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You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and belie

You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have. If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes. You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume. But instead we have expensive electricity (at least here in Australia), where your mind is constantly loaded wit being aware of your energy consumption.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
You do know that nuclear power has experienced negative learning by doing throughout its entire life? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... You don’t get ”free electricity” with absolutely massive handouts to the nuclear industry. Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the ”too cheap to meter” promise.
- dporter 1y ago
  Renewable power is cheap because it also receives massive government handouts in the form of tax credits.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Still built at absolutely massive scale around the world without subsidies. With many countries phasing out their renewable subsidies because they aren’t needed anymore. Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the world cheaper than coal and fossil gas. The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
    - nandomrumber 1y ago
      What storage? Where? At what price? Where are all these 14 day full load capable storage plants being built? I’m not saying they aren’t, I am saying I don’t see the data.
      - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
        We are at the point in the S-curve where storage goes from nowhere to everywhere in the blink of an eye. Here BESS for $63/kWh installed and serviced for 20 years. https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-announces-winning-bidders-in-10-gwh-bess-tender/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an... https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-bids-for-16-gwh-bess-tender-with-average-price-of-66-5-kwh/ https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-bids... China installed 74 GW comprising 168 GWh in 2024. In increase of 250% compared to 2023. https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storage-capacity-surges-to-74-gw-168-gwh-in-2024-up-130-yoy/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag... After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California: - Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24 - Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24 https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs7pm22i https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs... In the US in 2025 storage was expected to make up 30% of all grid additions. Before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 No one generally expects more than a couple of hours of storage to be needed. But for the fun exercise let’s calculate what spending Vogtles $36.8B on equivalent renewables, as in TWh delivered, and the storage gives. That makes the renewables come out to about $9B. With storage costing $0.063B GWh and having $28B to spend we can build 444 GWh storage. That is the equivalent to running Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days straight. In this calculation we don’t even bother with Vogtles O&M costs compared to near zero for renewables and storage. Do you now understand how incredibly expensive new built western nuclear power is?
      - bryanlarsen 1y ago
        Never, because we don't need 14 days of full load capable storage. Most models say we need about 3 days to get 99.99% coverage with a reasonable amount of overbuild & interconnect.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Renewable suffers a little bit from having renewable infrastructure costs considered a new subsidy, while fossil fuel costs are just kind of baked in. If we included the cost of cleaning up fossil fuel byproducts… well, we don’t even know how much it will cost to clean up all that carbon. Then we will have to work out how we bill the international relations cost of having to deal with petrochemical producers…
  - EasyMark 1y ago
    that used to be true, but it's not really true any longer; they could even do well without subsidies, but no industry will ever give up free money.
- belorn 1y ago
  It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen. Instead we had yesterday in Sweden news the opening of a freshly new built natural gas power plant as the solution to that intermittence problem. Of course, those natural gas power plants are paid through subsidizes as grid stability is the government responsibility, and thus the bill for that natural gas is put on taxes and connection fees. I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Love how the goalposts magically shifted to ”green hydrogen deployed today!!” even though many grids still don’t even reach saturation from renewables. Storage or green hydrogen is an enormous waste of money in Poland given their grid composition. That renewable buildout leads to larger fossil emissions being wrong is trivial to verify. The UK as one example of many: - Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero. - Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh. - Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh. Massively decreasing all fossil fueled electricity production of course "extends the life" of these plants. All those plants that were shut down had their "life extended". You can do the same for Denmark, Portugal, California, South Australia and everywhere else. First renewables offset coal followed by cutting into gas usage. After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California: - Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24 - Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24 https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs7pm22i https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs... Storage is exploding globally. China installed 74 GW comprising 134 GWh of storage in 2024. Increasing their yearly installation rate by 250%. The US is looking at installing 18 GW in 2025 making up 30% of all grid additions. Well, before Trump came with a sledgehammer of insanity. Storage delivers. For the last bit of "emergency reserves" we can run some gas turbines. First our existing fleet and then when it becomes the most pressing issue to decarbonize we can utilize the solution aviation and shipping settled on. Or just run the gas turbines on biofuels, green hydrogen or whatever. Start collecting food waste and create biogas from it. Doesn't really matter, we're talking single percent of total energy demand. I love how completely insignificant issues becomes blown up to enormous proportions try to force nuclear power into the conversation.
- chermi 1y ago
  Are you really denying the learning curve based on one paper about France? You don't think maybe there's other confounding factors*? A single survey of a single country isn't counterfactual. Are you really certain that with a relatively fixed design the learning curve wouldn't apply at sufficient scale, all else being equal. The learning curve is one of the most time-tested laws in construction. *Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear. In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.) -Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design -Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires. - regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal". -while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    It also includes the US seeing the same negative learning by doing. We have research on when we have achieved learning effects. > If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements: > - It has to be the same site > - It has to be the same constructor > - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next > - It has to be constant labor laws > - It has to be a constant regulatory regime > When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world. From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k In the meantime renewables and storage have gone from nascent industries to today be the vast majority of all new energy production in TWh and while costing a fraction of new built nuclear power.
energy123 1y ago
Yeah, if we went back in time and built nuclear then we'd have nuclear today, and the fixed costs would have been paid by a previous generation. Is that surprising? But that doesn't inform us on what the optimal policy decision is in the current year of 2025 given 2025 prices and time-to-build of the various options. In Australia renewables have the perfect confluence of multiple factors: - low seasonable variability of insolation in the north - high wind speeds in the south - land availability for solar - high statistical diversification of renewables due to size - higher than normal costs of nuclear due to first-of-a-kind costs dominating the total build-out costs due to the small energy needs of the country, and higher labor costs The CSIRO studied this for Australia and released a report about it. Even when you factor in storage and transmission costs, renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear.
- nandomrumber 1y ago
  The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming there’s no point thinking about deploying nor researching & developing solar / wind because we don’t have the expertise nor technology. We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either. Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base. And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper. AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear. CSIRO perfidy.
  - ZeroGravitas 1y ago
    How did nuclear slip into your list of power sources that dominate the Chinese grid? You skipped over two other sources that generate double what nuclear does and are growing faster: Coal 58.2% Hydro 13% Wind 9.8% Solar 8.3% Nuclear 4.4% https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
hannob 1y ago
> the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle What exactly are you talking about? It does not sound like it describes the way nuclear power, uranium mining, and nuclear waste storage works.
- nandomrumber 1y ago
  Explaine how nuclear waste is dealt with. Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value. Hint: it isn’t. There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants. Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very reactive at all. Vitrified it’s chemically non-reactive.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Nuclear waste is essentially a non-issue today. Even if there was a way to magically make spent nuclear fuel disappear it would not materially change the prospects for nuclear energy. And if all other issues with nuclear were resolved (the primary one being cost), storage of spent fuel in dry casks for several centuries is a fine and economical solution. The only scenario in which waste processing becomes an issue is if nuclear is so wildly successful we start running out of cheap uranium and need to do reprocessing and breeding. That is not the world we live in (this is also why thorium is a non-solution.)
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    The comment they were replying to went out of its way to say “completely closed” which is, of course, not correct. If we want to say nuclear generates not much in terms of byproducts, that seems like a potentially viable argument. But then, renewables don’t consume any fuel (but the installations are a lot less durable). We’re rapidly approaching the point where we might have to admit that sweeping dramatic statements about either one being universally superior are hard to justify and the differences are complicated…
GolfPopper 1y ago
I can't speak for the prior poster, but I am highly skeptical that the current business ecosystem in the United States is capable of effectively and safely building new nuclear power infrastructure, particularly if and when the ever-popular but, to the best of my knowledge, never-completed Small Modular Reactor pitch gets involved.
- XorNot 1y ago
  Conversely China has built a lot of new nuclear capacity, and has projects for SMRs in the works too. The problem as you allude to isn't the technology.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Yeah, we have political issues around infrastructure in the US, but those probably aren’t going away. If we can do nuclear with just technology (no politics), then it might be viable. So, as I said, good luck Google!
  - derriz 1y ago
    I wouldn't call it "a lot" when you put it into perspective. China has about 60GW of nuclear generation capacity - this is after 70 years of building their first nuclear plant. It has about 1600GW of wind and solar after about 10 years. In 2024, China added 80GW of wind capacity and 277GW of solar. In the first 3 months of 2025 alone, 60GW of new solar capacity and 15GW of new wind capacity were added. In 2024, 4.3GW of nuclear was added.
Propelloni 1y ago
You mean like France?
pfdietz 1y ago
It's proven to not be competitive. All these nuclear announcements are smoke screens to cover construction of large amounts of gas fired capacity. Anyone expecting dramatic near term increases in electricity demand will need to go with gas (or renewables, but tariffs make that less competitive); nuclear, especially new designs, cannot be rolled out quickly.
bee_rider 1y ago
Due to political issues, the US doesn’t have the capacity to engage in infrastructure projects that take more than ~2 years to complete, unfortunately.
crote 1y ago
> a proven technology with excellent safety record Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more. Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all. It is the only power source which has made entire cities impossible to live in. I personally don't believe this is necessarily a dealbreaker with modern nuclear plants in rich countries, but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record. > a completely closed fuel life cycle Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal. Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem. We've been operating nuclear reactors for 80 years now, but permanent waste disposal and reactor decommissioning is still in its infancy. The current state-of-the-art is essentially "let it rot in place and hope nothing goes wrong while we figure out a way to deal with it". I think it can be solved, but unless we've done so you probably shouldn't make it part of your argument. > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example. 9% of global power is supplied by nuclear plants. There are over 400 plants currently operational, and 700 have been decommissioned. We aren't on "baby's first nuclear reactor" anymore. > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable. > You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume. Not a chance. Although fuel would indeed be quite cheap, power still isn't going to be free: someone has to pay off the massive construction loans. Consumer power consumption is also a lot more flexible than something like internet. People don't suddenly start to consume a lot more data when their internet gets faster - a single person is still only going to watch one Netflix stream at a time, and that'll work just as fine on a 100Mbps connection as on a 8Gbps one. And all the equipment is already prepared for the faster connection, so it's not like they are saving any money by keeping it slow. But if your power is free, why bother with gas heating? Why go for a heat pump when resistive heating has cheaper equipment? Why bother isolating your home? Why shut off your lights when you leave your home? Making electricity free means we'll be using a lot more of it, which means having to build significantly more expensive nuclear power plants. If this was an option, countries with abundant hydro would be providing free power. And they aren't. > But instead we have expensive electricity Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity. While building additional nuclear could get us (mostly) off fossil fuel, it is definitely not going to make your power bill any cheaper. Nuclear power is only viable with hefty subsidies - which in practice means turning off dirt-cheap solar and wind to run expensive nuclear plants.
natmaka 1y ago
> proven technology with excellent safety record The real long-term effect of past nuclear accidents is a subject of debate, and the potential worst case a concern for all. > the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle Not at industrial-scale. > and believe in a technology we don’t have. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewables-nuclear-line?time=2001..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...

ViewTrick1002 1y ago

You do know that nuclear power has experienced negative learning by doing throughout its entire life? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... You don’t get ”free electricity” with absolutely massive handouts to the nuclear industry. Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the ”too cheap to meter” promise.

dporter 1y ago
Renewable power is cheap because it also receives massive government handouts in the form of tax credits.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  Still built at absolutely massive scale around the world without subsidies. With many countries phasing out their renewable subsidies because they aren’t needed anymore. Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the world cheaper than coal and fossil gas. The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
  - nandomrumber 1y ago
    What storage? Where? At what price? Where are all these 14 day full load capable storage plants being built? I’m not saying they aren’t, I am saying I don’t see the data.
    - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
      We are at the point in the S-curve where storage goes from nowhere to everywhere in the blink of an eye. Here BESS for $63/kWh installed and serviced for 20 years. https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-announces-winning-bidders-in-10-gwh-bess-tender/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an... https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-bids-for-16-gwh-bess-tender-with-average-price-of-66-5-kwh/ https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-bids... China installed 74 GW comprising 168 GWh in 2024. In increase of 250% compared to 2023. https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storage-capacity-surges-to-74-gw-168-gwh-in-2024-up-130-yoy/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag... After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California: - Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24 - Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24 https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs7pm22i https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs... In the US in 2025 storage was expected to make up 30% of all grid additions. Before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 No one generally expects more than a couple of hours of storage to be needed. But for the fun exercise let’s calculate what spending Vogtles $36.8B on equivalent renewables, as in TWh delivered, and the storage gives. That makes the renewables come out to about $9B. With storage costing $0.063B GWh and having $28B to spend we can build 444 GWh storage. That is the equivalent to running Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days straight. In this calculation we don’t even bother with Vogtles O&M costs compared to near zero for renewables and storage. Do you now understand how incredibly expensive new built western nuclear power is?
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      Never, because we don't need 14 days of full load capable storage. Most models say we need about 3 days to get 99.99% coverage with a reasonable amount of overbuild & interconnect.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Renewable suffers a little bit from having renewable infrastructure costs considered a new subsidy, while fossil fuel costs are just kind of baked in. If we included the cost of cleaning up fossil fuel byproducts… well, we don’t even know how much it will cost to clean up all that carbon. Then we will have to work out how we bill the international relations cost of having to deal with petrochemical producers…
- EasyMark 1y ago
  that used to be true, but it's not really true any longer; they could even do well without subsidies, but no industry will ever give up free money.
belorn 1y ago
It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen. Instead we had yesterday in Sweden news the opening of a freshly new built natural gas power plant as the solution to that intermittence problem. Of course, those natural gas power plants are paid through subsidizes as grid stability is the government responsibility, and thus the bill for that natural gas is put on taxes and connection fees. I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  Love how the goalposts magically shifted to ”green hydrogen deployed today!!” even though many grids still don’t even reach saturation from renewables. Storage or green hydrogen is an enormous waste of money in Poland given their grid composition. That renewable buildout leads to larger fossil emissions being wrong is trivial to verify. The UK as one example of many: - Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero. - Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh. - Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh. Massively decreasing all fossil fueled electricity production of course "extends the life" of these plants. All those plants that were shut down had their "life extended". You can do the same for Denmark, Portugal, California, South Australia and everywhere else. First renewables offset coal followed by cutting into gas usage. After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California: - Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24 - Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24 https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs7pm22i https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs... Storage is exploding globally. China installed 74 GW comprising 134 GWh of storage in 2024. Increasing their yearly installation rate by 250%. The US is looking at installing 18 GW in 2025 making up 30% of all grid additions. Well, before Trump came with a sledgehammer of insanity. Storage delivers. For the last bit of "emergency reserves" we can run some gas turbines. First our existing fleet and then when it becomes the most pressing issue to decarbonize we can utilize the solution aviation and shipping settled on. Or just run the gas turbines on biofuels, green hydrogen or whatever. Start collecting food waste and create biogas from it. Doesn't really matter, we're talking single percent of total energy demand. I love how completely insignificant issues becomes blown up to enormous proportions try to force nuclear power into the conversation.
chermi 1y ago
Are you really denying the learning curve based on one paper about France? You don't think maybe there's other confounding factors*? A single survey of a single country isn't counterfactual. Are you really certain that with a relatively fixed design the learning curve wouldn't apply at sufficient scale, all else being equal. The learning curve is one of the most time-tested laws in construction. *Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear. In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.) -Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design -Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires. - regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal". -while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  It also includes the US seeing the same negative learning by doing. We have research on when we have achieved learning effects. > If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements: > - It has to be the same site > - It has to be the same constructor > - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next > - It has to be constant labor laws > - It has to be a constant regulatory regime > When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world. From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k In the meantime renewables and storage have gone from nascent industries to today be the vast majority of all new energy production in TWh and while costing a fraction of new built nuclear power.

energy123 1y ago

Yeah, if we went back in time and built nuclear then we'd have nuclear today, and the fixed costs would have been paid by a previous generation. Is that surprising? But that doesn't inform us on what the optimal policy decision is in the current year of 2025 given 2025 prices and time-to-build of the various options. In Australia renewables have the perfect confluence of multiple factors: - low seasonable variability of insolation in the north - high wind speeds in the south - land availability for solar - high statistical diversification of renewables due to size - higher than normal costs of nuclear due to first-of-a-kind costs dominating the total build-out costs due to the small energy needs of the country, and higher labor costs The CSIRO studied this for Australia and released a report about it. Even when you factor in storage and transmission costs, renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear.

nandomrumber 1y ago
The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming there’s no point thinking about deploying nor researching & developing solar / wind because we don’t have the expertise nor technology. We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either. Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base. And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper. AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear. CSIRO perfidy.
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  How did nuclear slip into your list of power sources that dominate the Chinese grid? You skipped over two other sources that generate double what nuclear does and are growing faster: Coal 58.2% Hydro 13% Wind 9.8% Solar 8.3% Nuclear 4.4% https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/

hannob 1y ago

> the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle What exactly are you talking about? It does not sound like it describes the way nuclear power, uranium mining, and nuclear waste storage works.

nandomrumber 1y ago
Explaine how nuclear waste is dealt with. Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value. Hint: it isn’t. There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants. Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very reactive at all. Vitrified it’s chemically non-reactive.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Nuclear waste is essentially a non-issue today. Even if there was a way to magically make spent nuclear fuel disappear it would not materially change the prospects for nuclear energy. And if all other issues with nuclear were resolved (the primary one being cost), storage of spent fuel in dry casks for several centuries is a fine and economical solution. The only scenario in which waste processing becomes an issue is if nuclear is so wildly successful we start running out of cheap uranium and need to do reprocessing and breeding. That is not the world we live in (this is also why thorium is a non-solution.)
- bee_rider 1y ago
  The comment they were replying to went out of its way to say “completely closed” which is, of course, not correct. If we want to say nuclear generates not much in terms of byproducts, that seems like a potentially viable argument. But then, renewables don’t consume any fuel (but the installations are a lot less durable). We’re rapidly approaching the point where we might have to admit that sweeping dramatic statements about either one being universally superior are hard to justify and the differences are complicated…

GolfPopper 1y ago

I can't speak for the prior poster, but I am highly skeptical that the current business ecosystem in the United States is capable of effectively and safely building new nuclear power infrastructure, particularly if and when the ever-popular but, to the best of my knowledge, never-completed Small Modular Reactor pitch gets involved.

XorNot 1y ago
Conversely China has built a lot of new nuclear capacity, and has projects for SMRs in the works too. The problem as you allude to isn't the technology.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Yeah, we have political issues around infrastructure in the US, but those probably aren’t going away. If we can do nuclear with just technology (no politics), then it might be viable. So, as I said, good luck Google!
- derriz 1y ago
  I wouldn't call it "a lot" when you put it into perspective. China has about 60GW of nuclear generation capacity - this is after 70 years of building their first nuclear plant. It has about 1600GW of wind and solar after about 10 years. In 2024, China added 80GW of wind capacity and 277GW of solar. In the first 3 months of 2025 alone, 60GW of new solar capacity and 15GW of new wind capacity were added. In 2024, 4.3GW of nuclear was added.

Propelloni 1y ago

You mean like France?

pfdietz 1y ago

It's proven to not be competitive. All these nuclear announcements are smoke screens to cover construction of large amounts of gas fired capacity. Anyone expecting dramatic near term increases in electricity demand will need to go with gas (or renewables, but tariffs make that less competitive); nuclear, especially new designs, cannot be rolled out quickly.

bee_rider 1y ago

Due to political issues, the US doesn’t have the capacity to engage in infrastructure projects that take more than ~2 years to complete, unfortunately.

crote 1y ago

> a proven technology with excellent safety record Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more. Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all. It is the only power source which has made entire cities impossible to live in. I personally don't believe this is necessarily a dealbreaker with modern nuclear plants in rich countries, but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record. > a completely closed fuel life cycle Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal. Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem. We've been operating nuclear reactors for 80 years now, but permanent waste disposal and reactor decommissioning is still in its infancy. The current state-of-the-art is essentially "let it rot in place and hope nothing goes wrong while we figure out a way to deal with it". I think it can be solved, but unless we've done so you probably shouldn't make it part of your argument. > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example. 9% of global power is supplied by nuclear plants. There are over 400 plants currently operational, and 700 have been decommissioned. We aren't on "baby's first nuclear reactor" anymore. > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable. > You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume. Not a chance. Although fuel would indeed be quite cheap, power still isn't going to be free: someone has to pay off the massive construction loans. Consumer power consumption is also a lot more flexible than something like internet. People don't suddenly start to consume a lot more data when their internet gets faster - a single person is still only going to watch one Netflix stream at a time, and that'll work just as fine on a 100Mbps connection as on a 8Gbps one. And all the equipment is already prepared for the faster connection, so it's not like they are saving any money by keeping it slow. But if your power is free, why bother with gas heating? Why go for a heat pump when resistive heating has cheaper equipment? Why bother isolating your home? Why shut off your lights when you leave your home? Making electricity free means we'll be using a lot more of it, which means having to build significantly more expensive nuclear power plants. If this was an option, countries with abundant hydro would be providing free power. And they aren't. > But instead we have expensive electricity Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity. While building additional nuclear could get us (mostly) off fossil fuel, it is definitely not going to make your power bill any cheaper. Nuclear power is only viable with hefty subsidies - which in practice means turning off dirt-cheap solar and wind to run expensive nuclear plants.

natmaka 1y ago

> proven technology with excellent safety record The real long-term effect of past nuclear accidents is a subject of debate, and the potential worst case a concern for all. > the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle Not at industrial-scale. > and believe in a technology we don’t have. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewables-nuclear-line?time=2001..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...