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Great news. Lets hope this is just the start. The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Net

Great news. Lets hope this is just the start. The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Netherlands, Sweden and France.

hdgvhicv 11mo ago
The question is what’s better value for money, wind and solar (potentially with storage when required), or nuclear.
- helltone 11mo ago
  In the UK, probably nuclear.
  - rcxdude 11mo ago
    Nuclear is surprisingly expensive and solar/wind/storage is surprisingly cheap. Even solar in the UK has better economics than nuclear, and it has no shortage of wind.
    - cenamus 11mo ago
      Yeah, the UK is probably one of the best places for offshore wind, and they're building gigantic fields. And compared to what Hinkley Point C is gonna cost... solar and wind is basically for free
      - dukeyukey 11mo ago
        With the big * of solar being fairly predictable, and wind not. You can be bereft of wind for weeks.
        Earw0rm 11mo ago
        In a given spot yes, the UK continental shelf is pretty big though.
        dukeyukey 11mo ago
        It is, but you can look at https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ and see wind go up and down depending on the weather.
    - neilwilson 11mo ago
      Not when you take the circular economy into account. We’ve always been very good at making boilers. Less so semiconductors.
    - krona 11mo ago
      The outcome of Contracts for Difference (CfD) Allocation Round 6 suggests wind isn't cheap compared to wholesale electricity prices in the UK, which are already one of the highest in the world. The maths is quite simple. And that doesn't include curtailment costs, which are not insignificant.
      - Reason077 11mo ago
        The average strike price for offshore wind in AR6 came in at £59.90/MWh. That's pretty cheap, and much cheaper than any new nuclear. Hinkley Point C's strike price is £92.50/MWh. (note: strike prices are always quoted based on 2012 currency, and get adjusted for inflation) You can't really compare strike prices to spot prices on the wholesale market precisely because there's so much supply under CfD contracts, which distorts the wholesale market. When supply is abundant, the wholesale price plummets and even goes negative, yet suppliers still want to generate because they get the CfD price. When supply is constrained (eg: cold snaps in winter with little wind), the spot price can surge to £1000/MWh.
        krona 11mo ago
        That £59.90 figure is 2012 prices. In 2024 money offshore was £102 offshore, onshore £89. AR7 estimates are >10% higher. Those prices were not high enough for Hornsea 4, who cancelled the contract (with a big write down for the entire project) after being awarded it. Hinkley C is, as everyone knows, a disaster.
        Reason077 11mo ago
        Yes, like I said, UK CfD strike prices (both nuclear and wind) are always quoted in 2012 prices. But even adjusting for inflation, offshore wind's £59.90 is a fraction of the retail price that UK consumers and most businesses pay for electricity. There's plenty of margin left for the middlemen (regulator, grid operator, distribution network operator, electricity retailer, etc). ... and Hinkley Point C's £92.50 is £133.79 today, and could be £160+ by the time it actually starts generating in (maybe?) 2031.
    - Mawr 11mo ago
      Unless there is a shortage of wind on a given day/week/month. Then the cheapness is no longer surprising ― you are literally paying only what it costs to provide the electricity now, not at any point in the future. Maybe the guarantee of 24/7 supply is actually worth something?
- cinntaile 11mo ago
  As usual the answer is likely to be a combination of energy sources. It's not wind and solar (+storage) OR nuclear, it's wind and solar (+storage) AND nuclear (and of course other energy sources when appropriate).
  - ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
    The problem is that nuclear powers profile with fixed output and extremely high CAPEX costs is the opposite to what a modern grid needs. How would you add an extremely expensive new built nuclear plant to this grid? Would you shut it down for days on end or try to run it as a peaker? https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
    - justincormack 11mo ago
      Or add a load of batteries to the capex and redistribute the constant load?
      - ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
        If taking that step, why charge the batteries with extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity rather than cheap renewables? It is done when moving electricity around when the grid is strained. Buy expensive electricity and sell it at even higher prices. But that is a vanishly tiny portion of the demand.
        evandijk70 11mo ago
        Because there is little solar in the 3 winter months, so you would need a lot more storage for solar then for nuclear.
        pfdietz 11mo ago
        What is needed is an alternative storage that minimizes capex, even if that means operating at lower round trip efficiency. Hydrogen or ultra low capex thermal storage. I'll point to Standard Thermal again here. https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal
- rwmj 11mo ago
  Wind & nuclear together. Britain already has large wind installations, since the sea to the east is quite shallow (it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago). Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.
  - ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
    > Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security. So you’re saying that we should turn off the nuclear plant? What do we calculate? A generous 50% capacity factor? The new built nuclear power now costs ~40 cents/kWh. It just becomes ridiculously expensive when real world constraints are added.
    - happymellon 11mo ago
      The current "real world constraint" is purchasing gas from Russia. Yeah, nuclear is better than that.
      - ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
        Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1] You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it. [1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-buys-more-ever-2025 https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-...
        realusername 11mo ago
        The French gas plants have been built to support renewables, France didn't have almost any gas plants prior 2010. There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol.
      - bauble12 11mo ago
- newsclues 11mo ago
  Depends on the load, but nuclear isn’t dependent upon batteries or the wind.
  - fundatus 11mo ago
    True, but for most places you'll now be dependent on some other country selling you uranium. Which is something many countries are now factoring in into these kind of decisions.
    - newsclues 11mo ago
      I always hoped reactor designs like CANDU would result in turn warheads into clean power!
  - hdgvhicv 11mo ago
    Depends on over provision then. If lowest demand in the grid is 20GW, average 30GW highest demand is 50GW then you need to be able to generate 50GW, despite nuclear costs only being specced assuming they can always find 20GW of customers. It’s the same problem as wind has where demand and supply are variable. Nuclear cant scale up in an affordable cost as the first GW is amortised over 8,760 hours a year, but the top 10GW is only needed 50 hours a year. If it’s £8760 to generate 10GW for a year, that means you have to spend £43,800 to be able to cope with a peak of 50GW, but the average demand of 30GW means the average cost is £14,600 - 65% more than the average “base load”
- chickenbig 11mo ago
  Given UK wind capacity factors are not going to be as high as predicted [0], a lot more storage is required for the wind system so reducing its value. [0] https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reality https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reali...
- skeletal88 11mo ago
  What do you do when there is no wind and it is cloudy. Dont turn on your tea kettle?
  - Earw0rm 11mo ago
    Fall back on your domestic battery, which stores a thousand kettles' worth of energy. If it's going to stay still and cloudy for a full week, from Jersey all the way up to Orkney, consider running things leaner than usual for a bit. Microwave instead of oven, showers every two days instead of every day, e-moped instead of eSUV to work. (The outrage some will be feeling at this demonstrates exactly how spoilt we are in the West.)
    - samarthr1 11mo ago
      The definition of prosperity, atleast to me is that even if something as natural as there being a bit less wind, or a few more clouds, or a small riot in the next town, my life can go on unchanged. Just knowing that you don't need to plan and budget for scarcity is something that takes an incredible load off my mind. I come from a place which has seen wide spread blackouts during hot summers, and know that I do not want my children to face that. Maybe I am being naive here, but to me, the whole point of doing more with less is so that we can bring up the billions of people less fortunate than us, to have the same or better standards of living as usual, not making our standards worse! The aim should be to grow the pie, not shrink our shares.
      - Earw0rm 11mo ago
        Two related but often confused concepts. Standards of living, quality of life. We definitely need more of the latter, and for it to be distributed more evenly across the globe. The former, however, hits an asymptote. The upper middle classes are, in general, a lot happier than the desperately poor, having perhaps 10x their wealth. Billionaires, who have 1000x more again, aren't much happier. So the question becomes, if we want to avoid scarcity, how much do we overbuild - such that scarcity is a physical and mathematical impossibility - and how much do we make society a bit more adaptive? A simple example - do we build enough electricity that people are guaranteed to always have enough to charge their heavy EVs, or do we overbuild a bit less, and encourage some percent of the population to work remotely or use light transport at times when energy availability is a little compromised. I'm here for a prosperity that gives everyone on the planet four weeks' paid vacation each year, hell, why not eight weeks if we can. I'm not so much here for all those vacations being long-haul aviation - it's enormously more impact on the planet for a tiny gain in quality of life.
- dan-robertson 11mo ago
  One advantage nuclear may have in the UK is in the per-Megawatt planning applications required, purely by the energy generation being more concentrated. Of course, while people hate wind turbines and solar panels, they _really_ hate nuclear, but this can mean nuclear has some chance of getting special permits from central government. Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby. Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
  - DrBazza 11mo ago
    > they _really_ hate nuclear The general public don't understand nuclear. And we can thank CND, Greenpeace, and the mainstream press of the 60s onwards for regurgitating their misinformation and poor science as fact. Modern designs are effectively melt-down proof. Nuclear waste storage is also hilariously funny. People understand not to tread on a railway line or get electrocuted and die, but somehow have a problem with burying waste at the bottom of a sealed mine in a geologically safe area many miles from the nearest village or town (never a city) in containers that have been tested to literal destruction is somehow a problem. The sad irony is these eco-people's opposition to nuclear for decades has resulted in gigatons of CO2 from coal/oil/gas power stations.
    - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
      People have a problem with spent fuels sitting in pools for decades, as happens in Sellafield. "Originally constructed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s these facilities - two ponds and two concrete silos - no longer meet the safety requirements that are required today and present some of the most difficult decommissioning challenges - not just in the UK - but in the world." The industry does not have a good reputation, and it only has itself to blame for that. https://www.onr.org.uk/our-work/what-we-regulate/sellafield-decommissioning-fuel-and-waste/sellafield/legacy-ponds-and-silos https://www.onr.org.uk/our-work/what-we-regulate/sellafield-...
- alecco 11mo ago
  Wind and solar are extremely unstable. Spain had a country-wide blackout earlier this year because of reactors being off. Days with peak solar and wind (heavily subsidized) made nuclear not viable. But you need a stable source to keep the grid from collapsing (and not fry appliances), like nuclear or hydro. It's like both a pace-maker and a goakeeper. So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
  - osn9363739 11mo ago
    Why not just firm the renewables with batteries to even it out. seems easier and cheaper than building nuclear.
  - crote 11mo ago
    Nonsense. For a stable grid you need inertia. Traditionally this has been provided by the spinning mass of turbines, but there's no technical reason why those have to be used. For example, the UK has been building a bunch of "synchronous condensers" for this reason - essentially a giant flywheel. Battery storage can easily provide a massive amount of inertia as well - provided it is configured to operate that way. The Spain blackout was mostly caused by misconfiguration. It is not in any way representative of any inherent characteristic of a renewable grid.
- razighter777 11mo ago
  No good answer to which is better for the money. I say bring it all. Diversity in renewable energy sources is important for grid resilience. Some areas are gonna be terrible for solar and good for wind. Some areas might not have proper water access for nuclear.
- belorn 11mo ago
  How much fossil fuel are acceptable to burn, should subsidizes count to the total cost, should grid connections and transport count to the total cost, and what is the time frame? Is the market allowed to freely spike based on supply and demand with no price roof? The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis. So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.
  - Earw0rm 11mo ago
    A lot of this depends on the scale - and cost (two way relationship) of domestic battery rollout. An individual uses (broad rule of thumb average) somewhere in the 300-500W range to participate in society at a modern level. A warm and well-lit home, cooking a couple of meals, hot water, an EV with enough charge to get to work, TV, laptop and so on. This is before we consider industry and infrastructure. It's possible to bring those numbers down a bit, but not a lot. Even with fairly aggressive optimisations (Passivhaus, ebike, low-energy cooking), below 100W it gets tough. But on the flip side, this means a 50kWh home battery can keep a family home running for a day, and 100-200kWh longer than that. 100kWh is affordable today as a home upgrade, and if people adopted a little more of a flexibility ethic with respect to availability, 200kWh will comfortably run a four-person home for a week. Granted 200kWh domestic instals aren't affordable yet, but by the time these NPPs are online - five years? - they likely will be.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
zwnow 11mo ago
[flagged]
- Angostura 11mo ago
  What ‘cult-like’ love would this be? If you are in a climate emergency it’s worth exploring all energy options and nuclear is one option for helping with baseload. It would be dumb to ignore it.
  - zwnow 11mo ago
    Just cut off the general public from power for like 1/6th of the day instead of going for unsafe solutions. Considering the amount of bullshit we power nowadays we can surely live without power for some hours of the day until we find better solutions.
    - roenxi 11mo ago
      That sounds like a pretty unsafe solution, it'll injure people. What if a member of the general public trips while stumbling around in the dark? Or gets food poisoning from improperly refrigerated food?
    - NitpickLawyer 11mo ago
      There's nothing inherently unsafe about small nuclear reactors. We've been using them safely since the 50s. You can look it up, you have the entire history of the world at your fingertips. Here's a fun fact: the bloke that was the first commander of a nuclear powered submarine (1954!) went on to be the first commander of a nuclear powered boat. And he got to live till 90+ yo. The tech is safe. The fear-mongering people are boring. It's literally the reason we can't have cool shit.
      - zwnow 11mo ago
        Whats ur solution to nuclear waste?
7bit 11mo ago
Truly great news. Less competition in the renewable energy sector for us.
croes 11mo ago
Nuclear and security, that’s a good one especially nowadays when companies tend to connect everything to the internet and drone wars are a thing since the war in Ukraine. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/09/ukraine-war-briefing-russia-deliberately-endangering-nuclear-safety-in-europe-says-kyiv https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/09/ukraine-war-br... Didn’t here similar about wind and photovoltaics

Great news. Lets hope this is just the start. The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Netherlands, Sweden and France.

hdgvhicv 11mo ago

The question is what’s better value for money, wind and solar (potentially with storage when required), or nuclear.

helltone 11mo ago
In the UK, probably nuclear.
- rcxdude 11mo ago
  Nuclear is surprisingly expensive and solar/wind/storage is surprisingly cheap. Even solar in the UK has better economics than nuclear, and it has no shortage of wind.
  - cenamus 11mo ago
    Yeah, the UK is probably one of the best places for offshore wind, and they're building gigantic fields. And compared to what Hinkley Point C is gonna cost... solar and wind is basically for free
    - dukeyukey 11mo ago
      With the big * of solar being fairly predictable, and wind not. You can be bereft of wind for weeks.
      - Earw0rm 11mo ago
        In a given spot yes, the UK continental shelf is pretty big though.
        dukeyukey 11mo ago
        It is, but you can look at https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ and see wind go up and down depending on the weather.
  - neilwilson 11mo ago
    Not when you take the circular economy into account. We’ve always been very good at making boilers. Less so semiconductors.
  - krona 11mo ago
    The outcome of Contracts for Difference (CfD) Allocation Round 6 suggests wind isn't cheap compared to wholesale electricity prices in the UK, which are already one of the highest in the world. The maths is quite simple. And that doesn't include curtailment costs, which are not insignificant.
    - Reason077 11mo ago
      The average strike price for offshore wind in AR6 came in at £59.90/MWh. That's pretty cheap, and much cheaper than any new nuclear. Hinkley Point C's strike price is £92.50/MWh. (note: strike prices are always quoted based on 2012 currency, and get adjusted for inflation) You can't really compare strike prices to spot prices on the wholesale market precisely because there's so much supply under CfD contracts, which distorts the wholesale market. When supply is abundant, the wholesale price plummets and even goes negative, yet suppliers still want to generate because they get the CfD price. When supply is constrained (eg: cold snaps in winter with little wind), the spot price can surge to £1000/MWh.
      - krona 11mo ago
        That £59.90 figure is 2012 prices. In 2024 money offshore was £102 offshore, onshore £89. AR7 estimates are >10% higher. Those prices were not high enough for Hornsea 4, who cancelled the contract (with a big write down for the entire project) after being awarded it. Hinkley C is, as everyone knows, a disaster.
        Reason077 11mo ago
        Yes, like I said, UK CfD strike prices (both nuclear and wind) are always quoted in 2012 prices. But even adjusting for inflation, offshore wind's £59.90 is a fraction of the retail price that UK consumers and most businesses pay for electricity. There's plenty of margin left for the middlemen (regulator, grid operator, distribution network operator, electricity retailer, etc). ... and Hinkley Point C's £92.50 is £133.79 today, and could be £160+ by the time it actually starts generating in (maybe?) 2031.
  - Mawr 11mo ago
    Unless there is a shortage of wind on a given day/week/month. Then the cheapness is no longer surprising ― you are literally paying only what it costs to provide the electricity now, not at any point in the future. Maybe the guarantee of 24/7 supply is actually worth something?
cinntaile 11mo ago
As usual the answer is likely to be a combination of energy sources. It's not wind and solar (+storage) OR nuclear, it's wind and solar (+storage) AND nuclear (and of course other energy sources when appropriate).
- ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
  The problem is that nuclear powers profile with fixed output and extremely high CAPEX costs is the opposite to what a modern grid needs. How would you add an extremely expensive new built nuclear plant to this grid? Would you shut it down for days on end or try to run it as a peaker? https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
  - justincormack 11mo ago
    Or add a load of batteries to the capex and redistribute the constant load?
    - ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
      If taking that step, why charge the batteries with extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity rather than cheap renewables? It is done when moving electricity around when the grid is strained. Buy expensive electricity and sell it at even higher prices. But that is a vanishly tiny portion of the demand.
      - evandijk70 11mo ago
        Because there is little solar in the 3 winter months, so you would need a lot more storage for solar then for nuclear.
        pfdietz 11mo ago
        What is needed is an alternative storage that minimizes capex, even if that means operating at lower round trip efficiency. Hydrogen or ultra low capex thermal storage. I'll point to Standard Thermal again here. https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal
rwmj 11mo ago
Wind & nuclear together. Britain already has large wind installations, since the sea to the east is quite shallow (it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago). Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.
- ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
  > Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security. So you’re saying that we should turn off the nuclear plant? What do we calculate? A generous 50% capacity factor? The new built nuclear power now costs ~40 cents/kWh. It just becomes ridiculously expensive when real world constraints are added.
  - happymellon 11mo ago
    The current "real world constraint" is purchasing gas from Russia. Yeah, nuclear is better than that.
    - ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
      Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1] You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it. [1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-buys-more-ever-2025 https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-...
      - realusername 11mo ago
        The French gas plants have been built to support renewables, France didn't have almost any gas plants prior 2010. There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol.
    - bauble12 11mo ago
newsclues 11mo ago
Depends on the load, but nuclear isn’t dependent upon batteries or the wind.
- fundatus 11mo ago
  True, but for most places you'll now be dependent on some other country selling you uranium. Which is something many countries are now factoring in into these kind of decisions.
  - newsclues 11mo ago
    I always hoped reactor designs like CANDU would result in turn warheads into clean power!
- hdgvhicv 11mo ago
  Depends on over provision then. If lowest demand in the grid is 20GW, average 30GW highest demand is 50GW then you need to be able to generate 50GW, despite nuclear costs only being specced assuming they can always find 20GW of customers. It’s the same problem as wind has where demand and supply are variable. Nuclear cant scale up in an affordable cost as the first GW is amortised over 8,760 hours a year, but the top 10GW is only needed 50 hours a year. If it’s £8760 to generate 10GW for a year, that means you have to spend £43,800 to be able to cope with a peak of 50GW, but the average demand of 30GW means the average cost is £14,600 - 65% more than the average “base load”
chickenbig 11mo ago
Given UK wind capacity factors are not going to be as high as predicted [0], a lot more storage is required for the wind system so reducing its value. [0] https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reality https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reali...
skeletal88 11mo ago
What do you do when there is no wind and it is cloudy. Dont turn on your tea kettle?
- Earw0rm 11mo ago
  Fall back on your domestic battery, which stores a thousand kettles' worth of energy. If it's going to stay still and cloudy for a full week, from Jersey all the way up to Orkney, consider running things leaner than usual for a bit. Microwave instead of oven, showers every two days instead of every day, e-moped instead of eSUV to work. (The outrage some will be feeling at this demonstrates exactly how spoilt we are in the West.)
  - samarthr1 11mo ago
    The definition of prosperity, atleast to me is that even if something as natural as there being a bit less wind, or a few more clouds, or a small riot in the next town, my life can go on unchanged. Just knowing that you don't need to plan and budget for scarcity is something that takes an incredible load off my mind. I come from a place which has seen wide spread blackouts during hot summers, and know that I do not want my children to face that. Maybe I am being naive here, but to me, the whole point of doing more with less is so that we can bring up the billions of people less fortunate than us, to have the same or better standards of living as usual, not making our standards worse! The aim should be to grow the pie, not shrink our shares.
    - Earw0rm 11mo ago
      Two related but often confused concepts. Standards of living, quality of life. We definitely need more of the latter, and for it to be distributed more evenly across the globe. The former, however, hits an asymptote. The upper middle classes are, in general, a lot happier than the desperately poor, having perhaps 10x their wealth. Billionaires, who have 1000x more again, aren't much happier. So the question becomes, if we want to avoid scarcity, how much do we overbuild - such that scarcity is a physical and mathematical impossibility - and how much do we make society a bit more adaptive? A simple example - do we build enough electricity that people are guaranteed to always have enough to charge their heavy EVs, or do we overbuild a bit less, and encourage some percent of the population to work remotely or use light transport at times when energy availability is a little compromised. I'm here for a prosperity that gives everyone on the planet four weeks' paid vacation each year, hell, why not eight weeks if we can. I'm not so much here for all those vacations being long-haul aviation - it's enormously more impact on the planet for a tiny gain in quality of life.
dan-robertson 11mo ago
One advantage nuclear may have in the UK is in the per-Megawatt planning applications required, purely by the energy generation being more concentrated. Of course, while people hate wind turbines and solar panels, they _really_ hate nuclear, but this can mean nuclear has some chance of getting special permits from central government. Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby. Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
- DrBazza 11mo ago
  > they _really_ hate nuclear The general public don't understand nuclear. And we can thank CND, Greenpeace, and the mainstream press of the 60s onwards for regurgitating their misinformation and poor science as fact. Modern designs are effectively melt-down proof. Nuclear waste storage is also hilariously funny. People understand not to tread on a railway line or get electrocuted and die, but somehow have a problem with burying waste at the bottom of a sealed mine in a geologically safe area many miles from the nearest village or town (never a city) in containers that have been tested to literal destruction is somehow a problem. The sad irony is these eco-people's opposition to nuclear for decades has resulted in gigatons of CO2 from coal/oil/gas power stations.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
    People have a problem with spent fuels sitting in pools for decades, as happens in Sellafield. "Originally constructed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s these facilities - two ponds and two concrete silos - no longer meet the safety requirements that are required today and present some of the most difficult decommissioning challenges - not just in the UK - but in the world." The industry does not have a good reputation, and it only has itself to blame for that. https://www.onr.org.uk/our-work/what-we-regulate/sellafield-decommissioning-fuel-and-waste/sellafield/legacy-ponds-and-silos https://www.onr.org.uk/our-work/what-we-regulate/sellafield-...
alecco 11mo ago
Wind and solar are extremely unstable. Spain had a country-wide blackout earlier this year because of reactors being off. Days with peak solar and wind (heavily subsidized) made nuclear not viable. But you need a stable source to keep the grid from collapsing (and not fry appliances), like nuclear or hydro. It's like both a pace-maker and a goakeeper. So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
- osn9363739 11mo ago
  Why not just firm the renewables with batteries to even it out. seems easier and cheaper than building nuclear.
- crote 11mo ago
  Nonsense. For a stable grid you need inertia. Traditionally this has been provided by the spinning mass of turbines, but there's no technical reason why those have to be used. For example, the UK has been building a bunch of "synchronous condensers" for this reason - essentially a giant flywheel. Battery storage can easily provide a massive amount of inertia as well - provided it is configured to operate that way. The Spain blackout was mostly caused by misconfiguration. It is not in any way representative of any inherent characteristic of a renewable grid.
razighter777 11mo ago
No good answer to which is better for the money. I say bring it all. Diversity in renewable energy sources is important for grid resilience. Some areas are gonna be terrible for solar and good for wind. Some areas might not have proper water access for nuclear.
belorn 11mo ago
How much fossil fuel are acceptable to burn, should subsidizes count to the total cost, should grid connections and transport count to the total cost, and what is the time frame? Is the market allowed to freely spike based on supply and demand with no price roof? The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis. So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.
- Earw0rm 11mo ago
  A lot of this depends on the scale - and cost (two way relationship) of domestic battery rollout. An individual uses (broad rule of thumb average) somewhere in the 300-500W range to participate in society at a modern level. A warm and well-lit home, cooking a couple of meals, hot water, an EV with enough charge to get to work, TV, laptop and so on. This is before we consider industry and infrastructure. It's possible to bring those numbers down a bit, but not a lot. Even with fairly aggressive optimisations (Passivhaus, ebike, low-energy cooking), below 100W it gets tough. But on the flip side, this means a 50kWh home battery can keep a family home running for a day, and 100-200kWh longer than that. 100kWh is affordable today as a home upgrade, and if people adopted a little more of a flexibility ethic with respect to availability, 200kWh will comfortably run a four-person home for a week. Granted 200kWh domestic instals aren't affordable yet, but by the time these NPPs are online - five years? - they likely will be.
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zwnow 11mo ago

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Angostura 11mo ago
What ‘cult-like’ love would this be? If you are in a climate emergency it’s worth exploring all energy options and nuclear is one option for helping with baseload. It would be dumb to ignore it.
- zwnow 11mo ago
  Just cut off the general public from power for like 1/6th of the day instead of going for unsafe solutions. Considering the amount of bullshit we power nowadays we can surely live without power for some hours of the day until we find better solutions.
  - roenxi 11mo ago
    That sounds like a pretty unsafe solution, it'll injure people. What if a member of the general public trips while stumbling around in the dark? Or gets food poisoning from improperly refrigerated food?
  - NitpickLawyer 11mo ago
    There's nothing inherently unsafe about small nuclear reactors. We've been using them safely since the 50s. You can look it up, you have the entire history of the world at your fingertips. Here's a fun fact: the bloke that was the first commander of a nuclear powered submarine (1954!) went on to be the first commander of a nuclear powered boat. And he got to live till 90+ yo. The tech is safe. The fear-mongering people are boring. It's literally the reason we can't have cool shit.
    - zwnow 11mo ago
      Whats ur solution to nuclear waste?

7bit 11mo ago

Truly great news. Less competition in the renewable energy sector for us.

croes 11mo ago

Nuclear and security, that’s a good one especially nowadays when companies tend to connect everything to the internet and drone wars are a thing since the war in Ukraine. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/09/ukraine-war-briefing-russia-deliberately-endangering-nuclear-safety-in-europe-says-kyiv https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/09/ukraine-war-br... Didn’t here similar about wind and photovoltaics