancy elaborating?
- pfdietz 2y ago
  If anyone told you that they were lying to you.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Presumably once it gets cheap enough it becomes profitable to sell it internationally which caps the price? Besides, you still have to pay back for the construction and the fuel, it's never gonna be free.
- Herz 2y ago
  The words of a human shouldn't necessarily represent reality, especially when the human in question is a politician and not a scientist. Your argument doesn't make much sense. Furthermore, no one could have predicted the mass protests, scandals, and fears that nuclear energy has sparked over the decades. These factors have significantly reduced the hype and investment in the sector.

henearkr 2y ago

The determinant factor in this article is the renewable electricity sudden flow. Nuclear fission reactors have problems in other domains like being a huge liability during a military conflict, and dependance on uranium supply from the Sahel.

gumby 2y ago

Indeed. The op ex of nuclear is surprisingly high (esp when compared to wind solar), then on top of that is the cost of financing the very long build. Also, nuclear plants in France are starting to suffer from water shortages; since an overheating plant is a problem it means that they take water at the expense of other uses, which is an externality they currently don't pay for because the economics of these plants is so terrible already. I really want to like niclear but I have never been able to see the math work (and I've been paying intermittent attention for 40 years).

givemeethekeys 2y ago

There's a cost associated with construction and maintenance - labor and materials aren't free. Then, there's everything else - you'd have to look at their budget to see if the proceeds from electricity are funding other programs.

johnzim 2y ago

I mean.. They literally just became too cheap to meter by application of 33% more generation? Functionally they could get there by just building a few more reactors.

more_corn 2y ago
The “just” word is doing a lot of work here and masking multiple billion euro investments, decades long planning and build projects, risk and opportunity cost. How about instead we “just” invest in grid scale and distributed battery storage and double down on wind and solar?

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

> Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future? Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more. The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural gas and coal) or are unreliable (solar and wind). I actually don't believe nuclear is "the future" because I think renewables + battery storage will be more economical going forward and less politically dicey. But France is currently the envy of the world for their energy generation save for some countries with unique environments that allow for a lot of carbon-free generation (e.g. Norway with hydro and Iceland with geothermal).

briandear 2y ago
Why isn’t wind and solar politically dicey? Nuclear is only politically dicey due to ignorance. I’d rather one nuclear plant than having the landscape covered with huge windmills — windmills made out of materials that aren’t recyclable. Solar is even worse. Nuclear doesn’t affect wildlife like wind and solar.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Spending $20B for $1B worth of generating capacity is and always should be politically dicey.
- dmoo 2y ago
  Until it does…
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Nuclear elicits outrage from customers forced to pay for it because it's so expensive. How do you propose muting them politics?
- kelnos 2y ago
  I agree that the safety fears and waste disposal issues around nuclear are overwrought, but still: I would much prefer solar and wind farms (even with the downsides you mention) over the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. Even if the probability of something like that is 0.0000000001% or whatever, the consequences are so severe that it just doesn't seem worth it when there's a good-enough alternative. Also consider that nuclear is expensive (both in capex and opex)! The whole "too cheap to meter" nonsense from the 1950s never came to fruition. I get that opinions differ on this (clearly you have a different take), but that's fine; reasonable people can disagree. (To be clear, I don't believe solar/wind is the be-all, end-all. Base load generation is still a problem there, and neither source is reliable or consistent in the way that something like nuclear is.)

digdugdirk 2y ago

Their grid was still constructed on a capitalistic model. Investment in electricity generation stations in return for payments from electricity consuming users over time. Build too much nuclear (or any other power generation) and you lower the returns of the previous investors. The easy answer is that financiers don't want it, so it won't happen.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

yongjik 2y ago

The nice thing about nuclear is that you can plan how much electricity you're going to generate. (Well, not counting project delays and stuff...) Ergo, if you're using nuclear and energy became "too cheap to meter" then someone was not doing their job properly. If Tesla overestimated market demand and has to give away cars for free, would you say it means Tesla is the car of the future?

helsinkiandrew 2y ago

> yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter" French nuclear power is run by EDF, which although 85% owned by the French government has “a mandate to make a profit for its shareholders”

guerby 2y ago
EDF is 100% owned by the french government since 20230608: https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/08062023-letat-redevient-lactionnaire-unique-dedf/ https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/08062023-letat-redevient-lac...
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago
  But it still makes a profit and pays tax on it. https://www.edf.fr/sites/groupe/files/epresspack/7068/PR-FY-2023-V16.02.2024.pdf https://www.edf.fr/sites/groupe/files/epresspack/7068/PR-FY-...

Retric 2y ago

France is its own unique thing because of how the government paid for so many things out of pocket they ended up losing money selling at wholesale rates. Safe Nuclear ended up being a lot more expensive than earlier predictions. It’s not some design issue that you can fix with small modular reactors or whatever. Every time anything significant goes wrong people kept adding systems to prevent it happening again. Sometimes that’s something physical like a wall or redundant system, and other times it’s longer procedures and more paperwork. This has been great for avoiding another SL-1, 3 mile island etc, but mitigating every possible risks isn’t cheap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 For example there was once an expensive issue where foreign material fell into the spent fuel pool where fixing it significantly extended an outage at a single reactor so now everyone working on anything at any reactor takes significant steps to mitigate that risk. Great things working as intended except now something that might have cost 100k now costs significantly more because of that mitigation effort. Extend that to any significant issue across hundreds of reactors and 50+ years and suddenly triple checking to avoid every fuck up means doing anything is really expensive. Worse very little of it is wasted effort, there’s just far more ways to fuck up in practice than in theory. PS: I do believe it’s possible to have safe and cheap nuclear power, it’s just going to look very different than what we’re doing today.

photochemsyn 2y ago

Operating costs for a coal-fired power plant, a nuclear reactor power plant, and a solar-battery power plant (requirement: steady power output 24-7) are all pretty comparable these days. Upfront constuction costs on nuclear are higher than others, so nuclear comes out near the top of the cost envelope. A lot also depends on variable costs of uranium ore and the fuel rod production process. While a 1 GW coal plant might burn as much as 4 million tons of coal a year, a comparable nuclear power plant only consumes some 30 tons of fuels rods per year - but depending on ore quality and U-235 enrichment level, that might translate to 300,000 tons of uranium ore that needs to be mined and converted into fuel rods through an expensive multi-step process. Coal is much dirtier in terms of average daily emissions (though there's always the catastrophic failure risk with nuclear). Solar / wind / storage operating costs are limited to maintenance and battery replacement, which can still be considerable.

gwervc 2y ago

Because the price of electricity is (unfairly) based on gas price by EU regulations, imposed by Germany. One of the propositions of one party running for the next election is to renegotiate this so we can use our cheap electricity as the competitive advantage it is.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

That's because it's a state run system and it really isn't that cheap. The nuclear operators are shielded from market rates by the government. The way that works is that they get a guaranteed price per kwh in long multi year deals, regardless of what the market does. That's actually true in most countries that operate nuclear plants. Without those guarantees, it's to risky of a thing to do financially for investors. What they charge customers in France is also controlled by the government (and not the same thing). The difference is simply made up by tax payer money. Of course being connected to the rest of the European market and also having a lot of their own renewables, this just means that bill is getting larger and larger for the French government whenever there is a surplus of wind and solar. Which is probably happening quite often now. Here are some details on a deal the French government struck with nuclear operator EDF recently: https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication-listing/france-strikes-an-agreement-with-edf-over-nuclear-energy-prices https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication... It's indeed a great example why commercial nuclear plants without extensive state support is not really a thing. Most places that have nuclear plants, also feature heavy government involvement and state funding. That plant that Bill Gates is involved with that recently started construction work, only still exists because of extensive state involvement.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

Why would any commercial energy producer, of any variety (nuclear, coal, solar, wind, etc), put money into building excess capacity to the point that the marginal profit of extra production is zero?

Krssst 2y ago

In countries using only intermittent renewable, we get news articles in the exceptional event that the grid did not need much fossil fuel generation for a day. In France, we get those in the exceptional event that we need more than a little fossil generation for a day. It's expensive, but seems to actually work at removing fossil generation from the grid almost completely. Negative prices meant the grid is inefficient to me; that's not a good thing. When you build a factory you want it operating as much as possible, otherwise ROI falls. That's worth more than a few plants.