8 ms·

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

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.
  - simplyluke 6mo ago
    > Technology has changed over 50 years Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example of this: the plants are so much more expensive per megawatt than what the navy builds day-in-day-out because of 1) lawsuits every step of the way 2) regulatory paralysis and 3) we haven't been doing it for 50 years so the talent and patterns aren't there. Which directly contributes to your later point: > We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi I wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi. Nor would I consider the ongoing rollout of reactors in China, which haven't seen the cost overruns of western nations, scifi. I'd consider those things consequences of the systems they were developed in. China's power plants have come in at about $2M/megawatt, which is coincidentally almost exactly what the US navy spends on their reactors and appears to be the cost of doing business in a well functioning environment. Solar is cheaper in the buildout (~$1M/megawatt), but not nearly to the extent that opponents of nuclear have made it out to be. It turns out when you make it almost impossible to do something, it gets really expensive! These are problems we could solve through policy, but the lasting gift of the Boomer generation's rise to power and refusal to relinquish it is that US policy, industry, regulatory structure, and infrastructure were largely frozen-in-time 50 years ago and have been trying to cope with the crumbling shell of that ever since.
    - dalyons 6mo ago
      china is a single party state. they can order whatever plants they want and they'll get built - regardless of how much they cost, regardless of if the power is economically competitive, with no need for insurance (the state will clean anything up if it comes to that), and with no need to factor in disposal or decommissioning costs. They can do all this and need not worry if the math pencils out long term, or if the bet was wrong vs renewables. They cant get voted out. Yes their buildout is impressive, but its just not a comparable situation in any way to the mostly free market driven west. Similarly the US navy does not have to produce commercially viable nuclear power on an all in cost basis. Different goals, different situation.
simplyluke 6mo ago
> The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle. Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more. If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon. If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.
- dalyons 6mo ago
  what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.
  - simplyluke 6mo ago
    We should do both, aggressively! That's exactly the point I'm making. It's always been shocking to me how this discussion immediately goes to a fixed-pie "solar OR nuclear" discussion. You build both! They solve different problems very well.
    - dalyons 6mo ago
      I guess I agree with your “should” in a world where we have infinite dollars to spend. Sadly we refuse to treat it as existential, so the dollars we have to spend are roughly fixed. In that world we live today any dollar spent on nuclear for 10 years from now isn’t spent on renewables today, so it costs us more emissions.
noosphr 6mo ago
>Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables This is not the cheaper option. You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
- ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
  Even with Danish insulation 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.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-renewables-are-53-cheaper-than-nuclear-power/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
  - noosphr 6mo ago
    Thanks pv magazine. I'll be sure to read oil daily about the benefits of LNG plants too.
    - ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
      Read the scientific article the entire post is about if you want the cut and dry version? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
  - selfmodruntime 6mo ago
    This article conveniently doesn't include flexible demands and energy storage, both of which are a solved problem with nuclear but completely unrealistic with renewables.
    - epistasis 6mo ago
      Nuclear does neither flexible demand nor energy storage, those are in fact the things that nuclear does not solve! There are a few flexible nuclear plants in France but they push up costs. Some of the new modular nuclear rector designs are considering storage/flexibility, but cost there is also expected to be far higher than an AP1000. Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization. Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.

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.
- simplyluke 6mo ago
  > Technology has changed over 50 years Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example of this: the plants are so much more expensive per megawatt than what the navy builds day-in-day-out because of 1) lawsuits every step of the way 2) regulatory paralysis and 3) we haven't been doing it for 50 years so the talent and patterns aren't there. Which directly contributes to your later point: > We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi I wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi. Nor would I consider the ongoing rollout of reactors in China, which haven't seen the cost overruns of western nations, scifi. I'd consider those things consequences of the systems they were developed in. China's power plants have come in at about $2M/megawatt, which is coincidentally almost exactly what the US navy spends on their reactors and appears to be the cost of doing business in a well functioning environment. Solar is cheaper in the buildout (~$1M/megawatt), but not nearly to the extent that opponents of nuclear have made it out to be. It turns out when you make it almost impossible to do something, it gets really expensive! These are problems we could solve through policy, but the lasting gift of the Boomer generation's rise to power and refusal to relinquish it is that US policy, industry, regulatory structure, and infrastructure were largely frozen-in-time 50 years ago and have been trying to cope with the crumbling shell of that ever since.
  - dalyons 6mo ago
    china is a single party state. they can order whatever plants they want and they'll get built - regardless of how much they cost, regardless of if the power is economically competitive, with no need for insurance (the state will clean anything up if it comes to that), and with no need to factor in disposal or decommissioning costs. They can do all this and need not worry if the math pencils out long term, or if the bet was wrong vs renewables. They cant get voted out. Yes their buildout is impressive, but its just not a comparable situation in any way to the mostly free market driven west. Similarly the US navy does not have to produce commercially viable nuclear power on an all in cost basis. Different goals, different situation.

simplyluke 6mo ago

> The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle. Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more. If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon. If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.

dalyons 6mo ago
what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.
- simplyluke 6mo ago
  We should do both, aggressively! That's exactly the point I'm making. It's always been shocking to me how this discussion immediately goes to a fixed-pie "solar OR nuclear" discussion. You build both! They solve different problems very well.
  - dalyons 6mo ago
    I guess I agree with your “should” in a world where we have infinite dollars to spend. Sadly we refuse to treat it as existential, so the dollars we have to spend are roughly fixed. In that world we live today any dollar spent on nuclear for 10 years from now isn’t spent on renewables today, so it costs us more emissions.

noosphr 6mo ago

>Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables This is not the cheaper option. You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.

ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
Even with Danish insulation 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.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-renewables-are-53-cheaper-than-nuclear-power/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
- noosphr 6mo ago
  Thanks pv magazine. I'll be sure to read oil daily about the benefits of LNG plants too.
  - ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
    Read the scientific article the entire post is about if you want the cut and dry version? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
- selfmodruntime 6mo ago
  This article conveniently doesn't include flexible demands and energy storage, both of which are a solved problem with nuclear but completely unrealistic with renewables.
  - epistasis 6mo ago
    Nuclear does neither flexible demand nor energy storage, those are in fact the things that nuclear does not solve! There are a few flexible nuclear plants in France but they push up costs. Some of the new modular nuclear rector designs are considering storage/flexibility, but cost there is also expected to be far higher than an AP1000. Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization. Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.