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I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most

by m101 1y ago

I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
I'm not convinced that's true about nuclear power when you look at the full lifecycle costs of uranium mining, maintenance and decommissioning. Also, solar is currently a lot cheaper than nuclear power when you exclude all the various subsidies (which applies to both energy sources). I'm not even convinced that nuclear power is that energy dense when you look at the raw uranium mining - most figures cherry-pick the processed uranium fuel which is indeed a very dense energy source.
davidjytang 1y ago
I take it you mean well built and well run nuclear plant you. Also is it most prone to human error?
mastermage 1y ago
Well, its wrong though. Its not the cheapest. Thats solar and by a long shot. Nuclear is literally the most expensive energy source. Also take into account the timeframe to build nuclear powerplants. 9 to 12 Years on average built time and delays often happen.
flohofwoe 1y ago
> most long lasting ...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason). Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.
- m101 1y ago
  When I referenced long lasting I mean that some nuclear power stations are no forecast to keep going for 120 years. CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage? Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous to stand near for 500 years (without centimetres of concrete), and then dangerous to consume for an further many thousand. It is within our technology to look after the quantities we are talking about indefinitely. Also, with current plants we could reduce the size of the waste by 30x if we recycled it. Other plant types would burn all the fuel and leave us with very low volumes of radioactive elements. Wrt Ukraine you choose to focus on the potential for release around Zaporozhzhia Vs the actual destruction occuring from the circumstances of war in the rest of the country?
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    See that's the thing, you're trying to argue rationally ;) But the discussion around nuclear energy stopped being rational decades ago. On one side you have the old guard of the environmentalist movement which got started with anti-nuclear protests in the first place and then had their "I told you so" moment in 1986, and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown, the radiation was actually good for the environment or whatever. Then I'm seeing that the latest European NPP in Finland was about 15 years late and 3x more expensive than planned (from 3.5 to 11 billion Eu) while wind and solar farms are just popping up everywhere around me without much fanfare, built by whoever has some money and a bit of unused farmland or roof space to spare. And I really can't imagine those same people pooling their money and starting to build nuclear power plants instead ;)
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Great overview! :)
    - Aachen 1y ago
      > and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown You're making it sound like anyone who's not against nuclear, thinks Chernobyl is overblown I've never heard that sentiment anywhere. (I'm sure you can find examples when looking for it; after all, there's also people who believe vaccines cause bill gates mind control.) Why the strawman argument?
AndyPa32 1y ago
I disagree with cheapest. If you factor in twenty years build time and nuclear waste disposal, the whole thing is not economically viable. Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on. You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.
- freetonik 1y ago
  Long build times are often the result of constantly changing regulations. Also it’s interesting that build times in Japan are almost 2 times smaller than in US.
  - rootsofallevil 1y ago
    Nuclear doesn't have a great record in other countries either. I might have the wrong figures but Hinkley Points C is over 2 times over budget and likely to be 5+ years late. The exemption being France and maybe China? France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well. I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong
    - looofooo0 1y ago
      South Korean company build a NPP in 7 years in Saudi Arabia.
      - mpweiher 1y ago
        United Arab Emirates. Fastest build times are Japan with under 4 years. Germany built its Konvois in just shy of 6 years. Just before we stopped building altogether. France built 50+ reactors in 15 years. We know how to build nuclear quickly, reliably and (relatively) cheaply. We also know how to do it slowly, eratically and expensively. Fortunately the former comes almost but not entirely automatically with building lots of them.
retinaros 1y ago
[flagged]
- fnordian_slip 1y ago
  Please don't lie
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - retinaros 1y ago
    enjoy your companies moving factories to USA/eastern europe to produce.
- lima 1y ago
  Merkel era politics were anything but "woke". It was 15 years of overly conservative policies, stalling economical and societal progress.
  - retinaros 1y ago
    ahahahaha. millions of immigrants from middle east are conservative policies. abandoning nuclear is conservative policies too?
kolinko 1y ago
So far it was either the cheapest or the safest. Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.
- pzo 1y ago
  but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
  - kubav027 1y ago
    During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
    - Luc 1y ago
      Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.
    - ukblewis 1y ago
      I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
tiberius_p 1y ago
I remember the anti-nuclear fever went viral in 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I think the correct lesson to be learned from that experience is not to built nuclear power plants in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters...and not to call for all nuclear power plants around the world to be shut down.
- mpweiher 1y ago
  Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster. There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima. Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons.
  - scrlk 1y ago
    > Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. If you're referring to the Onagawa plant, one engineer (Yanosuke Hirai) pushed for the height of the wall to be increased beyond the original spec: > A nuclear plant in a neighboring area, meanwhile, had been built to withstand the tsunamis. A solitary civil engineer employed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company knew the story of the massive Jogan tsunami of the year 869, because it had flooded the Shinto shrine in his hometown. In the 1960s, the engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, had insisted that the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station be built farther back from the sea and at higher elevation than initially proposed—ultimately nearly fifty feet above sea level. He argued for a seawall to surpass the original plan of thirty-nine feet. He did not live to see what happened in 2011, when forty-foot waves destroyed much of the fishing town of Onagawa, seventy-five miles north of Fukushima. The nuclear power station—the closest one in Japan to the earthquake’s epicenter—was left intact. Displaced residents even took refuge in the power plant’s gym. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-designed-to-make-bad-choices-but-heres-what-we-can-do https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-design... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanosuke_Hirai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanosuke_Hirai
strken 1y ago
That's blatantly wrong. Hydro stands out in the data as being the cheapest reliable carbon neutral option (wind and solar aren't reliable, and when you factor in storage to make them reliable then they're not cheap). Hydro requires large sums of capital to get started, destroys entire valleys, is only viable in a limited number of places, has significant risks if not maintained, and isn't energy dense in the slightest. Nevertheless, it's cheap and it's carbon neutral.
- tomatocracy 1y ago
  Run-of-the-river hydro in all but a handful of sites tends to be quite dependent on rainfall levels. This means production levels can vary quite meaningfully both seasonally and more importantly year-to-year. It's definitely reliable in the sense that hydro stations can basically last forever if properly maintained (there are plenty of hydro stations operating today which are more than 100 years old) but it's not quite a silver bullet.
pfdietz 1y ago
I was all for nuclear when it was the best option to displace fossil fuels. It is no longer, so I'm no longer all for it.
- lima 1y ago
  This. The time for new nuclear plants was 20 years ago. Now it's too late, and too expensive, even in purely practical terms without the question of safety.
teamonkey 1y ago
> I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s. Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_fatalities_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind. It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks. Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity. I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.
- account42 1y ago
  People fear what the media tells them to fear. I still remember the (publicly funded so not really independent from government) TV here having someone refer to a beech near Fukushima as "possibly one of the most dangerous places on earth" while holding up a Geiger counter that showed radiation levels barely above background levels. Nuclear accidents have been a nothing-burger compared to all the deaths and health issues caused by coal and gas - but those are more spread out over time and don't make for as exciting news so no one cares. Shutting down nuclear instead of coal was never a rational decision but an emotional one.
- s_dev 1y ago
  Coal kills far more people than nuclear yet you never read about it. I think partly because any nuclear catastrophes are visible and concentrated to a single area. Coal smoke kills over a much wider area and this impacts that 'newsworthiness' of this fear to spread. It's a class data vs feelings issue and yet again peoples feelings trump the data and undermines what experts familiar with both the danger and the data say.
prinny_ 1y ago
I am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?
- pera 1y ago
  This is the main reason why I am, generally speaking, against nuclear as a universal solution. A question for pro-nuclear folks: Would you be okay with having a highly corrupt low HDI country building nuclear facilities (conversion and deconversion, enrichment, power plants) next to your borders?
  - adastra22 1y ago
    They are more likely to cause more damage, just less visibly, in building substandard fossil fuel plants.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    Absolutely. Just stop using LWR as the blueprint.
  - District5524 1y ago
    This is similar to the reasoning of Austria vehemently opposing nuclear reactors to be built in neighbouring countries, even if downstream on the Danube, even if 200 km from their border. The latest decision (although on the surface, not on an environmental issue like the article is about, but on state aid measures - but actually not the real reason for Austria's opposition): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62023CJ0059 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62... So, I believe, yes, low HDI countries with high corruption do have the right to build nuclear facilities. This is not like a combination of low HDI and high corruption index awarded by some international organization has the approval rights to such questions of sovereignity. There is a whole range of special regulation regarding who can build nuclear stations and under what conditions, with a special agency to ensure the safe use (IAEA) - that should be the only criteria for letting nations build nuclear stations, not corruption, HDI or how rich the countries are.
greesil 1y ago
It's a bit more nuanced than this, no? It's better to reflect on why we let important things like nuclear energy go to the lowest bidder, or private entities that want to maximize short term profit.
kranke155 1y ago
The reason to be against nuclear energy is quite simple - human error. Unlike flying, we’ve not shown nuclear energy to be sufficiently idiot-proof for many people to be comfortable with it. That and the fact that radiation is invisible, which makes it somehow almost paranormal.
- dijit 1y ago
  The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered). But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it. The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl. Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven and earth to solve the problem… and if they hadn’t, then the entire continent might be dead today.
  - nilslindemann 1y ago
    And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.
    - mbs159 1y ago
      You generally can't really pet a wild brown bear, since they are not interested in humans and would avoid you. You can't run away from it either, since it can outrun you easily
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      This analogy is probably wrong.
      - nilslindemann 1y ago
        No. You just have an irrational fear of brown bears.
MichaelDickens 1y ago
The reason I used to oppose nuclear energy is that its proponents would say nuclear waste isn't a problem, but they would never explain why it isn't a problem. I knew the half-life of uranium was 4 billion years; I didn't see how you could possibly make that safe, and nobody on the pro-nuclear side seemed to have an explanation, so I assumed that no explanation existed. (Turns out the answer is that you can store nuclear waste deep underground at geologically stable locations where tectonics won't cause it to eventually resurface.) (Also radioactive waste isn't uranium and the half-life is considerably shorter than 4 billion years, although it's still quite long.)
- dijit 1y ago
  it’s also true that you get better at using (and reusing) what we would consider waste today over time. The more energy we are able to use, the more inert the waste material becomes, leading to much lower storage timeframes (though still multiple human lifetimes even in the best case).
jerome-jh 1y ago
From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad! Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale. I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.
- adastra22 1y ago
  Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate. 3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.
  - nilslindemann 1y ago
    See my brown bear vs car comparison above/below. Also, solar causes less deaths, according to your counting method. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Analogy doesn’t work, it’s deaths per TWhour that matter.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - adastra22 1y ago
      Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that: 1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima. 2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here. 3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.
jiehong 1y ago
But is very centralised. Solar and wind are less centralised, and I think that’s one advantage they have over nuclear.
alphazard 1y ago
Or why there is a "clean" energy distinction that some authority has control over in the first place. If CO2 is the thing we care about, then tax CO2 and let everything sort itself out. The fact there are subsidies instead of carbon taxes is revealing all on its own.
defaultcompany 1y ago
How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.
- marcyb5st 1y ago
  Isn't that only applicable for Uranium 235 based reactors? Thorium is converted to Uranium 233 and when split the byproducts have an half life of 10s of years, meaning that the radioactivity drops to safe levels in "only" few hundred years. This is much more manageable. Anyway, that is to say that nuclear is a spectrum, and the current mainstream tech I believe it is the one that won because of the military applications (and therefore funding) back in the cold-war era.
nrjames 1y ago
We're living in a reality where nuclear waste was not always properly contained and the repercussions of it are long-lasting. While this particular case is related to the Manhattan Project, it's causing all types of issues to this day: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/11/long-term-effects-nuclear-waste-in-st-louis https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/11/long-term-effects-nu...
burnt-resistor 1y ago
You're purposefully and deceptively omitting the lack of safety and perpetual waste risks.
cauch 1y ago
Probably said somewhere else, but "green" originally means "does not create toxic waste when used". Nuclear is nice and good for the environment, but it does fit in the definition "produce waste", even if this waste can be considered as small or can be somehow treated.
patapong 1y ago
Okay, my reflection is as follows. Investing in nuclear power today is a bit akin to betting against solar/wind + battery. In my opinion it is a losing bet. For a nuclear powerplant to be economically feasible, it first needs to be built (10+ years at this point), and then run for tens of years at consistent output rates. To make this worth it for investors, the state often guarantees the price for energy for tens of years after construction, picking up the difference if the electricity price falls. So in essence, building a nuclear power plant today is locking in that price of electricity for something like 50 years. Solar is today already much cheaper than nuclear, and is coming down in price very quickly, as are batteries and other storage methods. If this development continues and there are further breakthroughs in storage, the taxpayer would have to keep footing the bill to buy expensive nuclear energy for years in the future. Therefore, instead of investing in reviving nuclear, I would much rather invest the same amount in upgrading the grid, researching storage methods, and subsidizing grid-scale solar and wind. I think this will be the better choice for the taxpayer in the long run.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
wkat4242 1y ago
I'm still against nuclear and this ruling didn't change it. For me it's still externalising many of the negative effects to many future generations. And with much more spent fuel comes more proliferation risks. Of course this stuff is not up to me but the parties I vote for are in part because they're anti nuclear.

by m101 1y ago

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

I'm not convinced that's true about nuclear power when you look at the full lifecycle costs of uranium mining, maintenance and decommissioning. Also, solar is currently a lot cheaper than nuclear power when you exclude all the various subsidies (which applies to both energy sources). I'm not even convinced that nuclear power is that energy dense when you look at the raw uranium mining - most figures cherry-pick the processed uranium fuel which is indeed a very dense energy source.

davidjytang 1y ago

I take it you mean well built and well run nuclear plant you. Also is it most prone to human error?

mastermage 1y ago

Well, its wrong though. Its not the cheapest. Thats solar and by a long shot. Nuclear is literally the most expensive energy source. Also take into account the timeframe to build nuclear powerplants. 9 to 12 Years on average built time and delays often happen.

flohofwoe 1y ago

> most long lasting ...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason). Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.

m101 1y ago
When I referenced long lasting I mean that some nuclear power stations are no forecast to keep going for 120 years. CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage? Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous to stand near for 500 years (without centimetres of concrete), and then dangerous to consume for an further many thousand. It is within our technology to look after the quantities we are talking about indefinitely. Also, with current plants we could reduce the size of the waste by 30x if we recycled it. Other plant types would burn all the fuel and leave us with very low volumes of radioactive elements. Wrt Ukraine you choose to focus on the potential for release around Zaporozhzhia Vs the actual destruction occuring from the circumstances of war in the rest of the country?
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  See that's the thing, you're trying to argue rationally ;) But the discussion around nuclear energy stopped being rational decades ago. On one side you have the old guard of the environmentalist movement which got started with anti-nuclear protests in the first place and then had their "I told you so" moment in 1986, and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown, the radiation was actually good for the environment or whatever. Then I'm seeing that the latest European NPP in Finland was about 15 years late and 3x more expensive than planned (from 3.5 to 11 billion Eu) while wind and solar farms are just popping up everywhere around me without much fanfare, built by whoever has some money and a bit of unused farmland or roof space to spare. And I really can't imagine those same people pooling their money and starting to build nuclear power plants instead ;)
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Great overview! :)
  - Aachen 1y ago
    > and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown You're making it sound like anyone who's not against nuclear, thinks Chernobyl is overblown I've never heard that sentiment anywhere. (I'm sure you can find examples when looking for it; after all, there's also people who believe vaccines cause bill gates mind control.) Why the strawman argument?

AndyPa32 1y ago

I disagree with cheapest. If you factor in twenty years build time and nuclear waste disposal, the whole thing is not economically viable. Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on. You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.

freetonik 1y ago
Long build times are often the result of constantly changing regulations. Also it’s interesting that build times in Japan are almost 2 times smaller than in US.
- rootsofallevil 1y ago
  Nuclear doesn't have a great record in other countries either. I might have the wrong figures but Hinkley Points C is over 2 times over budget and likely to be 5+ years late. The exemption being France and maybe China? France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well. I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong
  - looofooo0 1y ago
    South Korean company build a NPP in 7 years in Saudi Arabia.
    - mpweiher 1y ago
      United Arab Emirates. Fastest build times are Japan with under 4 years. Germany built its Konvois in just shy of 6 years. Just before we stopped building altogether. France built 50+ reactors in 15 years. We know how to build nuclear quickly, reliably and (relatively) cheaply. We also know how to do it slowly, eratically and expensively. Fortunately the former comes almost but not entirely automatically with building lots of them.

retinaros 1y ago

[flagged]

fnordian_slip 1y ago
Please don't lie
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- retinaros 1y ago
  enjoy your companies moving factories to USA/eastern europe to produce.
lima 1y ago
Merkel era politics were anything but "woke". It was 15 years of overly conservative policies, stalling economical and societal progress.
- retinaros 1y ago
  ahahahaha. millions of immigrants from middle east are conservative policies. abandoning nuclear is conservative policies too?

kolinko 1y ago

So far it was either the cheapest or the safest. Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.

pzo 1y ago
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
- kubav027 1y ago
  During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
  - Luc 1y ago
    Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.
  - ukblewis 1y ago
    I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me

tiberius_p 1y ago

I remember the anti-nuclear fever went viral in 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I think the correct lesson to be learned from that experience is not to built nuclear power plants in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters...and not to call for all nuclear power plants around the world to be shut down.

mpweiher 1y ago
Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster. There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima. Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons.
- scrlk 1y ago
  > Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. If you're referring to the Onagawa plant, one engineer (Yanosuke Hirai) pushed for the height of the wall to be increased beyond the original spec: > A nuclear plant in a neighboring area, meanwhile, had been built to withstand the tsunamis. A solitary civil engineer employed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company knew the story of the massive Jogan tsunami of the year 869, because it had flooded the Shinto shrine in his hometown. In the 1960s, the engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, had insisted that the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station be built farther back from the sea and at higher elevation than initially proposed—ultimately nearly fifty feet above sea level. He argued for a seawall to surpass the original plan of thirty-nine feet. He did not live to see what happened in 2011, when forty-foot waves destroyed much of the fishing town of Onagawa, seventy-five miles north of Fukushima. The nuclear power station—the closest one in Japan to the earthquake’s epicenter—was left intact. Displaced residents even took refuge in the power plant’s gym. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-designed-to-make-bad-choices-but-heres-what-we-can-do https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-design... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanosuke_Hirai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanosuke_Hirai

strken 1y ago

That's blatantly wrong. Hydro stands out in the data as being the cheapest reliable carbon neutral option (wind and solar aren't reliable, and when you factor in storage to make them reliable then they're not cheap). Hydro requires large sums of capital to get started, destroys entire valleys, is only viable in a limited number of places, has significant risks if not maintained, and isn't energy dense in the slightest. Nevertheless, it's cheap and it's carbon neutral.

tomatocracy 1y ago
Run-of-the-river hydro in all but a handful of sites tends to be quite dependent on rainfall levels. This means production levels can vary quite meaningfully both seasonally and more importantly year-to-year. It's definitely reliable in the sense that hydro stations can basically last forever if properly maintained (there are plenty of hydro stations operating today which are more than 100 years old) but it's not quite a silver bullet.

pfdietz 1y ago

I was all for nuclear when it was the best option to displace fossil fuels. It is no longer, so I'm no longer all for it.

lima 1y ago
This. The time for new nuclear plants was 20 years ago. Now it's too late, and too expensive, even in purely practical terms without the question of safety.

teamonkey 1y ago

> I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s. Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_fatalities_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind. It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks. Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity. I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.

account42 1y ago
People fear what the media tells them to fear. I still remember the (publicly funded so not really independent from government) TV here having someone refer to a beech near Fukushima as "possibly one of the most dangerous places on earth" while holding up a Geiger counter that showed radiation levels barely above background levels. Nuclear accidents have been a nothing-burger compared to all the deaths and health issues caused by coal and gas - but those are more spread out over time and don't make for as exciting news so no one cares. Shutting down nuclear instead of coal was never a rational decision but an emotional one.
s_dev 1y ago
Coal kills far more people than nuclear yet you never read about it. I think partly because any nuclear catastrophes are visible and concentrated to a single area. Coal smoke kills over a much wider area and this impacts that 'newsworthiness' of this fear to spread. It's a class data vs feelings issue and yet again peoples feelings trump the data and undermines what experts familiar with both the danger and the data say.

prinny_ 1y ago

I am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?

pera 1y ago
This is the main reason why I am, generally speaking, against nuclear as a universal solution. A question for pro-nuclear folks: Would you be okay with having a highly corrupt low HDI country building nuclear facilities (conversion and deconversion, enrichment, power plants) next to your borders?
- adastra22 1y ago
  They are more likely to cause more damage, just less visibly, in building substandard fossil fuel plants.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  Absolutely. Just stop using LWR as the blueprint.
- District5524 1y ago
  This is similar to the reasoning of Austria vehemently opposing nuclear reactors to be built in neighbouring countries, even if downstream on the Danube, even if 200 km from their border. The latest decision (although on the surface, not on an environmental issue like the article is about, but on state aid measures - but actually not the real reason for Austria's opposition): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62023CJ0059 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62... So, I believe, yes, low HDI countries with high corruption do have the right to build nuclear facilities. This is not like a combination of low HDI and high corruption index awarded by some international organization has the approval rights to such questions of sovereignity. There is a whole range of special regulation regarding who can build nuclear stations and under what conditions, with a special agency to ensure the safe use (IAEA) - that should be the only criteria for letting nations build nuclear stations, not corruption, HDI or how rich the countries are.

greesil 1y ago

It's a bit more nuanced than this, no? It's better to reflect on why we let important things like nuclear energy go to the lowest bidder, or private entities that want to maximize short term profit.

kranke155 1y ago

The reason to be against nuclear energy is quite simple - human error. Unlike flying, we’ve not shown nuclear energy to be sufficiently idiot-proof for many people to be comfortable with it. That and the fact that radiation is invisible, which makes it somehow almost paranormal.

dijit 1y ago
The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered). But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it. The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl. Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven and earth to solve the problem… and if they hadn’t, then the entire continent might be dead today.
- nilslindemann 1y ago
  And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.
  - mbs159 1y ago
    You generally can't really pet a wild brown bear, since they are not interested in humans and would avoid you. You can't run away from it either, since it can outrun you easily
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    This analogy is probably wrong.
    - nilslindemann 1y ago
      No. You just have an irrational fear of brown bears.

MichaelDickens 1y ago

The reason I used to oppose nuclear energy is that its proponents would say nuclear waste isn't a problem, but they would never explain why it isn't a problem. I knew the half-life of uranium was 4 billion years; I didn't see how you could possibly make that safe, and nobody on the pro-nuclear side seemed to have an explanation, so I assumed that no explanation existed. (Turns out the answer is that you can store nuclear waste deep underground at geologically stable locations where tectonics won't cause it to eventually resurface.) (Also radioactive waste isn't uranium and the half-life is considerably shorter than 4 billion years, although it's still quite long.)

dijit 1y ago
it’s also true that you get better at using (and reusing) what we would consider waste today over time. The more energy we are able to use, the more inert the waste material becomes, leading to much lower storage timeframes (though still multiple human lifetimes even in the best case).

jerome-jh 1y ago

From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad! Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale. I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.

adastra22 1y ago
Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate. 3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.
- nilslindemann 1y ago
  See my brown bear vs car comparison above/below. Also, solar causes less deaths, according to your counting method. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Analogy doesn’t work, it’s deaths per TWhour that matter.
    - deleted 1y ago
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  - adastra22 1y ago
    Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that: 1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima. 2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here. 3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.

jiehong 1y ago

But is very centralised. Solar and wind are less centralised, and I think that’s one advantage they have over nuclear.

alphazard 1y ago

Or why there is a "clean" energy distinction that some authority has control over in the first place. If CO2 is the thing we care about, then tax CO2 and let everything sort itself out. The fact there are subsidies instead of carbon taxes is revealing all on its own.

defaultcompany 1y ago

How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.

marcyb5st 1y ago
Isn't that only applicable for Uranium 235 based reactors? Thorium is converted to Uranium 233 and when split the byproducts have an half life of 10s of years, meaning that the radioactivity drops to safe levels in "only" few hundred years. This is much more manageable. Anyway, that is to say that nuclear is a spectrum, and the current mainstream tech I believe it is the one that won because of the military applications (and therefore funding) back in the cold-war era.

nrjames 1y ago

We're living in a reality where nuclear waste was not always properly contained and the repercussions of it are long-lasting. While this particular case is related to the Manhattan Project, it's causing all types of issues to this day: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/11/long-term-effects-nuclear-waste-in-st-louis https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/11/long-term-effects-nu...

burnt-resistor 1y ago

You're purposefully and deceptively omitting the lack of safety and perpetual waste risks.

cauch 1y ago

Probably said somewhere else, but "green" originally means "does not create toxic waste when used". Nuclear is nice and good for the environment, but it does fit in the definition "produce waste", even if this waste can be considered as small or can be somehow treated.

patapong 1y ago

Okay, my reflection is as follows. Investing in nuclear power today is a bit akin to betting against solar/wind + battery. In my opinion it is a losing bet. For a nuclear powerplant to be economically feasible, it first needs to be built (10+ years at this point), and then run for tens of years at consistent output rates. To make this worth it for investors, the state often guarantees the price for energy for tens of years after construction, picking up the difference if the electricity price falls. So in essence, building a nuclear power plant today is locking in that price of electricity for something like 50 years. Solar is today already much cheaper than nuclear, and is coming down in price very quickly, as are batteries and other storage methods. If this development continues and there are further breakthroughs in storage, the taxpayer would have to keep footing the bill to buy expensive nuclear energy for years in the future. Therefore, instead of investing in reviving nuclear, I would much rather invest the same amount in upgrading the grid, researching storage methods, and subsidizing grid-scale solar and wind. I think this will be the better choice for the taxpayer in the long run.

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wkat4242 1y ago

I'm still against nuclear and this ruling didn't change it. For me it's still externalising many of the negative effects to many future generations. And with much more spent fuel comes more proliferation risks. Of course this stuff is not up to me but the parties I vote for are in part because they're anti nuclear.