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So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance productio

So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe. Look, I love nuclear technology. But time has moved on. The costs to rebuild this industry is astronomical and means we lose out on key-future technology like batteries. Edit: But then there are bombs. And especially French love their nukes due national security. This is the only reason to keep pushing for nuclear, since Russia, the US and China are not gonna change direction on this either. But the very least we could do is be honest about it. Edit 2: Changed from "World has moved on" to "time has moved on", since evidently China has invested for a good 2 decades to build their own fully functional nuclear-industry. Proving my point that it takes dedicated investment, network effects and scale to rebuild this industry. After all, they too want to mass produce nukes.

nixass 11mo ago
> Look, I love nuclear technology. But the world has moved on. Come again?
- iknowstuff 11mo ago
  We deploy 10x the capacity in renewables and batteries than we do in nuclear and its only accelerating. We are trending towards 1/10th the cost of nuclear per GW. There is no going back just due to the sheer scale of mass manufacturing renewables. We are below $1B/GW for solar. China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year. Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years
  - nixass 11mo ago
    Use case: Germany It's going great!!!11 https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
    - notTooFarGone 11mo ago
      Ok let's link Germany when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. Thanks for cherry picking and not linking averages.
      - lawn 11mo ago
        You still need electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing you know?
        Archelaos 11mo ago
        Gas-fired power plants are planned for load balancing, and these are already being built in such a way that they can be converted to hydrogen operation at a later date.
        lawn 11mo ago
        Gas... How "great" for the environment.
        ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
        Perfect is the enemy of good enough. We still need to decarbonize construction, agriculture, aviation, maritime shipping etc. Let’s not stare us blind at perfect in one sector wasting money and opportunity cost which needs to be spent on harder to abate industries.
        lawn 11mo ago
        Seems weird to say that while arguing against nuclear.
      - nixass 11mo ago
        You can move slider for last 24hrs, there were sunny bits in Germany. CO2 is constantly shit over here. And yeah.. what am I supposed to do when it's not sunny or no wind? Fart into windfarm?
  - goatlover 11mo ago
    That's great, but what percentage of decarbonization will it stall at due to lack of energy density and relying on the wind/sun?
    - iknowstuff 11mo ago
      How is it stalling anything if it offers a cheaper and faster build than nuclear? If you need to build 1GW and want it anytime in the next 2 decades, you sure as hell don’t choose nuclear. You either do natural gas or renewables these days. Those are the only competitive sources of energy.
      - mpweiher 11mo ago
        You actually need energy even when the sun doesn't shine. And you are incorrect: renewables are not competitive without heavy subsidies and preferential treatment, such as being allowed to shift the cost of their intermittency onto the reliable producers.
    - DarkNova6 11mo ago
      The problems lies in the lack of storage. Which is why you need efficient and scalable battery technologies. This is the true key technology that yields much more promise than anything nuclear.
  - mpweiher 11mo ago
    Since the capacity factor is so much lower, 10x in capacity just about matches the energy production of nuclear. Never mind the dispatchable power. And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time. So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.
    - iknowstuff 11mo ago
      Ugh. One of us is living in an alternate reality. If the share of energy produced is not growing increasingly more renewable, then it’s me.
      - mpweiher 11mo ago
        An initial much stronger increase in renewables is a logical an unavoidable consequence of what I described. The increase in renewable production needs to be 4x greater initially, because of the longer life of nuclear plants. Queueing theory/Little's Law. So this is entirely expected if you are targeting (a) a fairly constant fleet and (b) fairly constant production rate, both of which are desirable. Under the Messmer plan, France ignored this and built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Which means that they were pretty much done after 15 years, their nuclear industry had basically nothing to do for the next 40 or so years and withered. Bad idea. The current rate of new construction starts in China implies a build rate of at least 10 reactors per year. With an expected life of 80 years, that implies a target fleet size of around 800 reactors if the rate remains constant.
  - solarengineer 11mo ago
    I am a small-time investor in renewable energy businesses, but I am also a believer in nuclear energy. Consider a city like Mumbai that needs about 3.8 GW per day. One would need lots of windmills and large solar farms that would need to be positioned in a different state having more sunlight throughout the year. Mumbai often experiences cloudy weather and intermittent wind. I cannot imagine only wind and solar supporting the needs of Mumbai. There are countries other than the US who do not take 20 years to build a reactor. Out-dated regulations, punitive paperwork, and perhaps poor project management are the reasons for the oft-cited delays in the US. Other countries complete their builds in 6 to 7 years. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-rate-of-nuclear-construction https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
    - mpweiher 11mo ago
      The US delays with the Vogtle AP-1000s (the only recently completed US build) were extremely atypical. First, it was a FOAK design. Which always takes longer to build, it is a prototype. Second, the nuclear build know how in the nuclear engineers, construction workers, and supply chain was not really there any longer. Third, they used a new permitting system, which in theory should have been better and probably will be better in the future: instead of ongoing individual checks and modifications, which made every nuclear power plant in the US a unique unicorn, you are now allowed to submit a master design and once approved you can build that over and over. Without changes. Alas, Westinghouse wasn't actually done with the design when they submitted. So when they started building, they noticed that they had submitted plans that could not actually be built. Oops. That cause massive delays. And delays = cost. And the suppliers fought each other, one went bankrupt etc. COVID also didn't help. So how can we guarantee that the same won't happen in the future and that NOAK builds will be better? Well, for one they now have plans that are obviously buildable, because a bunch of AP-1000s have been built. So that exact thing absolutely can't happen. Also, we can look to China. Turns out, China also built 2 FOAK AP-1000s. These also took about 10 years, despite China usually building in 5. And it turns out, China built some more AP-1000s after that. NOAK builds. And these took 5 years to build with buildable plans, experience building that reactors and a mature nuclear industry to back them. So there is good reason to believe that future NOAK builds of the AP-1000 and of comparable reactors will be much faster and much cheaper than what we've seen so far.
  - jandrewrogers 11mo ago
    That cost is a property of the regulatory environment, it isn't intrinsic. You can buy a floating nuclear power plant in the form of an aircraft carrier for a lot less than $16B. The US Navy builds these things as a matter of course in a few years using standard designs they crank out by the dozens.
    - hvb2 11mo ago
      Those carriers have 700MW thermal output reactors. The new generation EPRs built now are about 6x that. And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is) Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
  - nine_k 11mo ago
    The problem is that much of Europe lies pretty far north. Certainly, Spain can deploy solar power with high efficiency, but Netherlands can't grab as much sunlight no matter what, to say nothing of Sweden or Norway. Wind power helps, but it's way more expensive than solar.
    - laurencerowe 11mo ago
      Wind is still much cheaper than new nuclear with an LCOE in the UK under half that of new nuclear. Surprisingly it seems worthwhile to build solar in places like the UK/Netherlands/Denmark since solar production is negatively correlated with wind. Norway and Sweden have large hydropower resources too.
  - mpweiher 11mo ago
    Since you use China as a comparison for solar: China builds 1.4GW nuclear power plants in 5 years for $3.5 bn. And of course the capacity factor for PV is about 10%, so you need 10x the capacity to get the same output even on average. Never mind that you get nothing at night, and very little in winter.
    - g8oz 11mo ago
      Not 10%. It's a 25% capacity factor for utility scale solar in the US. I'm assuming it's a similar number for China.
      - mpweiher 11mo ago
        In Germany it has now dropped to 8%.
        g8oz 11mo ago
        >>It is important to note that within Germany’s generation data, Ember’s analysis has identified an unusual trend of declining solar irradiance-adjusted performance over the past several years. We do not yet have a definitive explanation for why this is, but it could be related to challenges in measuring behind-the-meter solar generation, exacerbated recently by high levels of residential battery storage. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that there is under-reporting of German solar generation. - European electricity review 2024 by Ember https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricity-review-2024/insights/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
        mpweiher 11mo ago
        It was 10% before, the recent drops in fleet capacity factors are explained by cannibalization/curtailment and the best locations already gone.
        ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
- DarkNova6 11mo ago
  Look at the boom of nuclear in the 70s. The industry wide and deep expertise from production, to planning, to logistics. Particularly the french did this par excellence. But nuclear has first languished and is now almost non-existent in Europe. Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective. We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.
  - nunobrito 11mo ago
    Plenty of comments here are disproving that baseless argument.
- derriz 11mo ago
  The technology of electricity production has advanced since nuclear peaked in the mid 1980s. We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator. Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part. All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive. Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
goatlover 11mo ago
But that means it's not a completely new industry since the French already have nuclear power plants and working experts.
- DarkNova6 11mo ago
  Oh yeah, the EPR is going super great. Delay after delay after delay. The Finnish EPR only took 18 years of construction. What a marvel of engineering and planning.
  - mpweiher 11mo ago
    Shifting goal posts.
mpweiher 11mo ago
Er...what? There is a massive nuclear renaissance in-progress. According to the following tracker: https://globalenergymonitor.github.io/maps/trackers/nuclear/ https://globalenergymonitor.github.io/maps/trackers/nuclear/ There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively. Note that both the numbers are pretty large compared to the installed base (more than doubling the installed base), that they are increasing for the earlier stages (indicating more is in the pipeline than is currently being built), and that all the pipeline stages are increasing over time. Which is of course consistent with the fact that 34 countries have now signed the international pledge to triple nuclear output that was first agreed at COP28. These countries include: France, the United States, China, Japan, Poland, Sweden, etc. India has plans and is on track to triple by 2032, but hasn't signed the pledge. I am also not sure why you think that "all existing experts" have retired and there is no nuclear industry. The World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris November 4-6 of this year had over 1000 exhibitors, and more than half of those were from Europe. https://www.framatome.com/en/evenements-clients/world-nuclear-exhibition-2025-the-worlds-leading-civil-nuclear-exhibition/ https://www.framatome.com/en/evenements-clients/world-nuclea... Even phase-out-Germany still has substantial nuclear engineering capacity, there's even a nuclear fuel factory in Lingen. And of course the actual nuclear component of a nuclear power plant is only around 20%. About the same effort/cost goes into the steam turbines, of which Siemens is a major worldwide supplier. And of course civil nuclear programs have next to nothing to do with military nuclear programs. There are many more users of civil nuclear power than there are military nuclear powers, and the military nuclear powers invariably got the bomb first, and added a civil program later, with some like Israel only having a military nuclear program, not a civilian one. In fact, there's a fun anecdote from the beginnings of the French nuclear program, since you mention France: when the Messmer plan got started, the military wanted to deploy an indigenous type of reactor for the civilian program that was more suitable for military uses, but in the end the government decided to standardize on a US Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that was not useful for military purposes.
- rstuart4133 11mo ago
  > There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively. At about 1 GWatt per reactor, thats about 500 GWatt total new nuclear built over what must be decades, if it is built at all. A fair chunk of the existing 419 reactors will be retired in that time. Meanwhile, Gemini tells me the planet added well over 100 GW renewable generation in 2024. That 100 GW is dispatchable. It was over 500 GW peak. Almost no renewables were retired in 2024. The rate new renewables are being added is growing at least quadratically. Maybe Europe sunshine and wind resources mean they have no choice, it's nuclear or nothing. But renewables are being added at the pace they are for a reason. In the places that do have the renewable resources, they are far cheaper. If Europe is forced to go down the nuclear path, they are going to be paying far more than other places on the planet for their energy.
sailingparrot 11mo ago
> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?
- DarkNova6 11mo ago
  If you are so smug about this, answer me: 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life? 2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005? 3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China? The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
  - nine_k 11mo ago
    France in particular connected a new nuclear power station to the grid as late as 2024 [1]. But the previous reactor was put online in 1999 or so. Three more were built in EU since 2000: one in Finland (Swedish/Finnish design) and two in Slovakia (Soviet/Russian design). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
    - laurencerowe 11mo ago
      The Finnish reactor is the same French EPR design used at Flamanville and Hinkley Point C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
  - sailingparrot 11mo ago
    Yes, very few new NPP have been built in Europe recently. Quite a few have been built by Europe however. The french company Framatome alone, with 18k employees, is actively building 2 EPR reactors in the UK (+ preliminary studies for 8 more), one reactor has been finished last year in France and recently multiple were built or being built in China, India, Russia (although I guess that might be canceled). Its also already operating the 57 french reactors as well as operating reactors in South Africa, China, Korea, Belgium, Finland. Sure, the industry will need to grow, but claiming it basically has to start from 0 is ludicrous.
BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago
> But the world has moved on. China's got 27 reactors under construction right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
- DarkNova6 11mo ago
  You are naturally correct and I have corrected my statement. I intended to refer to the West but my wording was factually incorrect. China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology that they now have the industry which Europe once had. And to rebuild the same type of industry would take the same amount of effort that China had to do. Meanwhile, the US can't even build their own warships anymore.
  - bigbadfeline 11mo ago
    > China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology... And to rebuild the same type of industry in the EU would take the same amount of effort. You're factually wrong. China started from 0 but the EU has kept building reactors, the French Areva/EDF finished three advanced 1600 MW reactors just 6 and 2 years ago. They are also building two reactors of the same type in the UK as we speak. The EU has never lost the expertise necessary for building nuclear reactors, they have actually advanced the state of the art since the end of the initial European wave. Don't be confused by the lack of finished reactors in the EU, 2 of the completed Areva plants are in China and were built for a third of the time and cost of the same type reactors currently under construction in the UK. Therefore: 1. Looking at completed reactors in the EU cannot be used for judging the level of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) expertise in the EU. 2. Cost overruns in Europe are due to politics and civil engineering chaos there while the EU's NPP expertise is the best in the world. 3. Technology-wise, a new EU buldout of NPPs won't start from zero but from the the very top of the NPP technology ladder.
- derriz 11mo ago
  In the first 5 months of this year, China added 198 GW of solar PV and 46 GW of wind. Nuclear is a small side-hustle for them.
scythe 11mo ago
>So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe. You could say most of the same things about batteries. There is a little lithium in Europe. But Europe doesn't have a battery industry. It's in China. And you could buy batteries from China, but we aren't doing that and the political trends don't support more energy dependence on China. You could also buy nuclear reactors from China, but of course Europe doesn't want to do that either. What they are proposing is that Europe is going to pivot from not making batteries to not building nuclear plants. They will, however, write lots of papers about the reactors (neé batteries) they would like to build, if only the prevailing wage or regulatory regime or other economic excuse du jour wasn't stopping them. It has increasingly become my impression after watching these debates unfold that the core technology is not the real problem. The problem is a lack of political will to encourage the growth of new industries in green energy, failing both at regulatory and industrial policy. Solar is succeeding, not because it is the best form of energy (though it is) but because it is mostly paid for and installed by individuals and small businesses (with a little capital you can own your own solar farm!).
- belorn 11mo ago
  Sweden had a major company try to make lithium batteries but it was not economical viable without major and continuously infusion of government subsidies. The company Northvolt is the largest bankruptcy in modern Swedish industrial history.
  - scythe 11mo ago
    >The deal with BMW was cancelled in June 2024 because of Northvolt not being able to deliver on time. [Wikipedia] Certainly this is some kind of failure. But this is Hacker News. Surely we can appreciate that you can't just blame the core technology when a company fails. History is full of companies that failed. Japan and the USA have battery companies despite high wages. There is something to be learned here, but I don't have the determination to figure out exactly what it is.
yongjik 11mo ago
These kind of "all the experts are retired" take are getting tiresome. When you think about it, until recently there were no experts in stabilizing the electric grid on a continental scale using renewables, because it was literally never needed before! Didn't stop experts from sprouting out when it became necessary. There were no experts in building continental scale EV charging frameworks, either, until we needed them, and then there were. Same thing all over again. What we can say about nuclear is that it's been continuously supplying a non-negligible part of Europe's energy need for generations, and there are people who've been maintaining that. That's more than what we can say about a lot of our industrial needs in 2025.
7bit 11mo ago
There's a German documentary called "Yellow Cake". It is about the cost of mining uranium. It really was eye opening and I have seen it like ten years ago when I was about thirty. It took thirty years for someone to show me how incredibly devastating the mining of Uranium is to the environment. That's how good of kept secret it is. Because once you see it, you would never ever want nuclear energy ever again. And you finally understand how bad people are lying when they say, it is clean energy. It destroys entire landscapes for generations to come! It is extremely expensive and it is very finite.

nixass 11mo ago

> Look, I love nuclear technology. But the world has moved on. Come again?

iknowstuff 11mo ago
We deploy 10x the capacity in renewables and batteries than we do in nuclear and its only accelerating. We are trending towards 1/10th the cost of nuclear per GW. There is no going back just due to the sheer scale of mass manufacturing renewables. We are below $1B/GW for solar. China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year. Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years
- nixass 11mo ago
  Use case: Germany It's going great!!!11 https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
  - notTooFarGone 11mo ago
    Ok let's link Germany when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. Thanks for cherry picking and not linking averages.
    - lawn 11mo ago
      You still need electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing you know?
      - Archelaos 11mo ago
        Gas-fired power plants are planned for load balancing, and these are already being built in such a way that they can be converted to hydrogen operation at a later date.
        lawn 11mo ago
        Gas... How "great" for the environment.
        ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
        Perfect is the enemy of good enough. We still need to decarbonize construction, agriculture, aviation, maritime shipping etc. Let’s not stare us blind at perfect in one sector wasting money and opportunity cost which needs to be spent on harder to abate industries.
        lawn 11mo ago
        Seems weird to say that while arguing against nuclear.
    - nixass 11mo ago
      You can move slider for last 24hrs, there were sunny bits in Germany. CO2 is constantly shit over here. And yeah.. what am I supposed to do when it's not sunny or no wind? Fart into windfarm?
- goatlover 11mo ago
  That's great, but what percentage of decarbonization will it stall at due to lack of energy density and relying on the wind/sun?
  - iknowstuff 11mo ago
    How is it stalling anything if it offers a cheaper and faster build than nuclear? If you need to build 1GW and want it anytime in the next 2 decades, you sure as hell don’t choose nuclear. You either do natural gas or renewables these days. Those are the only competitive sources of energy.
    - mpweiher 11mo ago
      You actually need energy even when the sun doesn't shine. And you are incorrect: renewables are not competitive without heavy subsidies and preferential treatment, such as being allowed to shift the cost of their intermittency onto the reliable producers.
  - DarkNova6 11mo ago
    The problems lies in the lack of storage. Which is why you need efficient and scalable battery technologies. This is the true key technology that yields much more promise than anything nuclear.
- mpweiher 11mo ago
  Since the capacity factor is so much lower, 10x in capacity just about matches the energy production of nuclear. Never mind the dispatchable power. And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time. So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.
  - iknowstuff 11mo ago
    Ugh. One of us is living in an alternate reality. If the share of energy produced is not growing increasingly more renewable, then it’s me.
    - mpweiher 11mo ago
      An initial much stronger increase in renewables is a logical an unavoidable consequence of what I described. The increase in renewable production needs to be 4x greater initially, because of the longer life of nuclear plants. Queueing theory/Little's Law. So this is entirely expected if you are targeting (a) a fairly constant fleet and (b) fairly constant production rate, both of which are desirable. Under the Messmer plan, France ignored this and built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Which means that they were pretty much done after 15 years, their nuclear industry had basically nothing to do for the next 40 or so years and withered. Bad idea. The current rate of new construction starts in China implies a build rate of at least 10 reactors per year. With an expected life of 80 years, that implies a target fleet size of around 800 reactors if the rate remains constant.
- solarengineer 11mo ago
  I am a small-time investor in renewable energy businesses, but I am also a believer in nuclear energy. Consider a city like Mumbai that needs about 3.8 GW per day. One would need lots of windmills and large solar farms that would need to be positioned in a different state having more sunlight throughout the year. Mumbai often experiences cloudy weather and intermittent wind. I cannot imagine only wind and solar supporting the needs of Mumbai. There are countries other than the US who do not take 20 years to build a reactor. Out-dated regulations, punitive paperwork, and perhaps poor project management are the reasons for the oft-cited delays in the US. Other countries complete their builds in 6 to 7 years. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-rate-of-nuclear-construction https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
  - mpweiher 11mo ago
    The US delays with the Vogtle AP-1000s (the only recently completed US build) were extremely atypical. First, it was a FOAK design. Which always takes longer to build, it is a prototype. Second, the nuclear build know how in the nuclear engineers, construction workers, and supply chain was not really there any longer. Third, they used a new permitting system, which in theory should have been better and probably will be better in the future: instead of ongoing individual checks and modifications, which made every nuclear power plant in the US a unique unicorn, you are now allowed to submit a master design and once approved you can build that over and over. Without changes. Alas, Westinghouse wasn't actually done with the design when they submitted. So when they started building, they noticed that they had submitted plans that could not actually be built. Oops. That cause massive delays. And delays = cost. And the suppliers fought each other, one went bankrupt etc. COVID also didn't help. So how can we guarantee that the same won't happen in the future and that NOAK builds will be better? Well, for one they now have plans that are obviously buildable, because a bunch of AP-1000s have been built. So that exact thing absolutely can't happen. Also, we can look to China. Turns out, China also built 2 FOAK AP-1000s. These also took about 10 years, despite China usually building in 5. And it turns out, China built some more AP-1000s after that. NOAK builds. And these took 5 years to build with buildable plans, experience building that reactors and a mature nuclear industry to back them. So there is good reason to believe that future NOAK builds of the AP-1000 and of comparable reactors will be much faster and much cheaper than what we've seen so far.
- jandrewrogers 11mo ago
  That cost is a property of the regulatory environment, it isn't intrinsic. You can buy a floating nuclear power plant in the form of an aircraft carrier for a lot less than $16B. The US Navy builds these things as a matter of course in a few years using standard designs they crank out by the dozens.
  - hvb2 11mo ago
    Those carriers have 700MW thermal output reactors. The new generation EPRs built now are about 6x that. And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is) Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
- nine_k 11mo ago
  The problem is that much of Europe lies pretty far north. Certainly, Spain can deploy solar power with high efficiency, but Netherlands can't grab as much sunlight no matter what, to say nothing of Sweden or Norway. Wind power helps, but it's way more expensive than solar.
  - laurencerowe 11mo ago
    Wind is still much cheaper than new nuclear with an LCOE in the UK under half that of new nuclear. Surprisingly it seems worthwhile to build solar in places like the UK/Netherlands/Denmark since solar production is negatively correlated with wind. Norway and Sweden have large hydropower resources too.
- mpweiher 11mo ago
  Since you use China as a comparison for solar: China builds 1.4GW nuclear power plants in 5 years for $3.5 bn. And of course the capacity factor for PV is about 10%, so you need 10x the capacity to get the same output even on average. Never mind that you get nothing at night, and very little in winter.
  - g8oz 11mo ago
    Not 10%. It's a 25% capacity factor for utility scale solar in the US. I'm assuming it's a similar number for China.
    - mpweiher 11mo ago
      In Germany it has now dropped to 8%.
      - g8oz 11mo ago
        >>It is important to note that within Germany’s generation data, Ember’s analysis has identified an unusual trend of declining solar irradiance-adjusted performance over the past several years. We do not yet have a definitive explanation for why this is, but it could be related to challenges in measuring behind-the-meter solar generation, exacerbated recently by high levels of residential battery storage. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that there is under-reporting of German solar generation. - European electricity review 2024 by Ember https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricity-review-2024/insights/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
        mpweiher 11mo ago
        It was 10% before, the recent drops in fleet capacity factors are explained by cannibalization/curtailment and the best locations already gone.
        ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
DarkNova6 11mo ago
Look at the boom of nuclear in the 70s. The industry wide and deep expertise from production, to planning, to logistics. Particularly the french did this par excellence. But nuclear has first languished and is now almost non-existent in Europe. Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective. We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.
- nunobrito 11mo ago
  Plenty of comments here are disproving that baseless argument.
derriz 11mo ago
The technology of electricity production has advanced since nuclear peaked in the mid 1980s. We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator. Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part. All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive. Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

goatlover 11mo ago

But that means it's not a completely new industry since the French already have nuclear power plants and working experts.

DarkNova6 11mo ago
Oh yeah, the EPR is going super great. Delay after delay after delay. The Finnish EPR only took 18 years of construction. What a marvel of engineering and planning.
- mpweiher 11mo ago
  Shifting goal posts.

mpweiher 11mo ago

Er...what? There is a massive nuclear renaissance in-progress. According to the following tracker: https://globalenergymonitor.github.io/maps/trackers/nuclear/ https://globalenergymonitor.github.io/maps/trackers/nuclear/ There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively. Note that both the numbers are pretty large compared to the installed base (more than doubling the installed base), that they are increasing for the earlier stages (indicating more is in the pipeline than is currently being built), and that all the pipeline stages are increasing over time. Which is of course consistent with the fact that 34 countries have now signed the international pledge to triple nuclear output that was first agreed at COP28. These countries include: France, the United States, China, Japan, Poland, Sweden, etc. India has plans and is on track to triple by 2032, but hasn't signed the pledge. I am also not sure why you think that "all existing experts" have retired and there is no nuclear industry. The World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris November 4-6 of this year had over 1000 exhibitors, and more than half of those were from Europe. https://www.framatome.com/en/evenements-clients/world-nuclear-exhibition-2025-the-worlds-leading-civil-nuclear-exhibition/ https://www.framatome.com/en/evenements-clients/world-nuclea... Even phase-out-Germany still has substantial nuclear engineering capacity, there's even a nuclear fuel factory in Lingen. And of course the actual nuclear component of a nuclear power plant is only around 20%. About the same effort/cost goes into the steam turbines, of which Siemens is a major worldwide supplier. And of course civil nuclear programs have next to nothing to do with military nuclear programs. There are many more users of civil nuclear power than there are military nuclear powers, and the military nuclear powers invariably got the bomb first, and added a civil program later, with some like Israel only having a military nuclear program, not a civilian one. In fact, there's a fun anecdote from the beginnings of the French nuclear program, since you mention France: when the Messmer plan got started, the military wanted to deploy an indigenous type of reactor for the civilian program that was more suitable for military uses, but in the end the government decided to standardize on a US Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that was not useful for military purposes.

rstuart4133 11mo ago
> There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively. At about 1 GWatt per reactor, thats about 500 GWatt total new nuclear built over what must be decades, if it is built at all. A fair chunk of the existing 419 reactors will be retired in that time. Meanwhile, Gemini tells me the planet added well over 100 GW renewable generation in 2024. That 100 GW is dispatchable. It was over 500 GW peak. Almost no renewables were retired in 2024. The rate new renewables are being added is growing at least quadratically. Maybe Europe sunshine and wind resources mean they have no choice, it's nuclear or nothing. But renewables are being added at the pace they are for a reason. In the places that do have the renewable resources, they are far cheaper. If Europe is forced to go down the nuclear path, they are going to be paying far more than other places on the planet for their energy.

sailingparrot 11mo ago

> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?

DarkNova6 11mo ago
If you are so smug about this, answer me: 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life? 2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005? 3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China? The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
- nine_k 11mo ago
  France in particular connected a new nuclear power station to the grid as late as 2024 [1]. But the previous reactor was put online in 1999 or so. Three more were built in EU since 2000: one in Finland (Swedish/Finnish design) and two in Slovakia (Soviet/Russian design). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
  - laurencerowe 11mo ago
    The Finnish reactor is the same French EPR design used at Flamanville and Hinkley Point C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
- sailingparrot 11mo ago
  Yes, very few new NPP have been built in Europe recently. Quite a few have been built by Europe however. The french company Framatome alone, with 18k employees, is actively building 2 EPR reactors in the UK (+ preliminary studies for 8 more), one reactor has been finished last year in France and recently multiple were built or being built in China, India, Russia (although I guess that might be canceled). Its also already operating the 57 french reactors as well as operating reactors in South Africa, China, Korea, Belgium, Finland. Sure, the industry will need to grow, but claiming it basically has to start from 0 is ludicrous.

BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago

> But the world has moved on. China's got 27 reactors under construction right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

DarkNova6 11mo ago
You are naturally correct and I have corrected my statement. I intended to refer to the West but my wording was factually incorrect. China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology that they now have the industry which Europe once had. And to rebuild the same type of industry would take the same amount of effort that China had to do. Meanwhile, the US can't even build their own warships anymore.
- bigbadfeline 11mo ago
  > China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology... And to rebuild the same type of industry in the EU would take the same amount of effort. You're factually wrong. China started from 0 but the EU has kept building reactors, the French Areva/EDF finished three advanced 1600 MW reactors just 6 and 2 years ago. They are also building two reactors of the same type in the UK as we speak. The EU has never lost the expertise necessary for building nuclear reactors, they have actually advanced the state of the art since the end of the initial European wave. Don't be confused by the lack of finished reactors in the EU, 2 of the completed Areva plants are in China and were built for a third of the time and cost of the same type reactors currently under construction in the UK. Therefore: 1. Looking at completed reactors in the EU cannot be used for judging the level of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) expertise in the EU. 2. Cost overruns in Europe are due to politics and civil engineering chaos there while the EU's NPP expertise is the best in the world. 3. Technology-wise, a new EU buldout of NPPs won't start from zero but from the the very top of the NPP technology ladder.
derriz 11mo ago
In the first 5 months of this year, China added 198 GW of solar PV and 46 GW of wind. Nuclear is a small side-hustle for them.

scythe 11mo ago

>So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe. You could say most of the same things about batteries. There is a little lithium in Europe. But Europe doesn't have a battery industry. It's in China. And you could buy batteries from China, but we aren't doing that and the political trends don't support more energy dependence on China. You could also buy nuclear reactors from China, but of course Europe doesn't want to do that either. What they are proposing is that Europe is going to pivot from not making batteries to not building nuclear plants. They will, however, write lots of papers about the reactors (neé batteries) they would like to build, if only the prevailing wage or regulatory regime or other economic excuse du jour wasn't stopping them. It has increasingly become my impression after watching these debates unfold that the core technology is not the real problem. The problem is a lack of political will to encourage the growth of new industries in green energy, failing both at regulatory and industrial policy. Solar is succeeding, not because it is the best form of energy (though it is) but because it is mostly paid for and installed by individuals and small businesses (with a little capital you can own your own solar farm!).

belorn 11mo ago
Sweden had a major company try to make lithium batteries but it was not economical viable without major and continuously infusion of government subsidies. The company Northvolt is the largest bankruptcy in modern Swedish industrial history.
- scythe 11mo ago
  >The deal with BMW was cancelled in June 2024 because of Northvolt not being able to deliver on time. [Wikipedia] Certainly this is some kind of failure. But this is Hacker News. Surely we can appreciate that you can't just blame the core technology when a company fails. History is full of companies that failed. Japan and the USA have battery companies despite high wages. There is something to be learned here, but I don't have the determination to figure out exactly what it is.

yongjik 11mo ago

These kind of "all the experts are retired" take are getting tiresome. When you think about it, until recently there were no experts in stabilizing the electric grid on a continental scale using renewables, because it was literally never needed before! Didn't stop experts from sprouting out when it became necessary. There were no experts in building continental scale EV charging frameworks, either, until we needed them, and then there were. Same thing all over again. What we can say about nuclear is that it's been continuously supplying a non-negligible part of Europe's energy need for generations, and there are people who've been maintaining that. That's more than what we can say about a lot of our industrial needs in 2025.

7bit 11mo ago

There's a German documentary called "Yellow Cake". It is about the cost of mining uranium. It really was eye opening and I have seen it like ten years ago when I was about thirty. It took thirty years for someone to show me how incredibly devastating the mining of Uranium is to the environment. That's how good of kept secret it is. Because once you see it, you would never ever want nuclear energy ever again. And you finally understand how bad people are lying when they say, it is clean energy. It destroys entire landscapes for generations to come! It is extremely expensive and it is very finite.