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> Look, I love nuclear technology. But the world has moved on. Come again?
by nixass 10mo ago
> Look, I love nuclear technology. But the world has moved on.
Come again?
- iknowstuff 10mo agoWe 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 10mo agoUse 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 10mo agoOk 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 10mo agoYou still need electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing you know?
- Archelaos 10mo agoGas-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 10mo agoGas... How "great" for the environment.
- ViewTrick1002 10mo agoPerfect 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 10mo agoSeems weird to say that while arguing against nuclear.
- nixass 10mo agoYou 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?
- Phil_Latio 10mo agoThen look at the the average and compare with France. Germany causes 6 times more Co2 stemming from energy production. The energy mix in Germany leads to a situation where electric cars are dirtier than diesel (for the first ~200000 km / 125000 miles driven).
- Archelaos 10mo agoCitation needed. I don't belief a word of this.
- derriz 10mo ago> The energy mix in Germany leads to a situation where electric cars are dirtier than diesel (for the first ~200000 km / 125000 miles driven). Renewable share of electricity production is about 56% so this claim is not at all credible. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-covers-nearly-56-percent-2025-electricity-use-renewables https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-covers-nearly-5...
- nosianu 10mo agoThat's what this is for, in general: https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/infrastructure/trans-european-networks-energy_en https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/infrastructure/trans-euro... Also, Germany currently has the problem of much more and more reliable wind generation in the north, but not enough network capacity to send it all south when needed. It is being addressed, but as expected, it is very complicated because infrastructure across the whole country touches the interests of a lot of groups with very different interests. We might need much better tunnel building equipment and a deep sub-terranean network... (useful sci-fi idea, needs to be able to cope with mild earth quakes in some regions).
- Archelaos 10mo agoThis! Don't be disappointed by the downvotes. The fussile+nuclear energy lobby is desparte because of Germany's success. This industry is the equivalent of the tabacoo and pestizide industry of the past. Everything is fine, cheap and under control -- until it isn't ...
- nuxi 10mo agoWe need more Kohl, that'll do the trick...
- seec 10mo agoGermany shows how trying to rely solely on renewables is a fool's errand. They can go from having over 50% of their electricity generated from renewables, but then suddenly it falls to barely over 20% in a single day. But the low production can last multiple days (for reference, look at the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of December 2025). For reference, to store a single day of Germany's electricity at the current battery storage price ($66/kwh) you would need over a hundred billion dollars. Even if battery storage is to be divided by 3 in the coming years, we are still talking tens of billions of dollars for something that isn't even reliable and has a hard limit (go over the 3 days of storage capacity, too bad, you're fucked). Even considering how nuclear construction is stupidly expensive nowadays, that would still be cheaper and more reliable (in large part thanks to German bureaucracy, fuck you by the way for the sabotage at Flamanville). Renewable is the German superiority complex applied at scale. They can't help themselves from overengineering cars, so that makes sense.
- goatlover 10mo agoThat's great, but what percentage of decarbonization will it stall at due to lack of energy density and relying on the wind/sun?
- iknowstuff 10mo agoHow 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 10mo agoYou 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 10mo agoThe 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 10mo agoSince 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 10mo agoUgh. 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 10mo agoAn 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 10mo agoI 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 10mo agoThe 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 10mo agoThat 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 10mo agoThose 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 10mo agoThe 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 10mo agoWind 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 10mo agoSince 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 10mo agoNot 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 10mo agoIn Germany it has now dropped to 8%.
- g8oz 10mo 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 10mo agoIt was 10% before, the recent drops in fleet capacity factors are explained by cannibalization/curtailment and the best locations already gone.
- ViewTrick1002 10mo ago
- DarkNova6 10mo agoLook 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 10mo agoPlenty of comments here are disproving that baseless argument.
- derriz 10mo agoThe 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.