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Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, and opposition to nuclear from environmentalist org

Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, and opposition to nuclear from environmentalist orgs should be viewed as a massive historical mistake as it set us back decades in moving the needle on carbon emissions. The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.

ardit33 6mo ago
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- deepsun 6mo ago
  Don't forget a large Russian campaign in Europe to discredit all energy sources that don't involve buying from Russia. Financing green movements, working with governments, especially Germany (Gerhard Schröder now holds good positions in Russian energy companies, Angela Merkel had good relationship with Putin). Puting worked in Germany as KGB agent before his ascension.
  - leonidasrup 6mo ago
    The beginning of Soviet and German cooperation goes back much earlier, to early 1970s. The famous policy of "Wandel durch Handel" "Wandel durch Handel (WdH, German for "Change through trade"), also known as Wandel durch Annäherung, is a political and economic notion, mostly associated with German foreign policy, of increasing trade with authoritarian regimes in an effort to induce political change. Although most strongly associated with Germany, similar policies have been pursued by several Western countries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel For example, West Germany has helped with building Soviet gas network. https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-Russian-Energy-Relations-since-1970.pdf https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-R... All subsequent goverments of Kohl, Schröder, Merkel supported expansion of gas imports from Russia. It was cheap and reliable even during Cold war. And little bit of money from Gazprom to politicians always helped. https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-lobby-germany/?lang=en https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-l...
- leonidasrup 6mo ago
  The root of the German Green party goes back to anti-nuclear and anti-war movements from 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement "Before the 1980s, it was unclear whether the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases was stronger than the cooling effect of airborne particulates in air pollution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change The original 1980 plan for the Energiewende "Energie-Wende: Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran" called for Germany to move towards "coal+gas" or "coal+solar" scenario. Only later were added any consideration for climate change, but the highest priority, the big evil, was nuclear technology. Greenpeace has it's roots also in the opposition to underground nuclear weapon tests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace#Origins
  - FabHK 6mo ago
    Indeed, anti-nuclear sentiment predates the 1990s. The book _The Power of Nuclear_ by Marco Visscher does a good job tracing the history from the shock of the nuclear bomb in 1945 to the enthusiasm of the 1950s and the increasing scepticism of the 1970s and 1980s.
    - leonidasrup 6mo ago
      I recommend book "The Rise of Nuclear Fear" by Spencer R. Weart "After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy. "
- CaptainPotatoe 6mo ago
  France did not get it totally right. We decomissionned superphénix for mostly dogmatic reasons, and also halted the Astrid project (although it look like it may be restarted we only lost 10 years)
ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
Why do so many nuclear fans try to suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear? It's very odd. Compare: If you believe COVID exists you need to use hydroxychloroquine. It makes you sound like you don't even believe in the problem you are proposing an (unpopular with experts) solution for.
- simplyluke 6mo ago
  > suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying. What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s. > unpopular with experts How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
  - cauch 6mo ago
    > How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt? Pretending it's all the fault of the bad environmentalists is a bit ridiculous. A nuclear powerplant is a tricky thing to create. A lot of projects had delay, often not due to any environmentalists or anti-nuclear people, but because the parts failed their internal control, which demonstrates that it is tricky to build. A nuclear powerplant is a huge provider that cannot be turned online for usually ~10 years, so you can also understand the complexity and the uncertainty: we are not able to predict the price of electricity or what will the electricity grid will look like in 2-3 years, and yet they need to predict it for a given region in 10 years. And some environmental laws are frivolous or turned out the be incorrect (the same way some people who at the time were against some environmental laws turned out to be incorrect years later), but some laws are just legitimate and it is simply not fair to pretend that the opinions of some people should just be discarded because you have a different opinion. I myself don't always agree with some law, sometimes anti-nuclear, sometimes pro-nuclear, but a given fraction of these laws will exist, it is just the reality. It's like saying "communism would work if it was not for people who don't like communism": people who don't like communism will always exist and if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic.
epistasis 6mo ago
There's two very different types of reactors: the already-paid-for long-run reactor that's still going, and then on-paper-not-yet-constructed reactor in a high cost of living nation. Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables, only makes sense in a few geographic locations. Not all, or even most! Even keeping old reactors running gets super expensive as they get past their designed lifetimes, and very often doesn't make sense. The engineering is indeed already done for electricity, and storage and renewables are cheap and getting cheaper. Nuclear is at best staying the same high cost, and getting more expensive is these large construction projects rise due to Baumol's cost disease. Opposing more nuclear in the US in the 1980s wasn't fully irrational, the US managerial class have way overbuilt nuclear and we didn't need all the electricity. Then we didn't have much growth in The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living, it's the anti-EV and anti-battery advocates, and to some degree it's retrofitting the wide variety of highly-cost-sensitive industries, such as steel or fertilizer or concrete, to use carbon neutral methods. Or maybe sustainable aviation fuel. Nuclear had it's chance to be a big contributor to climate action back in the mid 2000s and 2010s, it failed that challenge in Georgia at Vogtle, in South Carolnia at Summer, in the UK at Hinkley Point C, in France in Flamanville, and in Finland an Olkiluoto. Every one of those failures is a very good reason for a climate activist to oppose nuclear.
- DennisP 6mo ago
  Back in the 1980s if the US had followed France's lead, then we'd be in the position they're in now: 70% nuclear with much lower per-capita emissions.
  - epistasis 6mo ago
    That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s. Technology has changed over 50 years. France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear. It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects. The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster. People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work. The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.
illiac786 6mo ago
Yep, I have been saying for decades that I agree on almost everything wirh the local Green Party, _except_ the anti-nuclear stuff. Very emotional, very relatable but very dumb.
- trollbridge 6mo ago
  The anti-nuclear stuff seems to pair up quite well with "you need to start importing a lot of natural gas", which makes me think it is simply an agenda pushed by a certain rather large country to the east.
  - petre 6mo ago
    You don't have to wonder, because it is the agenda that you're thinking about and also the agenda of fossil fuel companies. But we now have two lessons that teach us that being anti-nuclear was stupid: the Ukraine war and the current US administration's adventure in the Gulf.
  - kimi 6mo ago
    This is now. But the seeds were sown much earlier.
  - nemetroid 6mo ago
    The west, you mean?
- kimi 6mo ago
  The anti-nuclear area, at least in Western Europe, had historically a very high correlation with those who held sympathies for a certain very large nuclear power who would have strategically benefited from an anti-nuke sentiment that would avoid another nuclear power's weapon deployment in EU bases. But I'm sure it is a coincidence.
sunaookami 6mo ago
>Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind Yes hello, these are both my opinions, do I exist for you or not ;)? You can say that we are in a climate crisis AND be anti-nuclear.
- Manuel_D 6mo ago
  Sure, someone can be both concerned about climate change and oppose nuclear power. But it's a largely self-defeating stance: nuclear is the only non-intermittent geographically independent form of clean energy. Dams and geothermal are geographically constrained. Solar and wind are intermittent, as well as varying in output depending on location.
  - sunaookami 6mo ago
    Everyone is entitled to their opinions.
    - yawaramin 6mo ago
      But they're not entitled to their own facts.
      - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
        The facts are that all large nuclear plants require a stable water supply, and climate change directly threatens that. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X24000725 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...
        Manuel_D 6mo ago
        To be clear, all thermal plants - be they nuclear, fossil fuel, biofuel, etc. - require water for cooling. But this doesn't need to be freshwater, many nuclear plants are cooled with seawater. In non-costal arid areas, nuclear plants can be cooled with sewer water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_... Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.
hintymad 6mo ago
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, I wonder how many people actually believe that we are in good shape so mankind should have no development whatsoever. Just stay as is or even go back decades just to preserve the environment. The first world need more energy because we're greedy and etc.
greendestiny 6mo ago
Nonsense, the reluctance of governments to reduce carbon emissions has been driven by the reluctance for entrenched industries to give up their gravy train. There are many ways for power to be produced with lower carbon emissions, it's absolutely not a binary situation at all. What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of the argument being forced into these positions, its artificial and contrary to the desires of people who want action on climate change who support nuclear and don't.
- belorn 6mo ago
  I would be very happy if people who oppose nuclear would abstain from supporting the fossil fuel industry. When EU voted on green technology, one side voted for nuclear to be defined as green, while the other side voted for natural gas to be given the green status. Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or supporting a combination of renewables and fossil fueled power plants (which sometimes goes under the name of reserve energy and other times as thermal power plants). Usually it is combined with some future hope that green hydrogen will replace that natural gas at some time in the distant future. We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Opposition to the fossil fuel industry should be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants, and a plan to phase out and decommission existing ones. It is difficult to respect people who claim to believing in a climate crisis but then stand there with a shovel when the next gas peaker plant is being built, then arguing how bad nuclear is to combat the climate crisis.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    > We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Well yeah because the battery storage to do that is still exorbitant, at least for the time being. There are some situational options but nothing universal. Other than waiting for the cost of existing battery tech to fall the most promising option I'm aware of are the prototypes utilizing iron ore for seasonal storage.
cushychicken 6mo ago
The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record. It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record. My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!
- avianlyric 6mo ago
  They have done. The Three Mile Island accident happened when it was being operated by Navy vets [1]. Simple training isn’t enough. During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response: > Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others. So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour. [1] https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-learned-and https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-lea...
  - echelon 6mo ago
    How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents? Vs. coal? Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.) ----- Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here: > Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work. Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable? Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?
UltraSane 6mo ago
Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear is like being a firefighter and opposing the use of water to extinguish fires.
- florkbork 6mo ago
  That seems to be deliberately obtuse. It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires. Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river right next to the house fire we are fighting?
  - stretchwithme 6mo ago
    so only do things that yield results fast.
  - UltraSane 6mo ago
    The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.
    - ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
      Even with Danish insolation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
      - UltraSane 6mo ago
        This paper is very heavily biased against nuclear power and is only valid for Denmark It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW 80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors. It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of-firm-low-carbon-electricity-resources-in-deep-decarbonization-of-power-generation.pdf https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of... "Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases" They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed. It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain. The authors are editors of the journal this was published in. Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot. This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.
margalabargala 6mo ago
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind Not at all. Some people are depopulationists.
- igorramazanov 6mo ago
  I've heard an opinion that having less people leads to a technological regression, because some things to create/research are so expensive that they become profitable and functioning only at the world's scale E.g. China is too small to have an isolated closed market for a competitive and efficient semiconductors manufactoring
  - PearlRiver 6mo ago
    No it is just that capitalism is a cancer. Nobody has actually cracked the code on how capitalism can work without perpetual growth. Leaders are looking at Japan and they are panicking. Fascists are demanding more white babies.
    - throw-the-towel 6mo ago
      FYI, socialism also cannot work without infinite growth.
      - amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
        Large scale socialism maybe. It seems to work fine in small hunter gatherer bands.
      - margalabargala 6mo ago
        Socialism works fine without infinite growth. The problem isn't that it requires infinite growth, the problem is that as the scale increases the drag effect of those who consume more resources than they contribute grows faster than resource availability grows. There's a maximum size limit that's based on things like cultural sense of responsibility.
PearlRiver 6mo ago
I live close to the Belgian border. Some time ago there was concern about Belgian reactors (they are old and their concrete was fracturing) and they were distributing iodine pills. Keeping them open even longer just sounds peak Belgium.
- Moldoteck 5mo ago
  iodine pills are given pretty much everywhere in a vicinity of npp's not just Belgium. Operating them further is sane if it's safe. Cracks were proven to not be relavant
tolciho 6mo ago
What about the opposition from the not exactly environmentalist orgs? > "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible." — "Nuclear Follies". Forbes Magazine. 1985.
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
  The fossil fuel industries and their shills? Probably not lamenting the delay in moving way from fossil fuels the same way the environmental groups ought to be. Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-001275_EN.html https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
  - lostlogin 6mo ago
    Russia gets blamed for funding every single dissenting voice in most major democracies. And I suspect it’s often true. They also fund major parts of the establishment - just look at UK politics and House of Lords. There are plenty that are anti nuclear and don’t get Russian funding.
  - tolciho 6mo ago
    Well, the marketing brocure said "too cheap too meter" but the result is often a White Elephant. Please explain how the nuclear folks missed the "too cheap to meter" target on account of some external shills. That is: how does one ensure that the next round of nuclear will not White Elepant like many of the previous rounds did? Besides the taxpayers taking it on the chin, as they usually do.
    - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      The shills do fear mongering to scare people into passing regulations that increase costs independent of the cost/benefit ratio, require costs to be internalized that other generation methods aren't required to (it should either be everyone or no one), and file lawsuits against construction projects to induce delays and increase costs again.
fireant 6mo ago
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infrequent and so we have very hard time estimating and thinking about probabilities of them happening. Personally I think that keeping existing reactors running is better than the alternatives, but I'm not so sure about building up new reactors compared to building more predictable green energy sources.
- idiotsecant 6mo ago
  Renewable generation is not the hard part. Renewable transmission and storage is the hard part. Its so hard, in fact, that building very expensive nuke is still much cheaper and more attainable.
  - adrithmetiqa 6mo ago
    That’s not true. The true capture price of nuclear is much higher https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture-price-nuclear/ https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture...
    - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
      That link is pretty silly: > So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices). The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid? It does the oppose of this: > whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day) Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset. And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
pbgcp2026 6mo ago
"carbon emissions" LOL. Just lookup what's happening In Tuapse, and in other war zones. And we are penalising some poor bugger burning wood to warm his house at winter ...
- flohofwoe 6mo ago
  That stored oil would burn one way or another, emitting the same CO2. Unplanned spontaneous disassembly by "falling drone debris" just accelerates the process a tiny bit. It does look much more spectacular though!
- m4rtink 5mo ago
  You are just looking at current event (a massive refinery and oil storage fire) and not the longer term picture. By that petrochemical complex burning down (arguably in quite a dirty manner) much more oil than has burned will not move through it, contributicontributing to CO2 emissions, pollution and war funding.
danmaz74 6mo ago
Funnily (or tragically?) enough, lots of environmentalists here in Italy are opposing solar and wind projects too. I find that crazy.
- lostlogin 6mo ago
  There is a lot of nuance to these situations. Destroying a whole valley for hydro is something locals could easily oppose. Similar with huge solar farms. You can be a proponent of a technology but anti a particular project.
  - snovv_crash 6mo ago
    NIMBY != Nuance
    - williamdclt 6mo ago
      Reducing every personal reason to oppose every specific project to "NIMBY" is not nuance.
      - snovv_crash 6mo ago
        They specific example GP gave was locals being opposed to something. That is textbook nimbyism. Happy for other examples that would demonstrate nuance, but that isn't it.
        lostlogin 6mo ago
        That would be part of it for sure. Locally there is opposition to gold mining. People in the region oppose it and with a broad definition of ‘NIMBY’ you’d be right. But neighbouring valley, town, region etc is a broad definition.
        snovv_crash 5mo ago
        Do any of those people have gold jewellery or gold-plated contacts on their electronics?
taegee 6mo ago
Here we go again ... Did those plants suddenly became manageable? No. Did those plants suddenly became cheap? No. Do we suddenly have a solution for the waste? No. Have new uranium deposits suddenly been discovered? No.
- Cwizard 6mo ago
  Why are they unmanageable? They are only expensive because externalities of other solutions are not captures or are subsidised. Wind and solar are expensive if battery storage is included in most of the world. Waste is mostly a solved problem. Much more solved that waste management for coal plants in any case (whom also produce a lot of radioactive waste in addition to producing tons and tons of co2) We have more than enough uranium. Currently only a small fraction is economically mineable but we have played that game before with oil.
  - taegee 6mo ago
    > Why are they unmanageable? Just look at the statistics. E. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and... To say that they're _potentially_ safe by waving at the US Navy is a fallacy for several reasons. 1. It's p-hacking. E. g. with the same technology the Soviets destroyed five of their reactors. 2. The world of civilian operators is completely incomparable. 3. Civilian power plants use different technologies. > Waste is mostly a solved problem. Not as far as I know. In Germany, for example, the search for a final disposal site is still completely open-ended, and the first final disposal site will not open until 2074 at the earliest, while, at the same time, the already collapsed storage facilities consume an enormous amount of money. I personally think it is absurd to assume that an underground nuclear waste storage facility can be operated safely over geological time scales. Needless to say there isn't even a single one worldwide for highly radioactive waste. And to compare them with coal plants is classical whataboutism. "They can't be bad, because I found something other that's bad as well." You're right about the minable uranium. That has changed over the last years, so the current estimate is 2080 in a high demand scenario. But your criticism about the externalized costs falls short as well. Regarding the externalized costs, that is really hard to quantify and I don't know of reliable estimations. How do you want to come up with a number if you don't even know if humans still exist on the planet at that time? What is clear is that for nuclear energy the majority of the costs is externalized. The bulk of the costs stem from the decommissioning of power plants, final disposal, and accident-related expenses. All three are typically passed on entirely to taxpayers. The former German vice chancellor even said, he would agree [to build a new nuclear power plant] if <political opponent> found a private operator willing to build a nuclear power plant entirely without government guarantees, subsidies, or liability coverage.
boshomi 6mo ago
Powerprice in Germany today minus 500€/MWh. Nuclear power is economic madness in an environment where we see negative electricity prices practically every day.
- asdefghyk 6mo ago
  What happens when there is wide bad weather for renewables? ( for a range of days from 1 - several) Where would the power needed come from? If, it was to be from some kind of storage, Extra capacity would be needed to allow recharging of the storage
  - lostlogin 6mo ago
    Bad weather often comes with wind or rain. Obviously it’s possible for solar, hydro and wind farms to stop producing, but that’s what storage is for.
    - ishtanbul 6mo ago
      Not really. Storage is most used for short term stabilization and alleviating congestion in certain transmission nodes. In most markets its used to provide capacity under contract with utilities to meet resource adequacy requirements which don’t consider long term regional complete loss of renewables. Longer term storage that can provide power to, say, a whole region during a multi-day storm is basically an uneconomic fantasy that rational developers have no real incentive to build, because it would be a huge overbuild most of the time, and accordingly undercompensated for said overbuild. Developers are building batteries that are just the right size for a capacity contract & providing ancillary services (voltage support, frequency regulation, etc) plus price arbitrage, which are deployed for only minutes to a few hours. There are some 8 hour duration batteries out there, but they are not common.
      - asdefghyk 6mo ago
        Multiday renewable droughts ( solar and wind ) are a significant challenge. ( A further problem would be if a renewables drought occurred at a (multiday) peak demand period ) Appropriate (often new) wide area, power transmission networks can help to reduce this risk. Renewables also need to be over provisioned to reduce the risks, which could be blackouts or some kind of power rationing (via "smart meters" )
RobotToaster 6mo ago
Fun fact, "friends of the earth" was originally funded by Robert Anderson, CEO of Atlantic Richfield oil, to oppose nuclear. https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/ https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/
maybewhenthesun 6mo ago
The engineering side might be a theoretically solved problem, anybody looking at belgium's crumbling nuclear powerplants can help but feeling slightly nervous! I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens. On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever. All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.
- ben_w 6mo ago
  > and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever. More of a political problem, from what I hear. This is, if anything, worse: simply not knowing is a research problem, but knowing how to do it and yet having an influential group saying "no because reasons" could be genuinely insurmountable.
  - maybewhenthesun 6mo ago
    My experience is that politicians tend to hand-wave this problem away, while physicists and geologists acknowledge the problem and actually think about it. So imo not really a political problem.
- yvdriess 6mo ago
  Just to highlight: in contrast with fossil fuels, at least nuclear waste is something we can capture, creating a storage problem.
  - tcfhgj 6mo ago
    *if everything works as planned
ericfr11 6mo ago
It follows Europe's energy policies (declaring nuclear climate-friendly). France is ahead of the US when it comes to civil nuclear plants strategy.
tcfhgj 6mo ago
well, regardless of what you think, they are not
tim333 6mo ago
If you believe in a climate crisis and are serious about it you probably want to run the numbers on different options and policies to see what works rather than saying yay this boo that. Running numbers on producing energy in say 15 years time which is roughly how long it takes to approve and build nuclear, and comparing it with projected solar+wind+battery costs for 15 years hence you tend to come with much better figures for the non nuclear. (see graph here with the trend https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nuclear-vs-solar?hide_intro_popup=true https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nuclear-vs-solar?hide_intro_po...) China which is fairly sensible on this stuff and which plans to be world's largest nuclear producer by 2035 actually added 1GW of nuclear and ~300GW of solar last year because it's cheaper. I'll give you maintaining existing nuclear makes sense. But as a British tax payer the cost of our upcoming Hinkley C is eye watering (£48bn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...)
- leonidasrup 6mo ago
  For China, nuclear power plants are still not very important, they build a lot new coal power plants. "2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024" https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/built-to-peak-coal-power-expansion-runs-out-of-room-in-china/ https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/built-to-peak-coal...
- pydry 6mo ago
  The reason why people tend to get a bit cheerleadery about nuclear power is because it has some great PR and it resonates with them. It needs the PR because it is so unconscionably expensive. The public needs to be primed to consent to indirect and direct subsidies. The reason China, US, France, it is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with nukes. The reason Sweden, Poland, Iran, etc. build a few plants is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with a nuclear weapons program they might want in a hurry one day. It's always obvious for those countries who the existential threat is.
  - tim333 6mo ago
Nevermark 5mo ago
It is quadruply impressive that the Navy has solved “waterproof and saltproof at a few dozen atmospheres, mobile global nuclear”. In the meantime, mobile phones are still figuring out how to operate reliably globally, . But phone plans are hard.
bmicraft 5mo ago
Nuclear is too expensive and takes to long. We can't afford to waste the resources that could go into a fully green grid in a couple of years taking decades building a fraction of that capacity as nuclear.
- Moldoteck 5mo ago
  you should check out TWh/y of clean power in Portugal/DK vs UAE and say this again)

ardit33 6mo ago

[flagged]

deepsun 6mo ago
Don't forget a large Russian campaign in Europe to discredit all energy sources that don't involve buying from Russia. Financing green movements, working with governments, especially Germany (Gerhard Schröder now holds good positions in Russian energy companies, Angela Merkel had good relationship with Putin). Puting worked in Germany as KGB agent before his ascension.
- leonidasrup 6mo ago
  The beginning of Soviet and German cooperation goes back much earlier, to early 1970s. The famous policy of "Wandel durch Handel" "Wandel durch Handel (WdH, German for "Change through trade"), also known as Wandel durch Annäherung, is a political and economic notion, mostly associated with German foreign policy, of increasing trade with authoritarian regimes in an effort to induce political change. Although most strongly associated with Germany, similar policies have been pursued by several Western countries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel For example, West Germany has helped with building Soviet gas network. https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-Russian-Energy-Relations-since-1970.pdf https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-R... All subsequent goverments of Kohl, Schröder, Merkel supported expansion of gas imports from Russia. It was cheap and reliable even during Cold war. And little bit of money from Gazprom to politicians always helped. https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-lobby-germany/?lang=en https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-l...
leonidasrup 6mo ago
The root of the German Green party goes back to anti-nuclear and anti-war movements from 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement "Before the 1980s, it was unclear whether the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases was stronger than the cooling effect of airborne particulates in air pollution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change The original 1980 plan for the Energiewende "Energie-Wende: Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran" called for Germany to move towards "coal+gas" or "coal+solar" scenario. Only later were added any consideration for climate change, but the highest priority, the big evil, was nuclear technology. Greenpeace has it's roots also in the opposition to underground nuclear weapon tests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace#Origins
- FabHK 6mo ago
  Indeed, anti-nuclear sentiment predates the 1990s. The book _The Power of Nuclear_ by Marco Visscher does a good job tracing the history from the shock of the nuclear bomb in 1945 to the enthusiasm of the 1950s and the increasing scepticism of the 1970s and 1980s.
  - leonidasrup 6mo ago
    I recommend book "The Rise of Nuclear Fear" by Spencer R. Weart "After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy. "
CaptainPotatoe 6mo ago
France did not get it totally right. We decomissionned superphénix for mostly dogmatic reasons, and also halted the Astrid project (although it look like it may be restarted we only lost 10 years)

ZeroGravitas 6mo ago

Why do so many nuclear fans try to suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear? It's very odd. Compare: If you believe COVID exists you need to use hydroxychloroquine. It makes you sound like you don't even believe in the problem you are proposing an (unpopular with experts) solution for.

simplyluke 6mo ago
> suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying. What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s. > unpopular with experts How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
- cauch 6mo ago
  > How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt? Pretending it's all the fault of the bad environmentalists is a bit ridiculous. A nuclear powerplant is a tricky thing to create. A lot of projects had delay, often not due to any environmentalists or anti-nuclear people, but because the parts failed their internal control, which demonstrates that it is tricky to build. A nuclear powerplant is a huge provider that cannot be turned online for usually ~10 years, so you can also understand the complexity and the uncertainty: we are not able to predict the price of electricity or what will the electricity grid will look like in 2-3 years, and yet they need to predict it for a given region in 10 years. And some environmental laws are frivolous or turned out the be incorrect (the same way some people who at the time were against some environmental laws turned out to be incorrect years later), but some laws are just legitimate and it is simply not fair to pretend that the opinions of some people should just be discarded because you have a different opinion. I myself don't always agree with some law, sometimes anti-nuclear, sometimes pro-nuclear, but a given fraction of these laws will exist, it is just the reality. It's like saying "communism would work if it was not for people who don't like communism": people who don't like communism will always exist and if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic.

epistasis 6mo ago

There's two very different types of reactors: the already-paid-for long-run reactor that's still going, and then on-paper-not-yet-constructed reactor in a high cost of living nation. Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables, only makes sense in a few geographic locations. Not all, or even most! Even keeping old reactors running gets super expensive as they get past their designed lifetimes, and very often doesn't make sense. The engineering is indeed already done for electricity, and storage and renewables are cheap and getting cheaper. Nuclear is at best staying the same high cost, and getting more expensive is these large construction projects rise due to Baumol's cost disease. Opposing more nuclear in the US in the 1980s wasn't fully irrational, the US managerial class have way overbuilt nuclear and we didn't need all the electricity. Then we didn't have much growth in The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living, it's the anti-EV and anti-battery advocates, and to some degree it's retrofitting the wide variety of highly-cost-sensitive industries, such as steel or fertilizer or concrete, to use carbon neutral methods. Or maybe sustainable aviation fuel. Nuclear had it's chance to be a big contributor to climate action back in the mid 2000s and 2010s, it failed that challenge in Georgia at Vogtle, in South Carolnia at Summer, in the UK at Hinkley Point C, in France in Flamanville, and in Finland an Olkiluoto. Every one of those failures is a very good reason for a climate activist to oppose nuclear.

DennisP 6mo ago
Back in the 1980s if the US had followed France's lead, then we'd be in the position they're in now: 70% nuclear with much lower per-capita emissions.
- epistasis 6mo ago
  That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s. Technology has changed over 50 years. France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear. It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects. The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster. People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work. The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.

illiac786 6mo ago

Yep, I have been saying for decades that I agree on almost everything wirh the local Green Party, _except_ the anti-nuclear stuff. Very emotional, very relatable but very dumb.

trollbridge 6mo ago
The anti-nuclear stuff seems to pair up quite well with "you need to start importing a lot of natural gas", which makes me think it is simply an agenda pushed by a certain rather large country to the east.
- petre 6mo ago
  You don't have to wonder, because it is the agenda that you're thinking about and also the agenda of fossil fuel companies. But we now have two lessons that teach us that being anti-nuclear was stupid: the Ukraine war and the current US administration's adventure in the Gulf.
- kimi 6mo ago
  This is now. But the seeds were sown much earlier.
- nemetroid 6mo ago
  The west, you mean?
kimi 6mo ago
The anti-nuclear area, at least in Western Europe, had historically a very high correlation with those who held sympathies for a certain very large nuclear power who would have strategically benefited from an anti-nuke sentiment that would avoid another nuclear power's weapon deployment in EU bases. But I'm sure it is a coincidence.

sunaookami 6mo ago

>Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind Yes hello, these are both my opinions, do I exist for you or not ;)? You can say that we are in a climate crisis AND be anti-nuclear.

Manuel_D 6mo ago
Sure, someone can be both concerned about climate change and oppose nuclear power. But it's a largely self-defeating stance: nuclear is the only non-intermittent geographically independent form of clean energy. Dams and geothermal are geographically constrained. Solar and wind are intermittent, as well as varying in output depending on location.
- sunaookami 6mo ago
  Everyone is entitled to their opinions.
  - yawaramin 6mo ago
    But they're not entitled to their own facts.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
      The facts are that all large nuclear plants require a stable water supply, and climate change directly threatens that. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X24000725 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...
      - Manuel_D 6mo ago
        To be clear, all thermal plants - be they nuclear, fossil fuel, biofuel, etc. - require water for cooling. But this doesn't need to be freshwater, many nuclear plants are cooled with seawater. In non-costal arid areas, nuclear plants can be cooled with sewer water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_... Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.

hintymad 6mo ago

> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, I wonder how many people actually believe that we are in good shape so mankind should have no development whatsoever. Just stay as is or even go back decades just to preserve the environment. The first world need more energy because we're greedy and etc.

greendestiny 6mo ago

Nonsense, the reluctance of governments to reduce carbon emissions has been driven by the reluctance for entrenched industries to give up their gravy train. There are many ways for power to be produced with lower carbon emissions, it's absolutely not a binary situation at all. What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of the argument being forced into these positions, its artificial and contrary to the desires of people who want action on climate change who support nuclear and don't.

belorn 6mo ago
I would be very happy if people who oppose nuclear would abstain from supporting the fossil fuel industry. When EU voted on green technology, one side voted for nuclear to be defined as green, while the other side voted for natural gas to be given the green status. Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or supporting a combination of renewables and fossil fueled power plants (which sometimes goes under the name of reserve energy and other times as thermal power plants). Usually it is combined with some future hope that green hydrogen will replace that natural gas at some time in the distant future. We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Opposition to the fossil fuel industry should be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants, and a plan to phase out and decommission existing ones. It is difficult to respect people who claim to believing in a climate crisis but then stand there with a shovel when the next gas peaker plant is being built, then arguing how bad nuclear is to combat the climate crisis.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  > We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Well yeah because the battery storage to do that is still exorbitant, at least for the time being. There are some situational options but nothing universal. Other than waiting for the cost of existing battery tech to fall the most promising option I'm aware of are the prototypes utilizing iron ore for seasonal storage.

cushychicken 6mo ago

The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record. It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record. My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!

avianlyric 6mo ago
They have done. The Three Mile Island accident happened when it was being operated by Navy vets [1]. Simple training isn’t enough. During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response: > Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others. So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour. [1] https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-learned-and https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-lea...
- echelon 6mo ago
  How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents? Vs. coal? Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.) ----- Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here: > Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work. Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable? Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?

UltraSane 6mo ago

Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear is like being a firefighter and opposing the use of water to extinguish fires.

florkbork 6mo ago
That seems to be deliberately obtuse. It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires. Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river right next to the house fire we are fighting?
- stretchwithme 6mo ago
  so only do things that yield results fast.
- UltraSane 6mo ago
  The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.
  - ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
    Even with Danish insolation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
    - UltraSane 6mo ago
      This paper is very heavily biased against nuclear power and is only valid for Denmark It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW 80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors. It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of-firm-low-carbon-electricity-resources-in-deep-decarbonization-of-power-generation.pdf https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of... "Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases" They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed. It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain. The authors are editors of the journal this was published in. Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot. This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.

margalabargala 6mo ago

> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind Not at all. Some people are depopulationists.

igorramazanov 6mo ago
I've heard an opinion that having less people leads to a technological regression, because some things to create/research are so expensive that they become profitable and functioning only at the world's scale E.g. China is too small to have an isolated closed market for a competitive and efficient semiconductors manufactoring
- PearlRiver 6mo ago
  No it is just that capitalism is a cancer. Nobody has actually cracked the code on how capitalism can work without perpetual growth. Leaders are looking at Japan and they are panicking. Fascists are demanding more white babies.
  - throw-the-towel 6mo ago
    FYI, socialism also cannot work without infinite growth.
    - amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
      Large scale socialism maybe. It seems to work fine in small hunter gatherer bands.
    - margalabargala 6mo ago
      Socialism works fine without infinite growth. The problem isn't that it requires infinite growth, the problem is that as the scale increases the drag effect of those who consume more resources than they contribute grows faster than resource availability grows. There's a maximum size limit that's based on things like cultural sense of responsibility.

PearlRiver 6mo ago

I live close to the Belgian border. Some time ago there was concern about Belgian reactors (they are old and their concrete was fracturing) and they were distributing iodine pills. Keeping them open even longer just sounds peak Belgium.

Moldoteck 5mo ago
iodine pills are given pretty much everywhere in a vicinity of npp's not just Belgium. Operating them further is sane if it's safe. Cracks were proven to not be relavant

tolciho 6mo ago

What about the opposition from the not exactly environmentalist orgs? > "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible." — "Nuclear Follies". Forbes Magazine. 1985.

AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
The fossil fuel industries and their shills? Probably not lamenting the delay in moving way from fossil fuels the same way the environmental groups ought to be. Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-001275_EN.html https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
- lostlogin 6mo ago
  Russia gets blamed for funding every single dissenting voice in most major democracies. And I suspect it’s often true. They also fund major parts of the establishment - just look at UK politics and House of Lords. There are plenty that are anti nuclear and don’t get Russian funding.
- tolciho 6mo ago
  Well, the marketing brocure said "too cheap too meter" but the result is often a White Elephant. Please explain how the nuclear folks missed the "too cheap to meter" target on account of some external shills. That is: how does one ensure that the next round of nuclear will not White Elepant like many of the previous rounds did? Besides the taxpayers taking it on the chin, as they usually do.
  - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    The shills do fear mongering to scare people into passing regulations that increase costs independent of the cost/benefit ratio, require costs to be internalized that other generation methods aren't required to (it should either be everyone or no one), and file lawsuits against construction projects to induce delays and increase costs again.

fireant 6mo ago

> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infrequent and so we have very hard time estimating and thinking about probabilities of them happening. Personally I think that keeping existing reactors running is better than the alternatives, but I'm not so sure about building up new reactors compared to building more predictable green energy sources.

idiotsecant 6mo ago
Renewable generation is not the hard part. Renewable transmission and storage is the hard part. Its so hard, in fact, that building very expensive nuke is still much cheaper and more attainable.
- adrithmetiqa 6mo ago
  That’s not true. The true capture price of nuclear is much higher https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture-price-nuclear/ https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture...
  - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
    That link is pretty silly: > So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices). The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid? It does the oppose of this: > whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day) Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset. And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.

pbgcp2026 6mo ago

"carbon emissions" LOL. Just lookup what's happening In Tuapse, and in other war zones. And we are penalising some poor bugger burning wood to warm his house at winter ...

flohofwoe 6mo ago
That stored oil would burn one way or another, emitting the same CO2. Unplanned spontaneous disassembly by "falling drone debris" just accelerates the process a tiny bit. It does look much more spectacular though!
m4rtink 5mo ago
You are just looking at current event (a massive refinery and oil storage fire) and not the longer term picture. By that petrochemical complex burning down (arguably in quite a dirty manner) much more oil than has burned will not move through it, contributicontributing to CO2 emissions, pollution and war funding.

danmaz74 6mo ago

Funnily (or tragically?) enough, lots of environmentalists here in Italy are opposing solar and wind projects too. I find that crazy.

lostlogin 6mo ago
There is a lot of nuance to these situations. Destroying a whole valley for hydro is something locals could easily oppose. Similar with huge solar farms. You can be a proponent of a technology but anti a particular project.
- snovv_crash 6mo ago
  NIMBY != Nuance
  - williamdclt 6mo ago
    Reducing every personal reason to oppose every specific project to "NIMBY" is not nuance.
    - snovv_crash 6mo ago
      They specific example GP gave was locals being opposed to something. That is textbook nimbyism. Happy for other examples that would demonstrate nuance, but that isn't it.
      - lostlogin 6mo ago
        That would be part of it for sure. Locally there is opposition to gold mining. People in the region oppose it and with a broad definition of ‘NIMBY’ you’d be right. But neighbouring valley, town, region etc is a broad definition.
        snovv_crash 5mo ago
        Do any of those people have gold jewellery or gold-plated contacts on their electronics?

taegee 6mo ago

Here we go again ... Did those plants suddenly became manageable? No. Did those plants suddenly became cheap? No. Do we suddenly have a solution for the waste? No. Have new uranium deposits suddenly been discovered? No.

Cwizard 6mo ago
Why are they unmanageable? They are only expensive because externalities of other solutions are not captures or are subsidised. Wind and solar are expensive if battery storage is included in most of the world. Waste is mostly a solved problem. Much more solved that waste management for coal plants in any case (whom also produce a lot of radioactive waste in addition to producing tons and tons of co2) We have more than enough uranium. Currently only a small fraction is economically mineable but we have played that game before with oil.
- taegee 6mo ago
  > Why are they unmanageable? Just look at the statistics. E. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and... To say that they're _potentially_ safe by waving at the US Navy is a fallacy for several reasons. 1. It's p-hacking. E. g. with the same technology the Soviets destroyed five of their reactors. 2. The world of civilian operators is completely incomparable. 3. Civilian power plants use different technologies. > Waste is mostly a solved problem. Not as far as I know. In Germany, for example, the search for a final disposal site is still completely open-ended, and the first final disposal site will not open until 2074 at the earliest, while, at the same time, the already collapsed storage facilities consume an enormous amount of money. I personally think it is absurd to assume that an underground nuclear waste storage facility can be operated safely over geological time scales. Needless to say there isn't even a single one worldwide for highly radioactive waste. And to compare them with coal plants is classical whataboutism. "They can't be bad, because I found something other that's bad as well." You're right about the minable uranium. That has changed over the last years, so the current estimate is 2080 in a high demand scenario. But your criticism about the externalized costs falls short as well. Regarding the externalized costs, that is really hard to quantify and I don't know of reliable estimations. How do you want to come up with a number if you don't even know if humans still exist on the planet at that time? What is clear is that for nuclear energy the majority of the costs is externalized. The bulk of the costs stem from the decommissioning of power plants, final disposal, and accident-related expenses. All three are typically passed on entirely to taxpayers. The former German vice chancellor even said, he would agree [to build a new nuclear power plant] if <political opponent> found a private operator willing to build a nuclear power plant entirely without government guarantees, subsidies, or liability coverage.

boshomi 6mo ago

Powerprice in Germany today minus 500€/MWh. Nuclear power is economic madness in an environment where we see negative electricity prices practically every day.

asdefghyk 6mo ago
What happens when there is wide bad weather for renewables? ( for a range of days from 1 - several) Where would the power needed come from? If, it was to be from some kind of storage, Extra capacity would be needed to allow recharging of the storage
- lostlogin 6mo ago
  Bad weather often comes with wind or rain. Obviously it’s possible for solar, hydro and wind farms to stop producing, but that’s what storage is for.
  - ishtanbul 6mo ago
    Not really. Storage is most used for short term stabilization and alleviating congestion in certain transmission nodes. In most markets its used to provide capacity under contract with utilities to meet resource adequacy requirements which don’t consider long term regional complete loss of renewables. Longer term storage that can provide power to, say, a whole region during a multi-day storm is basically an uneconomic fantasy that rational developers have no real incentive to build, because it would be a huge overbuild most of the time, and accordingly undercompensated for said overbuild. Developers are building batteries that are just the right size for a capacity contract & providing ancillary services (voltage support, frequency regulation, etc) plus price arbitrage, which are deployed for only minutes to a few hours. There are some 8 hour duration batteries out there, but they are not common.
    - asdefghyk 6mo ago
      Multiday renewable droughts ( solar and wind ) are a significant challenge. ( A further problem would be if a renewables drought occurred at a (multiday) peak demand period ) Appropriate (often new) wide area, power transmission networks can help to reduce this risk. Renewables also need to be over provisioned to reduce the risks, which could be blackouts or some kind of power rationing (via "smart meters" )

RobotToaster 6mo ago

Fun fact, "friends of the earth" was originally funded by Robert Anderson, CEO of Atlantic Richfield oil, to oppose nuclear. https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/ https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/

maybewhenthesun 6mo ago

The engineering side might be a theoretically solved problem, anybody looking at belgium's crumbling nuclear powerplants can help but feeling slightly nervous! I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens. On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever. All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.

ben_w 6mo ago
> and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever. More of a political problem, from what I hear. This is, if anything, worse: simply not knowing is a research problem, but knowing how to do it and yet having an influential group saying "no because reasons" could be genuinely insurmountable.
- maybewhenthesun 6mo ago
  My experience is that politicians tend to hand-wave this problem away, while physicists and geologists acknowledge the problem and actually think about it. So imo not really a political problem.
yvdriess 6mo ago
Just to highlight: in contrast with fossil fuels, at least nuclear waste is something we can capture, creating a storage problem.
- tcfhgj 6mo ago
  *if everything works as planned

ericfr11 6mo ago

It follows Europe's energy policies (declaring nuclear climate-friendly). France is ahead of the US when it comes to civil nuclear plants strategy.

tcfhgj 6mo ago

well, regardless of what you think, they are not

tim333 6mo ago

If you believe in a climate crisis and are serious about it you probably want to run the numbers on different options and policies to see what works rather than saying yay this boo that. Running numbers on producing energy in say 15 years time which is roughly how long it takes to approve and build nuclear, and comparing it with projected solar+wind+battery costs for 15 years hence you tend to come with much better figures for the non nuclear. (see graph here with the trend https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nuclear-vs-solar?hide_intro_popup=true https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nuclear-vs-solar?hide_intro_po...) China which is fairly sensible on this stuff and which plans to be world's largest nuclear producer by 2035 actually added 1GW of nuclear and ~300GW of solar last year because it's cheaper. I'll give you maintaining existing nuclear makes sense. But as a British tax payer the cost of our upcoming Hinkley C is eye watering (£48bn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...)

leonidasrup 6mo ago
For China, nuclear power plants are still not very important, they build a lot new coal power plants. "2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024" https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/built-to-peak-coal-power-expansion-runs-out-of-room-in-china/ https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/built-to-peak-coal...
pydry 6mo ago
The reason why people tend to get a bit cheerleadery about nuclear power is because it has some great PR and it resonates with them. It needs the PR because it is so unconscionably expensive. The public needs to be primed to consent to indirect and direct subsidies. The reason China, US, France, it is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with nukes. The reason Sweden, Poland, Iran, etc. build a few plants is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with a nuclear weapons program they might want in a hurry one day. It's always obvious for those countries who the existential threat is.
- tim333 6mo ago

Nevermark 5mo ago

It is quadruply impressive that the Navy has solved “waterproof and saltproof at a few dozen atmospheres, mobile global nuclear”. In the meantime, mobile phones are still figuring out how to operate reliably globally, . But phone plans are hard.

bmicraft 5mo ago

Nuclear is too expensive and takes to long. We can't afford to waste the resources that could go into a fully green grid in a couple of years taking decades building a fraction of that capacity as nuclear.

Moldoteck 5mo ago
you should check out TWh/y of clean power in Portugal/DK vs UAE and say this again)