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This still has to pass with the people in a referendum.
The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties an
This still has to pass with the people in a referendum.
The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.
Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.
We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
You could build the reactors inside the mountains to improve the security and effects of things like meltdowns.
Funny thing you mention that.
We had a nuclear meltdown in an experimental reactor in Lucens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor).
It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
As if construction cost wasn't the biggest expense already.
Sure, but it makes cooling extremely difficult. And due to the confined environment any kind of incident response is needlessly difficult.
> The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland
Does discourse from neighboring countries leak in as well? For example, German and Italian media's anti-nuclear sentiment versus French media's neutral to vaguely positive sentiment about nuclear.
French part of Switzerland is much more left leaning, so I can expect more anti-nuclear sentiment on this side. But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
But, Germany's decision after Fukushima to close down all nuclear reactors has had a strong impact on the 2017 votation that banned nuclear in Switzerland. So I guess the influence is there.
I didn't think about seasonality of hydro power. You might want french design then, they are the most effective as starting/shutting down.
I agree with you that you can't rely on hydro alone to power your country. It also seems like you're trying to be reasonable and suggest that any new nuclear production in your country needs to be done as ethically and environmentally friendly as possible.
Your statement about "We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time" really stood out to me.
Are Swiss folks maybe acting a bit NIMBY by not allowing nuclear in their own country, but are fine with buying French nuclear power? It seems a tad hypocritical to be against nuclear, while simultaneously using it as long as it's "not in my country".
Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.
If there is any country that can safely build nuclear power plants, it is Switzerland.
"All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear"
This is like firefighters opposing using water.
The time for nuclear power was 50 years ago. And it's sad due to unfounded fears and coal interests there weren't more built. I would love if historically we had build more nuclear power plants. I am against it now because we have other safer, cheaper, and more sustainable options.
I wouldn’t pin the irrational discourse on the left. Pro nuclear people are just as k=1 thinkers as well. We just need long term policy not short term panic.
I really hope Swiss people learned a lesson from Germany and vote to build nuclear power plant. We need more investment in research on how to build safe, efficient power plants and ways of re-using spent nuclear fuel
One thing I want to mention about "safe" nuclear plants: dams are very, very big risks. Destroy a dam and see the result...
People are scared of nuclear plants in the same irrational way they are scared of terrorism. It doesn't kill much, but it is very scary.
What kind of environmental impact does hydro have in Switzerland? I’d expect it’s less because they are in the mountains.
I’m against a lot of Hydro power in the US because the environmental damage is high. Plus I like to fish and they have huge impacts on the ecosystems. But these are relatively flat places compared to Switzerland.
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Many of the dams in Switzerland have been built before the fifties and sixties, when environmental concerns were much lower. While most of the dams have been built high up in the mountains, a few villages have been buried by the dams.
Today, it would be infeasible creating new dams. The only thing we can do, is raise the height of some existing dams, adds pumping stations and optimise water flow between the dams.
1. Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?
2. The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years - what's the plan for managing it?
Yes energy generation (and independence) is important, no nuclear ain't it.
No country is going to bomb Switzerland because they all have money stashed here.
by your logic, then what's preventing another country just nuking Switzerland?
> Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?
This makes no sense. Russia has actual nuclear weapons, it can "obliterate" Ukraine (or Switzerland) on a whim with them, if they decide to. Also, as you can verify by looking at the containment zone of Chernobyl catastrophe, full blown meltdown/explosion of a nuclear reactor doesn't really "obliterate" a country size of Ukraine.
> The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years
No, it is not hazardous for "tens of thousands of years".
Its bizarre that nuclear power is a left/right thing. It's clean, safe, and immediately displaces carbon emissions elsewhere. It doesn't require decades of storage and transmission improvements that may or may not come. It just works. Today.
One day nuclear will no longer be neasessary. Until that day comes it is essential. Anyone who disagrees is confusing wishful that being for physics.
> We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
Actually, why not ? I mean this as a serious question.
Just like Oregon or New Mexico do not have problems getting (possibly nuclear) energy from California.
You just have to believe in the concept of Europe hard enough.
Why not replenish with solar i.e. pump it back up into a dam-battery?
They should look into what Brazil is doing to store energy long term:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/849994733672039/posts/1362301982441309/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/849994733672039/posts/136230...
> All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear.
It's crazy that the left and green parties are against cheap, sustainable and clean energy for the masses.
If it wasn‘t for the European Greens’ (partially oil lobby funded) anti-nuclear propaganda starting in the 60s, carbon emissions today would be much lower than they are.
I've become increasingly disillusioned with the modern environmental movement. I support efforts to reduce CO2 production, and nuclear is one of the best ways to do that. This is an absolute no-brainer. Instead, when I talk with activists, they have a much greater focus on people using less energy. As though that will have no human impact.
Well. It is not cheap. Each new built large scale reactor needs tens of billions in subsidies. Money which could have multiple times larger effect, in a fraction of the time, if invested in renewables and storage.
The fact that so many European green parties have been so strongly anti-nuclear was always a bit of a head-scratcher for me. It seems so dumb on so many different fronts. Goes to show the power of uninformed public, wildly misleading or actively lying stereotypes and scaremongering.
Droughts will start impacting Switzerland just like Norway. So the summer oversupply problem will turn into an undersupply.
You are right about France, especially considering EDF wants to sell excess to data centers, hence recent announcements
Switzerland is like that. I remember asking (in my best German) the person manning a ticket counter at Zurich train station if they spoke French once, if a look could kill I'd be dead, lol.
It gives the strange feeling that although they decided to create a country together they don't want to interact with each others unless absolutely necessary.
That's not it. Everyone in Zurich studies French at school, if you speak slowly to them in French, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (if they are familiar with the context of course). Similarly, if you speak slowly in German to a French-speaking Swiss, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (again, if they are familiar with the context).
It's just harder to speak in another language than to understand it, so if you ask someone to speak...
Next time, ask them if they understand French :-).
"En Suisse, on s'entend bien parce qu'on ne se comprend pas".
Switzerland's multilingual situation might look primed for a balkanized culture war, especially if you are coming from a place where that is common. But 1) it's a country of 10m people and 2) the national identity is centered around being unified despite language differences.
Of course people make jokes and remarks about "those people" who speak a different language. But "those people" are probably 1h away by train, are probably coworkers, and their language was taught in your school (even if some didn't bother to learn).
I'd see a lot more "nuclear no thanks" stickers in swiss German side than Romandie.
I'd expect the strong anti movement from Germany to have some impact.
> the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for
Unless you personally agree with whatever your preferred party's line is on everything and generalize that sentiment, I'm not sure how to get to that conclusion.
> But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
People aren't really partisan like that in Switzerland. They'll happily elect people from one party then vote against the party on specific issues in referendums or initiatives.
For something like nuclear, people who vote for green party might be mostly aligned with the party because it's a key issue for them while people who vote for center or right parties won't really care what the party recommends.
To be pedantic: neither is Switzerland because of Liechtenstein...
The term EU doesn't describe a geographic area. It is a membership. Just as if I'm surrounded by members of a book club, I'm not in it.
I like that you ignore that “in” means “inside” in one sentence and then use that exact meaning of the word in the following sentence
You can escape Switzerland by going straight up into space. It's only "in" the EU in 2 dimensions, maybe 2.5 since you can't dig your way out.
Ah, that's what they're building the power plants for. Blasting things into space.
Maybe Tim Curry should move there.
It's not and that's fine, but it's very much part of the European economic area, and we have a great relationship as well as a lot of alignments with standards and so on. The EU wouldn't have no issues taking notes from the Swiss.
It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1].
At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/frances-edf-faces-higher-costs-electricity-oversupply-2026-02-16/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...
Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap?
They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.
Process works if you keep building, expanding and making it safer. If you don’t build it for decades, you’re basically starting from scratch.
It is a hard sell when you have to front a good chunk of money, without a track record of successful build ups. It applies to other infrastructure stuff like HSR.
1. Nuclear has a negative learning curve. It’s gotten more expensive with time. Part of the reason is increasing geopolitical risks (the U.S. just launched a war on Iran because of the possibility it may upgrade nuclear material to weapon capabilities), lost knowledge and expertise, and also the increasing relative cost of financing in the cost of energy projects.
2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were much more likely to directly invest in energy projects. It didn’t have to compete with Labubus for private dollars.
3. Its current competition didn’t exist, given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten, and how much cheaper battery tech has gotten with signs all of them will only get even cheaper. And on the non renewable side, natural gas has become incredibly cheaper as well.
1. I personally believe the “lost knowledge “ is overstated. Europe knows very well how to manage large scale infrastructure projects. It still has a healthy nuclear industry.
2. Once the vote is there(Switzerland is a direct democracy), the public funds will be there. Sweden has recently chosen to invest ~40B Euro.
3. Solar, really? In Switzerland?
Many parts of the industrialised world receive very little sun, especially in winter, where coincidentally, energy usage peaks.
And intermittent power generation like wind is no competition to nuclear.
These are very weak arguments. Good luck replacing Oskarshamn with solar panels…
> given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten
In a world with a lot of oil. How does that evolve when we don't have enough oil anymore?
Feels like renewables are extremely distributed, which sounds like it may be harder to manage without the happy globalisation brought by accessible oil.
To be clear, I believe we also need renewables. But I also believe that we won't remotely replace oil, so we need absolutely everything we can imagine, and that includes nuclear energy.
weapons are unrelated to plants. Weapons are more about enrichment.
What counts as "fast and cheap" ?
For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.
Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.
The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.
Utility-scale solar projects in California are experiencing interconnection delays averaging 3 to 5 years, primarily due to grid congestion, slow utility study pipelines, and aging substation equipment.
It took 5 years from construction start to grid connection for Oskarshamn R3, at the time the reactor with the world’s highest rated output. Since it began operating it has produced 350TWh.
That nuclear power must take forever is a myth and is only due to dysfunctional politics.
That “you get a permit in the winter and it’s done by summer” is a totally bogus claim. Perhaps for some tiny installation compared to a power plant with 1.5GW output.
https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/oskarshamn-3 https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/o...
And now France target 2038 at the earliest for the first reactor in the EPR2 fleet. With a 11 cent per kWh CFD and interest free loans, summing to over 20 cents per kWh.
It is easy to dream about what could have been half a century ago, but that doesn’t change reality today.
Fellow Swede here, what is crazy is I also learned this from this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
SVT or SR has never shown me this, wonder why...
And what is crazy is we, in Europe, act and talk as if we cannot do anything without sucking up to USA or China.
We also have massive Hydro in Sweden. We can see what is currently giving us electricity.
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/ https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/
oh and dont get us started on the electricity zones and germany...
Turn on Barsebäck again... absolute asenine they shut it down. Will never happen, been too long, also owned by Uniper... (Germans)
And sadly S+MP+V will win this election it looks like. Say goodbye to any new nuclear power. Also it will be 2015 all over again but that is off topic...
The same way that France did it; by building quite safe nuclear in series with massive government subsidies. A bit like China today.
After the accidents showed that these designs where just not quite safe enough, redundancy in the safety systems were added. The thing is; as soon as those reactor designs got a bit more safe, they got much more expensive quite quickly. Just look at France's history of nuclear reactor development.CP0, CP1 and CP2 were somewhat cheap and they were able to churn out the things in quite a number.P4 and P'4 were already much more complex, more expensive and it just wasn't possible to mass produce these things like before. By N4 the economy of scale had broken down almost completely.
That's the problem with nuclear reactors. They are simple in principle, but fiendishly difficult in practice and enormously complex. So complex indeed that the learning curve doesn't yield any compounding returns. That's what we've seen play out in the last 50 years.
I don't know how things evolved in Sweden, but I assume that Swedish reactors don't have all the safety features of modern reactors. I guess that's what made them cheap, just like the CP-series in France.
Gen2 units are expensive, but how do you explain ABWR as a FOAK costed far less than N-OAK gen 2 units?
It's not about safety but features and wishes to have. French reactors were cheap even at P4 level but the demand hasn't increased as planned and electrification was not great, so construction stopped. EPR is a complicated mess trying to cater to all regulations at once, especially the harsh german ones. That's why EPR2 has some stuff stripped apart
It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.
>environmentalists have choked it to death.
Those regulations you despise were written in blood.
Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it.
Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.
> If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent.
I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
The effect environmentalists have on adoption is a rounding error compared to the humongous cost of nuclear power.
Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically.
Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.
Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.
No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive.
It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition".
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construction-Starts-Drop-Again-in-the-World.html https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
> the systems were just too expensive.
Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.
I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".
"safe" is a spectrum. While coal is allowed to kill millions of people a year, the safety level of nuclear in the US was raised to "no matter whatever happens no one ever anywhere must have harm come to them" and that's not realistic. Solar kills orders of magnitude more people than nuclear! But we haven't regulated rooftop solar out of existence, plus that wasn't even an option 50 years ago. That's 40 years we didn't have to be poisoning the Earth with coal.
Your link says increased modulation adds 1.5-3.75 million euros/year in maintenance costs. That's utterly insignificant for the electricity supply to a nation of 70 million.
> It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years.
Renewables are not remotely displacing fossil fuels. Look at fossil fuel consumption.
Nuclear managed to make France and Sweden cleanest grids in EU as late as 90's while Germany is still one of the worst emitters in EU with ren-only approach and plans gas expansion fro firming. Yes, tell us more about who did better
Political will is not the actual bottleneck.
Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sense to invest the money in something else.
China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base.
Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generation_germany_2025.pdf https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...
In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.
You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.
Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
> we paid dearly for that
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
I don’t know if it’s that much cheaper, but they have the well to execute on infrastructure. does Japan for that matter and Taiwan.
One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies.
China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
There is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.
How much per kW?
China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service.
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.
You think this is a modern American problem?
What if I told you Europeans used to throw people in jail (or worse ) for claiming the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun?
This is a forever problem.
Indeed. Good to hear you’re a Trump supporter!
> Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
Meaning the solution for cheap nuclear power is cheating a corruption.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
The article is quite full of the classic nuclear fear mongering. Like:
"Most significant was the decision to abandon adding an extra wall in the reactor containment building—a feature designed to increase protection against radiation in the event of an accident."
Most reactors currently in operation have a single wall containment building.
The EPR has double layer containment, but the new EPR2 reactor will have single-wall prestressed concrete containment structure with a metal liner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR2_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR2_des...
Also Korea’s nuclear industry as pretty far from decline:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/khnp-sets-out-plans-for-usd186bn-czech-nuclear-project https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/khnp-sets-out-pl...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/sites-selected-for-korean-nuclear-new-build https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/sites-selected-f...
> One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns.
Areva underbid on the fixed price contract to win against the ABWR, IIRC. Admittedly the Fins were not pleased at the time overrun, but the construction cost was historically not so bad given it was FOAK in a country without recent construction experience .
Ironically Finland had the option to build ABWR which got built already for cheap and fast. But it picked EDF because it decided to underbid saying it can do cheaper... The result is known...
Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.
Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that.
There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.
What should one do then? Just shut everything down?
Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days.
That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.
Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.
You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.
> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days
Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.
That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built.
> That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built
No, it can’t. We’re already building solar as fast as we can, the economics drive that. The marginal supply will come from something else. That margin is what we’re talking about, not the bulk. Most of the new energy will come from solar. But we can’t manufacture and install PVs quickly enough, particularly over the next 20 years, to close the gap.
So how do you propose the energy is supplied in the 20 years it would take for the first nuclear reactors to become offline? Let me guess: gas turbines?
So we either fully rely on gas turbines for the base load for the next 20 years, orrrr we rely on gas turbines during the few days it is both dark and wind-less for the next 20 years.
We have statistics on solar performance at the huge countries levels. And it shows that, in reality, we're talking about 20x overbuild. Not 3x and not even 10x. And there is no way around it.
Wind and solar anti-correlation does not lowering this number. Number is still 20x, just it's more rare now, but it is still there.
it'll still not work if you bothered to look at energy charts data for Europe. Plenty of 3+days of low capacity factor for solar+wind. No amount of realistic oversupply will save you there. "Wind and solar are anti-correlated." - just weakly, if you zoom in at hourly/minute production situation is different. New nuclear makes sense if you hate gas.
Whether or not that's the case, the problem is that if you put together all the nuclear, solar, wind and hydro we can manage, we will still have less energy than what we get easily with oil.
I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.
You can only spend a dollar once, so any money going into nuclear won't go into solar, wind, or hydro - which have far better payoff when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions.
Those are all less safe than nuclear. It's a simple fact, look it up.
All the places that can use hydro already do. Oh, and it's pretty damaging to the environment, it turns out.
Wind and solar are pretty cool, but also unreliable, so it's not so clear that they're really cheaper after you account for overprovisioning and storage costs.
If only there was a safe and reliable source of energy we could use to complement them...
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Lol-ed hard... If we look only at modern generation of tech, Gen3 nuclear plants are the safest source of power
Did waste management become a solved problem?
In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.
Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.
What is the solution?
Where are the free nuclear plants?
Sizewell C = £40 billion
That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.
You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar.
Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.
Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.
Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.
Maybe have a look at that by now old old image. Notice the red square. It is a bit larger today, but the principle stays the same
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DESERTEC-Map_large.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DESERTEC-Map_large.jpg
There are enough roofs and waste lands for solar.
But out of curiosity, would you like to live next to a nuclear plant/uran mining/radioactive waste deposit?
Sorry is the idea here that we’d cover the Sahara in PVs? The Sahara desert, in Africa, the most dysfunctional continent on the planet. And, what, we’d lay a billion miles of transmission lines? You can’t keep reliable electricity running in those countries today because of how frequent copper theft is. You think building a solar farm is going to work?
This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.
The solution is nuclear fuel reprocessing + breeder reactors.
You end up burning all of the uranium, leaving being only short lived isotopes.
Will solar + bess supply power with the same pattern in UK or will they require gas firming on top?
"We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity"
Did you ever handled radioactive material yourself?
Or watched how Uranium mining works and what gets left behind?
I doubt that.
Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
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Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.
In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons that will make the widespread use of nuclear energy possible: once your neighbor have built a reactor, you begin to share with them all the risks associated with nuclear energy, but you receive none of the benefits. This makes building a nuclear reactor more attractive to you, since you're already bearing the risks.
From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.
The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.
Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.
Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown?
It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.
Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.
Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.
If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.
I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.
This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
Sure, you need the right place, but it's not like there's a shortage of space far away from everything.
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What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?
Newer reactors produce much less long-lasting waste. A half-life of only 100 or 200 years makes a tremendous difference to the old reactors where half-life was measured in 1000s of years
Waste management has been solved problem.
"A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico, US, is a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
But for political reasons it's used only for military nuclear high level waste.
For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository. High level nuclear waste is very small and French nuclear waste from light water reactors is no different from Swiss nuclear waste or Swedish, German, Spanish. (U.K. Magnox fuel rods are different and have special storage requirements). Single waste repository in Finland, Sweden or Norway would be enough, they have lot of old granite and very stable geology.
It really never was that big of a problem. People make a big deal that it lasts 30,000 years, but there are many other types of waste, such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, etc, that will literally never go away, but we don't make people put those types of wastes in repositories that will last forever. Basically you just want to put it in a very remote place with a lot of earth over it. The good thing about nuclear waste is that it's so energy dense that there really isn't even that much of it.
> Did waste management become a solved problem?
Yes? Just have them sit in concrete casks? It's safe enough to do a 'maternity photoshoot' with:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120 https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
The volumes of "waste" that is generated, given the electricity produced, is not a lot. The entirety of the US' waste created, over the course of multiple decades, can fit on single football field/pitch, ten yards/metres high (that's the actual fuel bundles: the dry casks they're stored in would increase the volume).
France is just across the border, so Orano can do reprocessing with the "waste" to reduce its volume even further if desired, and extract the unused fuel from the waste.
Yes. Check Onkalo. At worst you can unban reprocessing to reduce the amount of waste or pour some $ in fast reactors
Any country that does not use nuclear using less energy dense alternatives. Compressing controllable energy production should be considered one of our top priorities.
> Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though
France got there first.
They built out such a massive infrastructure of Nuclear that they are a net provider of energy in Europe. They are also the only country to date that has officially pushed back on old safety models like LNT.
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Switzerland is also working jointly with Denmark on a Thorium reactor and I’m sure in light of the continuing situation with Russia/Ukraine, and the fact that the Chinese have already built two Thorium reactors (a small one to work the kinks a much larger one that will go on line in 2029-2030) Danes/Swiss will be stepping up their efforts in this area.
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-refuels-thorium-reactor-without-shutdown/ https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-refuels-thorium-react...
I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build. Are we in the west gonna wait for the Chinese to build out Thorium Reactors, are we also gonna wait for high-speed rail to be built out by the Chinese too if it wasn’t for the war with Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese probably would have built out high-speed rail, all all the way to Europe, by the way, they’ve already built a rail system all the way to Tehran.
And the Chinese have built out a high speed rail system all the way to Ürümqi, China just east of Kazakhstan in western China. (They aren’t messing around).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/9e48ce28-ef7a-5ff0-a27e-1d744b968c65 https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/9e4...
> Nuclear is cheap at scale
Citation needed. We saw at-scale buildout during the 1970s and 1980, did it result in result in order-of-magnitude cost reductions back then?
VS the cost today yes. Nuclear wasn’t seen as a prohibitively expensive form of energy, quite the opposite. South korea and China are making it work. But if you build a new prototype every time and get bogged down in decades of environmental surveys, lawsuits and ever changing over regulations, any infrastructure project becomes prohibitive, whether it is nuclear, high speed rail, or anything else.
It led to onsite cost reductions. But these were negated if the following site had serious design changes. Example is France. Still, compared to today it was much cheaper.
> The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days
I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.
These are not opposites. Both can be true.
> I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.
Japan was able to start construction on a new nuclear reactor and have its construction (and start commercial service) with-in five years, and did so every year from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
The first unit you build will be expensive, the second less so, the third even less. Economies of scale work just as well for nuclear plants as they do for widgets: Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, Unit 4 cost 30% less.
Turns out if you don't know what you're doing, things can get be expensive because you're learning lessons along the way, but if/once you do know what you're doing costs drop.
Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?
Do you trust today's politicians with tall buildings, or bridges, or chemical plants, or guns, or fighter gets, or ammunition production?
No? That's exactly the point.
Today's politicians can't even be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure, leading to things like the Ponte Morandi collapse, or the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, or the Carola Bridge collapse, and so on and so on.
They can't even properly maintain fairly trivial infrastructure, routinely leading to at most a few dozen deaths per incident. Why would you assume they'd do any better with nuclear reactors - where a second Chernobyl is the potential result of an incident?
No, but they aren't the ones designing them. Politicians normally aren't engineers.
Do you trust today's politicians to hire competent engineers?
Do you trust today's politicians to provide all the money the engineers ask for?
Besides an engineering problem, they are also a political problem for as long as they exist, and even longer. Remember how Russia bombed Chernobyl in the Ukraine war?
> Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where 50% of all electricity currently comes from nuclear power:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply
I have no problem with getting more CANDU reactors (which is the current plan).
As an Ontarian, I love CANDU.
As an Ontarian, the thought of spending $500B on a couple of reactors makes me furious. Ontario is not going to become competitive again with the most expensive electricity in the world.
Ontario nuclear is cheaper than Ontario solar and wind (Table 2):
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb-EN.pdf https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
Until a few years ago it was cheaper than methane/natural gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20231019.pdf https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
At least when it comes to refurbishment, the independent (reports to provincial parliament) FAO found:
> Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb-EN.pdf https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
Their projections go to 2064.
New-nuclear is worthy of discussion, but given we have stood up supply chains via the refurbishment process, there's a lot of knowledge out there. My current largest complaint with the new-nuclear plans is the SMRs.
politicians dont manage nor design reactors. With all it's flaws nuclear is one of the safest sources of power
I'll never feel comfortable with it. Especially after after humans proved they will even attack nuclear power plants in a war. You can only design for so much.
Switzerland is not in the EU.
Setting a standard in Europe? What’s France doing then?
"The technology is so unbelievably safe". Absolutely! Chernobyl and Fukushima are post card holiday resort destinations ...
the argument is always repeated and always false. Unless you like gas firming, nuclear must be expanded. Nuclear has lowest enviromental impact per UNECE
Ukraine still has power due to it's npp because most of ren infra got destroyed or captured because it was in the south.
The plan for managing waste in Switzerland is terradura, similar to Onkalo in Finland, similar to what Germany does with toxic waste in herfa neurode
Germany is just a prime example. Germany was better off to not shut down existing plants and invest in ren+nuclear to retire leftover fossils.
It's also fascinating to hear the "horrifyingly expensive" statement. Germany spends on EEG equivalent of one failed french nuclear project each year. It also spends the same on transmission to acomodate distributed generation. And also plans to expand gas. Anyone suggesting German path is sane/correct and expanding nuclear is the worst decision ever loves fossils more than nuclear - as simple as that.
"Who cares if the emergency reserves are fossil gas when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, aviation, industry, maritime shipping and so on?" - many.
German EEG/y spending is about to increase because it's paid more frequently despite most expensive contracts being over. And for offshore this already didn't pan out well. Solar has the advantage of lower capex but will be hit too.
I mean the situation was clear when Germany dropped nuclear before coal and gas... I can understand simping for gas, but having coal on the grid and dismantling nuclear in parallel is peak insanity
Yes, EPR2 is overcomplicated mess. But the subsidy is not that great either... considering many EU countries are subsidizing biomass today at 18ct/kwh...
Always the false comparisons.
Please do tell me the expected capacity factor of these biomass plants, even if 18 cents per kWh is correct, after renewables, storage, hydro if available and existing nuclear plants with 80 year LTOs do the heavy lifting.
Can you see the difference compared to new built nuclear power which requires that absolutely insane price when running at 100% 24/7 for 40 years?
Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal.
But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
A country can do things that are not financially viable.
Because it was paid for by the taxpayer.
Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?
> Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
No need to run the world: in the last decades, some environmentalists have been lobbying against nuclear energy and in the end, the people in many countries have become opposed to it by fear of it. And that feared is fuelled (among others) by environmentalists for sure.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
If it's about comparing energies financially (and many other dimensions actually), nothing gets remotely close to oil. But oil is limited and oil is destroying the world.
Also not to forget: everything nowadays depends on globalisation and therefore oil. We like to compare renewables to oil, but we forget that they totally depend on oil at the moment. Without oil, we don't build much renewables anywhere. So an important question is: without oil, do we need nuclear energy or not? I believe we do. I believe we also need renewables, to be clear.
Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists."
Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.
(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)
Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.
France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construction-Starts-Drop-Again-in-the-World.html https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
> Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.
Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=rayiner%20environmentalists&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I mostly agree with your larger point, but the anti-nuclear movement predates the 70s by quite a bit.
I'm not sure I agree but lets set that aside for now. Are you seriously suggesting that $50 billion per France equivalent over half a century would have been an unreasonable price to pay to avert climate change? It's just not a logically consistent or even remotely sensible position. The environmentalist movement undeniably got this one wrong and I say that as someone with views that would generally be categorized as such.
These €50 billion is just what EDF is in debt, not what building and operating these reactors actually cost. Just in the next 10 years EDF will have in invest about €150-200 billion to replace and refurbish their reactors. That's just to keep the current capacity, not to expand it.
Unfortunately "the environmentalist movement" didn't have the information regarding the dangers of climate change and the information about the near-zero threat from low level nuclear radiation in 1970ies. Hindsight is 20/20.
That said; planning and construction of new nuclear reactors peaked in the early 1970ies, before large scale accidents (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) really mobilized civil society against nuclear power.
The reason the West stopped building is because even with state support, it's not such a financially attractive investment. That's why "the East" continued building more and more reactors until the big incident. (Arguably their reactors were also much less safe and thus probably cheaper by quite a bit.)
So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive. I'm certain there's ZERO correlation between regulations that make it expensive and regulations making it safe....................
So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?
> The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety.
https://www.nr-ha.org/history https://www.nr-ha.org/history
> ... which has adversely affected public health or safety.
Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.
>Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity
None of the theories put forward about the loss of the USS Scorpion have involved the reactor. Maybe they didn't discuss it because it wasn't relevant?
> Would not trust them as a source.
Ok
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Book_2025.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Bo...
The program led to the Three Mile Island accident, which is one of the largest releases of radioactivity in US history.
Naval reactors are inherently safer due to their small size and unlimited supply of cooling water. A meltdown is virtually impossible, worst-case scenario you could always use a firehose and a diesel pump to inject sea water into the reactor. On the other hand: you really don't want to overfill the reactor: a naval reactor "going solid" rips itself apart, killing the ship.
Commercial reactors are the exact opposite. Overfilling them is not a huge deal as there are plenty of ways to relieve pressure, but underfilling them can easily lead to a meltdown. Even after shutdown it needs active cooling for a decent while to prevent residual decay from overheating it.
The TMI reactor operators were trained on naval reactors, but they were operating a commercial reactor. During the incident they were too busy trying to prevent it from overfilling to notice that it was actually cooking itself dry - so they intentionally shut down the emergency cooling system!
So no, saying that the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program has led to zero accidents is both wrong, and completely irrelevant to the subject here.
Three Mile Island was never owned or operated by the US Navy. To place the blame on the Naval Reactor program you would have to prove that the operators would have acted the same way if they knew that the PORV had not closed when it was supposed to.
https://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/alfieri1/ https://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/alfieri1/
To put it another way, the only way to blame the Naval Reactor program is if you believe in a scenario where equipment failure of the control panel to notify operators of the exact problem that you described did not contribute to the incident. Once you get to “equipment failure doesn’t cause problems, the United States Navy causes problems” you’re pretty squarely in fantasticism territory, though.
Lmao at “three quarters of a century of institutional knowledge isn’t relevant because I don’t think you can build a nuclear reactor by water for some reason” while talking about a nuclear power plant on an island
> So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive
Yes, with extra steps.
Regulations, more so than their impact on price, cost calendar time.
Time, especially for already-lengthy and complicated infrastructure projects, costs volume.
And low volume means high prices and a slow pace of improvement.
Henry Ford wouldn't have built many automobiles, or improved them as quickly as he did, if every one needed to be individually permitted by multiple government agencies.
The failure of nuclear is that it never standardized and scaled to industrially-efficient volumes (outside of arguably France) at exactly the point that it could have technologically done so (~1970s). Had Offshore Power Systems^ begun producing floating reactors at volume in Jacksonville, FL in the late 70s, we'd be having a very different conversation about cheap American nuclear power today.
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems
there are regulations that make it safe and the ones that make it expensive. its two different groups. radiation limits and design safety with meltdown prevention is one thing but then you get rules like radiation needs to be as low as possible until you run into a cost limit. that basically means setting a price floor for the whole project.
nuclear being expensive is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. the costs for certified equipment are high because the market is small and not competitive, because nobodys building nuclear, because everyone knows its too expensive to build and not worth it.
the only solution i see is massive state investment like what france was doing in the 70s. that would upset the market purists but its more practical than trying to push the industry with a neoliberal hands off approach.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death
How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?
Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies.
(also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)
I'm not asking where they got funding. I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone. You don't find that strange at all?
The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it.
Environmentalists weren't just useful idiots then (and I hesitate to call people acting in good faith, without any self-interest, "idiots"). They're convenient fall guys today. The fossil fuel industry killed nuclear power and pinned it on the environmental movement. That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
> I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone
First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.
> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.
Environmentalists did have the nuclear industry's help with a few high profile disasters. Plus the lingering connection to nuclear weapons. That makes it easier for people to take the threat seriously.
But that's still insufficient to explain it. If the fossil fuel industry had wanted nuclear power we'd have it. They could use lobbying to reduce the push for nuclear, and then blame it on the environmentalists. Who were happy to take a rare win.
It’s easy to make the general public fearful of nuclear because they have no direct experience with it in daily life.
Right, because the general public has direct daily experience with... whaling?
People take on dangers all the time if the benefit (perceived or otherwise) outweighs the risk. That just tells me nuclear's economics didn't make it a clear winner over fossil fuels.
It's just weird to me that environmentalists get blamed for killing nuclear more than the group that actually made it happen and had something to gain - the fossil fuel industry. They funded the environmentalists to protest against it, and they funded the politicians to write laws against it.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death.
The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.
Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.
That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.
"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
This is so shortsighted. We'd still have the nuclear waste problem and - more importantly - the cost. Germany alone is facing a bill of €26B to €45B for nuclear waste management, decomissioning and cleanup. All of that goes into your electricity bill, because the government pays only 25% of it: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-costs https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-cos...
nuclear waste is not a problem. It can be made a problem if the chiefs responsible for it (BASE?BMUV) have certain political affiliation...
All german plants are decomissioned through operators money except soviet/experimental units. Operators also paid into KENFO, an autoinvesting fund about 24bn and it keeps it's value despite the state taking about 2bn/y from it for interim storage and 'searching'. Meanwhile Finland built Onkalo for 1bn...
Nobody said it would be as cheap as solar. But "renewables" can't fulfill ALL power needs ALL the time.
When you actually need to generate electricity rather than gather it, what's better than nuclear?
Renewables don't need to fulfill everything all the time. If they need assistance from fossil fuels 10% of the time, that's a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions. The last 10% won't be the biggest issue to deal with.
So you can build expensive nuclear plants for that small fraction of the time, or you can continue to use existing fossil fuel plants for free. The difference to the carbon bottom line is small.
"Renewables don't need to fulfill everything all the time. If they need assistance from fossil fuels 10% of the time, that's a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions. The last 10% won't be the biggest issue to deal with." - so funny seeing environmentalists accepting parallel gas infrastructure when countries like France/Sweden don't have it.
German Greens have managed the feat of presiding over extending strip coal while closing nuclear power plants. But hey, they fought for it since the 70s, and finally won; we all lost.
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20251017.pdf https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2025...
On the spectrum from "cheap" to expensive, where would that fall?
For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20231019.pdf https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
> No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.
Ontario's Bruce A site (Units 1-4) have an age of ~45 years, and has just finished refurbishment (ahead of schedule and under budget) to run for another few decades:
* https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/refurbishment-of-bruce-power-unit-3-reactor-completed-ahead-of-schedule-and-under-budget-province-says/ https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/refurbishment-of-bruce...
Ontario's Pickering B nuclear site (Units 5-8) have an age of ~40 years, and are about to be refurbished to run another 30+ years:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/ontario-to-spend-26-8-billion-on-pickering-nuclear-plant-refurbishment/article_68265625-f29b-49f0-aa69-854de3f2748d.html https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...
So while the 60-80 years has not been hit, it is probably less on the "speculative" side of spectrum and more on the "probable" side.
The American regime has recently solved this problem by removing safety requirements - they have de-recognized the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage, which means the official fact is that there is a threshold of radiation that's safe to receive. That threshold is, of course, just above whatever one of the nuclear reactors they're about to build will emit. They removed the "as low as reasonably possible" design goal which means it's now allowed to dump radioactive waste into a river to save money
Georgia nuclear power plant cleared for 80-year operating life
https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-cleared-for-80-year-operating-life https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/georgia-nuclear-powe...
> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
> We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!
> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?
> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.
> then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base. Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.
Germany shouldn’t have dismantled those nuclear power plants dumb…
> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
> The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing.
> It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
>They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun.
Virtually nowhere gets zero sun.
Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
As well as a very low population density.
It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disaster of recent projects (e.g. EDF cost overruns).
Everywhere gets zero sun at night.
And at high latitudes, the night can be very long. And even when the sun does appear for a bit, it doesn't provide a lot of energy.
And you might want to ask the Fins how they feel about nuclear power: around two thirds of the population are for it as well as pretty much the entire political establishment, including the Green Party.
> Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
Where did you get that idea from? This isn't Norway; we don't have any mountains. The country is mostly flat and most of the suitable locations already have a hydropower plant since the 1970s.
Last year, we had (depending on location) 0 to 25 hours of sunlight total in the entire month of December.
Low sun angle plus very heavy cloud cover means that even midday looks like a gloomy sunset.
Finland is the definition of an outlier, and folks in similar situations make up a tiny percentage of the world population. They can burn gas for the next 50 years, and we can still be good.
It isn't propaganda. No country gets 100% of its electricity from wind and solar 100% of the time for a reason.
It was good... for a while. And it was a "small amount of directly affected people". I mean, so long as you ignore places like St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Camden, etc., and the powers-that-be seemed to be okay with doing that. It's a major part of why the center of the country turned out the way it did politically, but whatever. What's done is done.
But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.
Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).
Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.
They are cheaper cars. Not at all sure they're better.
BYDs are certainly better than VWs, Fiats, Citroens and Renaults. The only problem is getting parts - you'll have to wait at least a month or so for the part to arrive from China if it isn't locally available (which often is the case).
European cars are opaque surveillance machines just as well, so why bother?
Honestly, VW spent years developing the ID line which was just too expensive, buggy, and constanly positioned as an alternative to much cheaper and better equipped Golf/Polo lines - it's like they were afraid to canibalize their own products. I don't know a single person who owned an ID.3 and was actually happy with it.
Or Mercedes, where they decided to build extremely expensive EVs that departed from their core design so much their core audience didn't want to buy them, then they were surprised EVs don't sell.
Or Audi who were probably a masterclass in offering the worst possible value for money you could imagine with their EVs - £50k Q4 that still had manual seats, like what are you competing with exactly?
Only Skoda could really kinda buck the trend with the Enyaq, which proves that VW could be competive if they wanted to, but they actively decided not to.
And don't start me on the Peugeot/Renault/Opel cars, which initially looked incredibly interesting and actually competitive, but I can only guess that Stellantis told them to tone it down because again - have to protect their core business of ICE cars, can't be too good.
And then MG came in with very well specced working EVs, and then other Chinese brands moved in, and big european manufacturers are crying that they are eating their lunch. Like, you guys had literally years to address this, but you decided to protect your legacy product over investing in the future = you're reaping the results now.
It might very well be a case of trying to maximize the return on the investment that they already made with the old vehicles.
Building out a new production line for vehicles is insanely expensive. Billions upon billions of dollars. You need the old cars to sell well enough to pay for this and all of your other expenses.
China got to get into the EV space with a mostly-clean slate. Their domestic manufacturers made absolutely horrid products at the turn of the century. They did what they do best: copy successful people with investment from the successful people.
They only let Western manufacturers sell in China with the cooperation of a local vehicle manufacturer. That necessitated a bunch of investment and IP transfers to Chinese manufacturers who didn't have to shell out themselves, and when they did, it was with the complete backing of the state.
When EV technology really became something viable in the last 10-15 years, they just used that capacity, lower wages, and lax environmental regulations around mining, to undercut the rest of the world on EVs.
It's easy to act like the rest of the world just isn't competent enough, but there are layers to this.
Just a small nitpick: Renault isn't Stellantis and have been quite competitive (if a bit timid) in the EV space. First with the Zoe and now with the Renault 5.
Well see the problem is we'd get the reactor hardware and we'd have to write the control software ourselves ha ha.
In practice though Westinghouse still bids lowest out of the politically viable options these days. Korean and French reactors are rather expensive.
You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium
I think the larger concern is containment breach via sabotage and the resulting material release, definitely less than ideal if these things are put under random buildings where you have little perimeter control.
And I already can imagine that prompt "Mythos, create a design for ..."
> You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_energy_Thorium_fuel_has_risks https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_e...
"Unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as Th-231), which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Additional fissile material or another neutron source is necessary to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fuelled reactor, Th-232 absorbs neutrons to produce U-233. Depending on the design of the reactor and fuel cycle, the generated U-233 either fissions in situ or is chemically separated from the used nuclear fuel and formed into new nuclear fuel."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material
Hahaha, uninformed comment right here.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
You don’t have to make a nuclear bomb for highly effective terrorism. Just blow up the reactor
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down because:
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor#Fuel_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor#Fuel_repro...
no, weapons production is unrealated anyway - it's cheaper to do it in special facilities. Thorium was just too late to the party when most units were classic PWR's and BWR's without complicated handling
Please read Directive (EU) 2022/2557 and then tell me how a disgruntled office worker is supposed to do anything they aren't supposed to, given full compliance with the directive. I've seen some preliminary national implementation efforts and it's really serious stuff physical security wise.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32022L2557 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
> full compliance with the directive
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
But again:
>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.
There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that.
Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.
Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
>> impossible to get to by a normal employee
No, it's the normal that does the heavy lifting. A radiation therapy machine does not allow for an easy removal of the source, not without hours of work with specialized machinery. Again, how does a disgruntled office worker do this without immediate attention of security?
>>There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that
Well, it's really unfortunate, but we have multiple reports from people who have accidentally walked into a room with an open Cesium source at various irradiation facilities - they all reported that they felt incredibly sick in less than a minute. And that's "just" an irradiation source, not an active nuclear reactor. Again, I'm struggling to imagine how a "disgruntled worker" gets anywhere near the actual radiactive material within it.
The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project)
The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.
They don't need to build reactors just to retain a military nuclear program. They specifically maintain a nuclear deterrent by policy, they don't need an excuse. They build reactors because they need more power. They have 60+ reactors and will have more nuclear the US by the end of the decade. They're also heavily investing in next-gen reactors which they wouldn't need to do if they just wanted a weapons program.
Yes it's subsidized, everything in China is subsidized, that's the best part of a planned-capitalist economy. But it's actually becoming more market driven so they can reduce financial pressure and force efficiency from competition. In 10 years those subsidies are gonna be a lot smaller
it is worth noting that if you were to measure by degree of subsidy, the planned output for nuclear has not really budged, but wind and solar are exploding in China in comparison.
> Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.
> Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Global-report-confirms-and-details-nuclear-power-s-stagnation-Someone-needs-to https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Global-report-confirms-an...
no they dont. For military nuclear program you don't need power plants at all. You either have enrichment for uranium based warheads or a facility dedicated specifically to breed plutonium. Classic PWRs are unsuitable for that. There are ways - but it's so expensive that it's better to do it the proper way
military is unrealated to plants. You are ill informed.
The statement about subsidies is false too for existing plants. IPEX data is public. There are more subsidies for new units because the west is bad at construction but the amount is still not that great. Heck, biomass in EU gets 2x the CFD's vs min profitability limit of french Flamanville...
Their estimate was somewhat justifiable. Just recently before Hitachi finished it's ABWR in Japan for 3bn in under 4y... EDF thought they are cocky and can do the same...
According to Wikipedia, PreussenElektra was a subsidiary of VEBA, a state owned energy company. You have to cite your sources here because I don't want to have to rebut made-up stuff.
I do note that you have changed your argument from "plants were built mostly by private sector" to "it wasn't fully state controlled enterprises in the west". Closer to the truth, but still incorrect.
I stand corrected. VEBA was state owned at that time. On the other hand RWE was 50/50 private-municipality owned in the same period.
Still, no CFDs were given to them. So it's not about state reducing subsidies. Nor was it about environment regulations.
The high costs of recent western projects are more related to depleted supply chain and poor designs of the plants. We'll get a chance soon to observe how Canada and Korea will build in Europe. Both have much better supply chain and both want to build (Czechia- apr and Romania -candu). If both will have the same cost blows as flamanville then it's clearly related to EU itself. If not- then the problem was EDF incompetence specifically here and Westinghouse incompetence in US
Yeah, the efficient coal plants displaced the inefficient nuclear ones. Efficiency all the way!
Climate change? Pollution? Nah, who cares, efficiency!
This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …
… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.
The fossil fuel industry quietly funneled money to these groups to discredit nuclear which competes with gas/coal for base load. Solar/wind only partially compete because at times they produce nothing so the grid still needs base load (usually "natural" gas these days).
Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!
Plain false. The "economics" never got bad. They were always bad to begin with, hidden under layers of government subsidies.
Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?
A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?
Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.
And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.
Source needed, a quick search if mine showed very different numbers:
"China aims to reach 110 gigawatts (GWe) of nuclear capacity by 2030."
"China installed over 430 GW of renewables in 2025"
In other words china installed last year alone 5x the energy capacity in solar and wind, what the are planning to have in 2030
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-power https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
110 GW at a 90% capacity factor vs 430 GW at maybe 20% capacity factor
what has installed capacity to do with price? Check recent chinese solar parks prices and power. Normalize that power with chineze weather capacity factor. Do the same for their nuclear which is roughly 2.5bn/unit
China does expand ren more than nuclear but the reason is not economics but the capacity to scale (as well as inland ban)
Vastly slower. China is on one hand building enough renewables to soak up the entire grid expansion and displace fossil fuels.
On the other hand their nuclear share is declining. It peaked at 4.7% in 2021 and is today down to 4.3%. Entirely irrelevant.
For each plan they put out they lower their nuclear targets and push them further into the future.
Going from a French like buildout 10-15 years ago to having it as a token investment today.
I do see how France and Sweden have lowest GHG emissions in EU by building both nuclear and renewables. I see other countries like Denmark/Germany who decided to go with ren alone. Germany spent on EEG double than entire french nuclear fleet. We can see the results. There's no race here. There's no imagine if. We already have historical data. We already have results on hand
Do you know it will still be properly monitored in 100 years?
What about 1000?
How would you know if there are even people left who know what it is??
May be societal collapse isn't a problem. Maybe we're having a nice new beginning but someone finds some nice, warm stuff?
In 100 years: sure.
Unless we have civilizational collapse in which case a bit of nuclear waste will be the least of our problems.
It won't have to be monitored for a 1000 years. First, by that time the level of radioactivity is very low, and when it's in a deep-geological repository (like the ones we already use for vastly greater amounts of highly toxic chemicals that never decay) it is gone. We know enough about how geology works.
We know enough about how geology works.
We also know how a BLU-122 works. Can you be sure the US wouldn't use one on its allies in yet another moment of irrational tantrum? What about Russia?
It won't be "the least of our problems", it would be an additional problem.
The fuel and related will have to be monitored for 1000 years and more.
Yes, we know how geology works, which is why we have found a single place where it might be safe. ONE.
Being an additional problem is not a contradiction of it being the least of those problems.
No it won't.
That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.
For example: "The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
> Being an additional problem is not a contradiction of it being the least of those problems.
How does this even help your argument?
Yeah, we have a nuclear winter. 80% of the civilisation is dead. "Hey look, we've found warm stuff". A few years later: 10% of the population died of cancer.
Are you kidding?
> No it won't.
Spent nuclear fuel stays a radiation hazard for extended periods of time with half-lifes as high as 24,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
> That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.
The fact that your single example is Yucca mountain and even the US wasn't able to come up with another place and is still discussing this one, shows that there is not an abundance of places you can put it. Even in such a huge country like the USA.
Other countries have the same issues and they are geological.
Germany had a spot a few decades ago. Everybody thought it would be safe. It has to be evacuated now. An evacuation which will cost the taxpayer millions of Euros.
Nice new beginning my foot. Go live in the woods without power, petrochemical fuel or modern technology for a year and then tell me what you think.
Again, destroy a dam and you get a catastrophe. Don't do anything in particular and watch how many people die in the mid-term due to climate change.
It's all about risk management.
The most deadly industrial accident was the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Is this a Katrina reference?
Yeah but the risk management of a dam is ridiculously small compared to waste which will be dangerous so far into future that we might not know if people will even know what it is.
A dam damming water at a hill is obvious.
Some warm stuff set up like something really special, is not.
You realize we're literally dispersing coal, gas & gasoline fumes into the atmosphere that we all breathe, right? 24/7?
Yeah, small amounts of solid waste sitting somewhere is as much of a non issue as can be.
Correct as long as we still have Geiger counters.. I’m not sure what kind of apocalypse you’re planning for. Maybe get a radon detection kit for your basement.
I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know) in a way that depends on a social solution that doesn't seem to exist. Pro-nuke people will handwave it away, ignoring the total failure to secure storage sites in most places, and the anti-nuclear people treat it as a fatal flaw in the technology (which it isn't).
That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!
The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2432/ML24320A014.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2432/ML24320A014.pdf
If you are looking in tritium leaks, I would encourage to look into leaks from coal power plants, which are gigantic in comparison to nuclear power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Factsheet-CoalAsh.pdf https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10...
This is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Yes coal power is worse! I know that and clearly you know that. What are we even talking about?
So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.
I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.
Coal plant waste is visibly a nightmare, mountains of toxic dust, only "mildly" radioactive but also chemically toxic and physically dangerous. If that was the other option you'd have my support for a nuclear plant - but it isn't the other option.
Today the alternate project might well be renewables and BESS, and even if it's fossil fuels it will be natural gas. Natural gas waste isn't roses and kittens, but on every measure it's less bad than coal, and it doesn't have such viceral "this a bad idea" vibes. No heaps of toxic ash, no clouds of smoke, the pollution is too abstract.
Several UK solar projects which bid for AR6 in 2024 are live today, when it was daylight earlier those projects helped power the country. They paid us handsomely to do so, because the market price was almost £100 per MWh even at midday but they bid about £75 at the CfD auction back in 2024 so that (adjusted for inflation) is all they get.
Nuclear is the other option, and cherry picking the most generous data from a deindustrialised economy is a far less meaningful metric than you seem to think.
I wish people like you, who care genuinely about this topic, would engage with it in a more holistic way.
* Removing fossil fuels requires massively increasing the grid capacity by electrifying a vast range of extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes. The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
* That extra load is almost entirely baseload - running large smelters, furnaces, etc intermittently is infeasible and would use even more energy
* This real energy economy is hidden in deindustrialised western countries, where the people depend on energy consuming processes in faraway lands - energy is 'imported' in the form of finished products like cheap building materials. It never shows up in grid usage
* The reality is that the countries where energy is consumed will use as much renewable energy as possible, when it is cheaper to do so, but will rely on fossil fuels to supply the bulk of the baseload demand
* The UK 's energy policy will be a rounding error in this decision-making process
Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
> I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know)
It's not a 10k year problem, it's a ~300 year problem, after which most of it is at the same level as natural uranium ore; and the stuff that isn't can be blocked via aluminium foil (to stop beta particles).
The first 10-20 years post-removal are the most dangerous, and why the fuel is kept in cooling ponds. From 10-300 you still have danger, but that is manageable with concrete casts:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120 https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
* https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/1195184970613936129 https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
Once you're past the ~300 year mark, all the most dangerous isotopes have burned away, and you're at point where the main ways of getting ill from what remains is by either eating the pellets or grinding them up and snorting the powder like cocaine.
> if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen?
A good geiger counter can be bought on Amazon for $30. Something is either radioactive or it's not. You don't need to have a sophisticated understanding of the chemistry to test if dangerous radiation is present or not, nor do you need sophisticated equipment. My point is that being next to a radiation hazard should not cause the same sort of anxiety-of-the-unknown that living next to, for example, a chemical plant that may produce a menagerie of difficult-to-detect carcinogens.
If you assume a continuous chain of custody for the next 10000 years, it's pretty trivial, but how do you make that happen? It's beyond all known technology. So you can't.
When Russia bombs that facility, how big will the exclusion zone be? At some point in the next 10000 years, it's not unlikely, it's not likely, it's guaranteed that there will be a war, and the facility will be bombed, or the custodians will be drafted or will just move to the city looking for work, and the nuclear post will be left abandoned (remember Russia's RTGs?), or the descendants will pass the wrong care instructions on to their descendants, and then the containers will rust and start leaching into the water supply. As long as you have a country with operating nuclear reactors you probably have all the infrastructure to keep waste safe. What when you don't?
Imagine that literally, not metaphorically, the devil came to earth in the time of the Neanderthals, destroyed almost everything, and some heroic Neanderthals managed to seal him in a box. If the box isn't taken care of the devil can break out again. Do we still have those care instructions? Is anyone executing them? There are religions from hundreds of years ago (not as long as needed!) which say you must do something or the world ends. We consider them all fairy stories, and they probably are. What if one wasn't? Then we'd be fucked because we wouldn't be following the instructions, right? Nuclear waste storage would be in that bucket.
At least the fallout will be localized. You're not destroying the world with careless handling of nuclear waste. You may make a limited region uninhabitable for thousands of years, and detectably reduce global lifespans by a few years and increase cancer rates by a few percent.
The purpose of deep geo facility is to be deep. Bombing something 500m deep underground makes little sense when russia can use dirty bombs directly.
Besides - humanity already has such facilities for vast of toxic waste, prime example being Herfa Neurode. It's not like we ban all electronics due to arsenic waste from copper mining
It's non porous right up until an earthquake or some movement of the area makes it not
So just to be clear the concern here is that something buried 2+ miles underground, in a secure container, encased along with other secure containers in a concrete vault, all homed in nonporous rock, in a geologically stable area, is suddenly going to be subjected to an earthquake, against all odds a fault is going to open right through the waste storage area, again against all odds groundwater will appear, the reinforced vault will be weathered to the point of failure (over what timespan I wonder?), and the resulting leak of radioactive material that is multiple miles underground will then somehow affect humans living, what, somewhere within a few hundred miles? Does that really sound like a reasonable scenario to you? Because as far as I'm concerned it's pure concern trolling.
Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick...
I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".
It's concern trolling at its worst.
An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.
And yet we had a natural nuclear reactor that's been self contained for 2 billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
Yeah, i know about that one and it kind of proves my point, it's been active as a nuclear reactor for roughly a billion years if i recall correctly - every time water seeped into the rock it slowed the neutrons down and the reactor started up, created steam, which then evaporated and stopped the reaction
Dangerous the whole time.
Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too.
For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?
Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.
> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened?
Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit.
The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.
"At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think."
Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.
You should read up on the Asse II mine in Germany. They tried exactly this kind of naïve "just throw it in an old mine" approach, and it has turned into a giant headache as it is now slowly collapsing and trying to leak into the surrounding groundwater - if chemical reactions don't cause it to explode first.
please spare us from this nonsense. Waste can be stored in facilities like Onkalo just like we do for many others type of waste, for example in Herfa Neurode
I don't think people appreciate how much power comes from such a small amount of waste. The largest plant near me has been operating for > 50 years and the waste is still kept on site though I believe they are working on another solution.
Most plants don't need anything special for waste management. They just put it in dry cask storage and leave those in the outside.
Ironically, there's less background radiation around the casks than away from them, since they are so shielded you also get shielded from part of the background radiation too.
Every time someone mentions a year where nuclear started being "safe," I find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment, plus plenty of near misses. Broader than waste though.
Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes into the air.
While there are problems, I think that you should compare with alternative technologies to be fair. For instance, coal used in Germany and China actually releases more radioactive material than nuclear!
A great perk of nuclear waste s that it's so small compared to the power produced, it's way easier to dispose and manage, than, say, expired wind turbines (which aren't recycled currently and take a massive amount of space).
If automotive was regulated like nuclear, then any car crash would result in all cars being sent to the scrap heap forever.
> find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment
That is what safe looks like, nobody said perfect. It's like how cars are death traps but people can still reasonably call them "safe". You could do the same thing for solar panels but for the fact it isn't newsworthy if there is some toxic sludge in some dump somewhere is associated with solar panels.
There might not be any material that we produce on an industrial scale that doesn't leak hazardous or toxic chemicals. I looked up concrete [0] to find out what it's problem was, and it turns out concrete leaks toxic and radioactive materials into the environment because turns out natural rock is sometimes radioactive. Concrete is nonetheless pretty safe stuff.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete#Toxic_and_radioactive_contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...
They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing. Different people are taking on the risk in each scenario too. Despite this, I'd be fine with a reactor next to my city if I got something like cheap power in return.
> They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing.
Would "they" rather we just dumped the nuclear waste off in some corner somewhere? Then it'd be a slow and certain leak too. If they want slow and certain rather than probably-nothing then that can be arranged. It'd still be less damaging than business as usual.
I mean, I get that people are scared but they are scared of their own imaginations as opposed to anything that can be engineered. I still think I'd be much better off having lived through a Class 7 nuclear disaster rather than my actual experience of spending years near a coal mine. Policy made for and by people who just live in fear for no obvious reason is never going to work. They're still going to be scared whatever the actual policy is and the rest of us are going to be forced to do stupid things in the real world.
Most of the incidents are less about waste storage and more about accidental draining of something, usually contaminated water. Or like, San Onofre got its reactor installed backwards, which yeah does raise some questions that can only be answered with imagination.
So what? Occasional leaks are no big deal. Very few people die.
No technology is 100% safe, so that is a straw man.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of electricity generation we have.
You would be surprised how much toxic industrial waste is been currently stored in deep geological repositories in Europe.
https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-management/ https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-man...
For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025):
690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
So nuclear waste is not a technical problem, mostly political problem.
And it's not very much talk about, but the real issue is geopolitics. Each nuclear trans-uranium waste repository (spend nuclear fuel) could in future be mined to retrieve the stored plutonium for nuclear weapons. And even better, over centuries the most radioactive short lived isotopes are transmuted into more stable isotopes, so the mining and handling of this material is much easier. And even even better over millennia, the undesirable isotope Plutonium-240 (with half-life 6561 year, much shorter then Plutionium-239 half-life 24110 years) will decay away and the reactor-grade Plutonium waste will itself transform, without any external action, into very usable weapon-grade Plutonium.
Therefor spend nuclear fuel and storage of spend nuclear fuel in non-weapon countries is subject to monitoring by the enhanced verification measures of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Additional Protocol.
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07lyman.pdf https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07lyman.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation#Additional_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation#Addition...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_grade_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_grade_plutonium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_plutonium
U.S. goes to great lengths to prevent other countries from acquiring material usable for nuclear weapons. Like, for example retrieving plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-inside-17-year-mission-secure-legacy-soviet-nuclear-testing https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-...
"The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium (enough for 20,000 warheads) into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants."
"The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
Can you provide a citation for the $500B? Because Carney has mentioned federal money in that amount for projects Canada-wide that include "energy" generally, but not nuclear specifically.
I did find this (potential?) $100B number on Ontario nuclear energy:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/doug-ford-s-100-billion-bet-why-ontario-is-spending-big-on-nuclear-even-as/article_edb88fbe-6746-4529-bde3-da73b1bc1c62.html https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...
but if you take that number and 'ammortize' it over the average 40-year life span of reactors, it comes to $2.5B/year (in capex), which is about ~1% of the provincial budget. I'm not sure how much raw GW capacity that would add, or how many GWh would be generated annually, to do the math on the per-kWh (capex?) cost.
The article goes over the pros and cons of various points in the energy mix debate.
Your documents are from 2017. The numbers for solar will be almost an order of magnitude wrong.
Removing subsidies? Are you aware that UK increased ren CFDs for latest AR rounds? Are you aware that offshore projects without CFDs are already facing problems? Germany still pays 18bn/y on EEG and the amount is projected to rise due to more frequent payments
Transmission upgrade requirements are far smaller with not so distributed generation. This can be clearly seen in case of Germany vs France. You need vastly more transmission for distributed power put based on fertile weather patterns and even more to reduce curtailment with projects like sudlink
I didn't suggest it to keep current emissions what a nonsense. I've suggested tp expand nuclear in parallel with renewables instead of expanding renewables+gas
Please stop asking this stupid question about being afraid of renewables and storage because that's not the topic of the discussion. German pathway includes gas and the fact you leave this "small" detail makes me think you either don't mind it or you haven't read the proposals of Fraunhofer ISE/Habeck/Reiche
I love that you now deflect to off-shore wind subsidies. Not daring to face onshore wind, solar or storage.
Followed by again complaining about 2010 solar being expensie. To absolutely no ones surprise.
In Australia CSIRO assuming a status quo energy system, i.e. not electrified society, put the extra costs for a renewable Australian grid at ~€12B. That's less than the subsidies a single new built nuclaer reactor requires.
Isn't it funny how entire country scale transmission systems becomes cheap when compared to the subsidies required new built nuclear power?
When means you lock in hundreds of billions of euros in nuclear handouts from tax money which could have vastly larger impact if invested in renewables. You know, opportunity cost.
It is this graph:
https://imgur.com/a/WrLUrwK https://imgur.com/a/WrLUrwK
It scales from a single reactor to a grid. If you waste money on a reactor which could have vastly larger impact if invested in renewables then you will never catch up to the emissions that could ahve been avoided.
You framing the question as stupid is because it hits too close to home. You truly are afraid of renewables and storage. Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry? Is that the issue?
Again. Who cares if we include an emergency reserve of fossil gas? Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough, especially not when we need to consider cumulative emissions.
Do you even grasp the concept of cumulative emissions?
No, they don't compete for the same slice of the market, that's silly
Nuclear is more flexible than coal and on par with some gas plants. BWR's are even faster. Your second link about french modulation proves that. Or you can check directly on RTE website
EDF is crying because ren get CFD's and curtailment payments while EDF does not.
The paper you posted is so funny. The author is also the chief editor of the journal the paper was published. He is also one of the founders of DK antinuclear movement which resulted in DK becoming one of the largest coal consumers at that time. His previous paper was subject to correction due to favorably "omitted details". His current paper still assumes for some reason dirt cheap hydrogen firming for renewables. Shall we check the cost of pure H2 firming per Lazard?
Not only DK has worse emissions than France - it also managed to piss off Norway and Sweden
https://montelnews.com/news/0138d712-3afd-4590-883e-4b9221fd776a/norways-ruling-party-rejects-renewal-of-denmark-cables https://montelnews.com/news/0138d712-3afd-4590-883e-4b9221fd...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-pauses-plans-new-power-cable-denmark-2026-05-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-pauses-plans-...
And what happens to a nuclear plant that is essentially only fixed costs when their capacity factor craters due to renewable competition?
Followed by attacking the author rather than the context, followed by a "what about".
You truly lost the plot here. You do realize that right?
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
It happens the same as with any other project, even renewables.
It's not an attack on the author. What I've written can be easily verified. The author IS the chief editor of the journal the paper was published in. The author is one of the founding members of DK antinuclear movement. His previous paper was subject to correction due to details that were omitted which skewed the final results. The paper does assume dirt cheap H2 firming which is not bounded to reality in any sense whatsoever. Nuclear ban in DK DID led to it becoming one of the largest coal consumers at that time.
You don't need to ask this stupid question at each post. It'll not change the simple fact that DK and DE have far worse emissions than France and Sweden. It'll not change the fact Germany plans gas expansion for firming renewables.
Maybe I should ask you the question why are you so afraid of nuclear combined with renewables when history proved this pathway gives the best results? I can't think of anything more than blind hate
You mean like this Australian coal plant forced to become a peaker or be decomissioned?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant-in-extraordinary-survival-experiment/104461504 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Yes. That is the issue. How do you suggest the nuclear plants will survive in such an environment when they are already today, early in the renewable disruption, facing headwinds?
Then more just attacking the author. Then trying to discredit this paper by an old one, and you clearly haven't read the criticism.
The criticism said:
1. Assuming new built nuclear power is cheap and fast to build then you are wrong!!!!
But you never read further than the headline did you?
Then you go on to mindless complaining. Yes, it would have been amazing if Denmark and Germany built nuclear power half a century ago and decarbonized their grids.
But we live in 2026 and there's no point crying over spilled milk.
> nuclear combined with renewables when history proved this pathway gives the best results?
Which is revionist history. As shown by the French nuclear plants struggling to cope with an increasingly renewable grid. Same with the Swedish ones where 4 reactors has shut down due to market conditions in recent years. They were hemorrhaging money.
You are looking at an incredibly short period of time where half a century old paid off plants are still around and renewables haven't completely disrupted the French grid yet.
Please do explain how you would fit a nuclear plant into this grid mix:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
That is where all grids globally are headed in less than 10 years time. Before a single nuclear projected started today is completed.
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage? Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry?
> In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
The website does not open for me. Are the quoted prices consumer prices including tax or wholesale prices before tax?
If it’s the latter, 8 cents is not that cheap and comparable to the average price per kWh (all sources) in Germany. In most cases in most places, the lion’s share of electricity costs is tax and infrastructure refinancing, not actual production. Levellized cost of PV+storage is well below new nuclear virtually in every deployment scenario.
> For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
Because NG is one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity, if you are not producing NG yourself locally AND don’t have to pay for environmental costs.
Germany spends 10x more than france on transmission precisely because of ren expansion. Curtailment payments are much higher too. So you are right that taxes are different - depending on your pathway, you have no choice. Germany has highest household prices in EU after ireland despite 18bn/y in EEG subsidies to lower them.
That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt.
Nuclear is cheap to operate. It's expensive to build and expensive to decommission. Any analysis that doesn't include those two costs is highly misleading.
> That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt.
Ontario Hydro did not go bankrupt.
It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).
Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.
The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.
decomission is cheap too. All german plants are decom with operator money except soviet/experimental units.
There are price breakdowns if you wish for opex https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
> You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.
....and then nuclear winter ends, generations after generations despise everything about nuclear. later they forget about it, more generations, more generations and meanwhile the stuff is still there and still dangerous.
> Not "who". "What". And the answer is "the data". The data say that.
Why don't you link to "the data" then?
> And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year,
I just gave you a source which proves my statement and shows that yours is a lie. Just like everything else you added to it.
> And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels.
Weird how they can't but already do. Must be some kind of magic eh?
> Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
Nope. This is a lie also :)
Nuclear clogs up transmission ways when it's not necessary. This is a fact and happens today.
> Here's the Finnish environment minister:
Why not add the French environment minister also? You can add as many ministers as you want, the world doesn't care. The money goes into renewables and they're the future.
Here is the source again: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Good grief.
Your source shows exactly that what I said is the truth, and that you are lying.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
The highest number for nuclear electricity production are 2024 and 2025, with 2025 being slightly higher than 2024.
1965 25.539724
1966 34.43329
1967 41.006016
1968 52.113163
1969 61.783413
1970 78.87466
1971 109.70418
1972 152.17516
1973 203.90158
1974 266.6001
1975 369.8482
1976 432.67142
1977 538.5478
1978 625.7944
1979 650.8599
1980 711.9242
1981 840.75073
1982 912.17755
1983 1033.8127
1984 1254.5685
1985 1488.9216
1986 1594.7357
1987 1734.7332
1988 1891.2493
1989 1945.0106
1990 2000.596
1991 2096.3098
1992 2112.223
1993 2184.9646
1994 2225.9788
1995 2322.5298
1996 2406.615
1997 2390.0642
1998 2431.1948
1999 2523.7056
2000 2540.46
2001 2613.17
2002 2654.78
2003 2601.05
2004 2719.41
2005 2726.97
2006 2761.59
2007 2703.49
2008 2694.72
2009 2656.76
2010 2725.91
2011 2610.34
2012 2432.22
2013 2448.52
2014 2498.73
2015 2532.93
2016 2571.05
2017 2594.23
2018 2658.7
2019 2754.08
2020 2648.33
2021 2762.44
2022 2639.64
2023 2697.74
2024 2777.11
2025 2811.57
Well presumably you are not aware that you are spreading falsehoods, so it's not technically a lie. Though it's so egregious that it might just be.
> Nuclear clogs up transmission ways when it's not necessary.
Haven't heard that joke in a long time. Good one!
> The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
It's weird for somebody who says they want nuclear power to bring this up - have you been playing too much Fallout ?
The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport and heating, which not only are being electrified already, they're also places where electrification is a net energy win, so that diesel or natural gas power translates into less than half as much electricity for the same results.
For heat it just comes down to heat pumps, since we don't actually want to make more heat we can instead move the heat that already exists and avoid that high price, easy with electricity, impractical otherwise.
But for transport it's even more fundamental, efficient fossil fuel power is about scale and regularity, but for transport you want tiny engines and bursty usage. A transition shrinks the overall energy budget while improving the outcomes, that's why this is such an obvious economic step.
> Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
The vast majority of UK consumers do not have a wholesale tracked price for electricity, so in fact that lower immediate wholesale price is just profits for the retail electricity companies.
Long term price trends matter more, but notice the CfD strike price for the new nuclear power station in the UK was a lot higher (IIRC) £92.50. If, of course, that station ever supplies actual power. So whether the headline price is £60 or £600, the price actually paid was £92.50 and somehow or another that's what you're paying for that electricity even if you were told it was £60.
£92.50 isn't bad for a novel technology. If you were going to deploy it next year and in five years you'd be bidding £80 or less for another new plant I'd have enthusiasm for this concept. But in fact you're going to come back in five years, still without a finished plant but now pitching for £110 per MWh instead of £92.50 -- we have seen this story before.
I've never played fallout, and this isn't a game for me. I do have an electrical engineering degree, have read dozens of textbooks on (renewable) power generation, thermodynamics and manufacturing, and have spent significant time helping a research group with simulations of solar hybridised biomass gasification (mostly for Fischer Tropsch biofuels). The scale of electrification is huge, make no mistake, and we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.
> The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport ..
A large fraction of transport is not amenable to electrification in this manner; however transport is the low hanging fruit and I support the rapid electrification of transport where possible. Unlike batteries for cars, generation of biofuels/hydrogen for airplanes/ships/heavy trucks will not be significantly more efficient than fossil fuels - it likely will consume more energy, not less. The fossil fuel technologies are already very efficient (50%+) and renewable alternatives are very inefficient. It is possible to electrify/solarise these processes in the long term, but also complicated and capital intensive. I have worked on technoeconomic simulations of such processes, where I learned first-hand from expert researchers in this field (though I am not a chemical engineer).
> .. and heating. For heat it just comes down to heat pumps
This is not true at all, and you've likely misunderstood what heating means in energy breakdowns.
Heat pumps are most suitable for low temperature heat - municipal heating, (industrial) cooking, etc. Things which are already largely electrified in developed countries. But low temperature heat is widely available as a downstream by-product of higher temperature processes (including power generation as in CHP), and it is there a low priority in the scheme of things.
Heat pumps are not feasible (nor are they even theoretically very efficient) for high temperature industrial processes, of which there are a great many (concrete, bricks, metal processing, plastics and other chemical processing, etc). Many of these processes are already practically 100% efficient, so electrification will use at least the same amount of energy. A factory may use for example a steam turbine with a mere 5% electrical efficiency - the high temp steam is used to heat a chemical reactor, and the small electrical output is used for pumps, etc.
Finally, the direct combustion of fuels, (often bundled under 'heating' in stats), also includes the use of fossil fuels as a chemical reagent, primarily carbothermal reduction of metals (plus many petrochemical processing reactions). This usage is highly efficient, and cannot be replaced with electricity directly. Alternative processes will likely consume more energy not less - there will be additional intermediate processes, separations, and so on, likely requiring melting/dissolving/reacting the materials at high temperatures.
> we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.
No. Things change. To understand how stupid this model of the world is you need some historical perspective
In the UK for Q4 2000, twenty five year ago, there was 33.95TWh of electricity produced from coal power, Q4 2025 that was zero. All gone. In Q4 2000 wind and solar is making 0.25TWh, in Q4 2025 that was 30.72 TWh
So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special". So lets look at another historical example to which I happen to have a connection.
In 1954, the SS Shieldhall was built for Glasgow, her main job was to take (treated) sewage and dump it into the ocean although she'd also have transported passengers (usually at low cost) because hey, why not. Shieldhall is a triple expansion oil fired steam ship, at the time she was a reasonable though slightly dated, design. Some of the aspects of her that make her desirable as a working museum piece today were deliberate (like I said passengers weren't her primary purpose but the buyers knew they existed) because they look cool, but a ship optimized for purpose in 1954 wouldn't have been that different, we don't have any because the restoration team could only afford one and this one is cool.
In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic and if not for a preservation trust which operates her today she'd have been scrapped and I wouldn't have mentioned her, but that's not fifty years it's just thirty and yet the entire notion of steamships went from "Obviously" to "This belongs in a museum" in that time.
At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified because it just makes too much economic sense. What counts as "short" will gradually creep up, there are several electric ferries doing 30-40 minute hops today, it would be silly to imagine nobody is offering say a Channel crossing with batteries by 2050.
So then the question only comes up for the freighters. The crude carriers won't exist, if we're not digging up fossil fuels in order to burn them then they cease to be attractive for other purposes too, but both bulk carriers (e.g. moving cereals or ore) and container ships still make sense. The "luxury" cruise market also ceases to make sense though. For those bulk carriers with perishables aboard and for jet liners you would need synthetic fuel which will be expensive, but for everything else get used to going a lot slower to avoid needing fuel.
> Used-fuel storage is no different.
I see quite a difference compared to the bridge example. The bridge provides a utility until it‘s EOL and replacing it, again, provides value for the generations paying for it, since they get to use it.
The spent fuel does not have a utility. In 200 years, it’s a burden left behind by a long-forgotten generation.
You can argue (or rather gamble) that those generations still rely on nuclear energy and still have an ongoing need for such facilities, but even then, a substantial portion of the facilities will be filled with something that the operating generations never received any utility from.
You've not addressed a single one of my arguments, only replied to my conclusion, and doubled down on the arrogance despite being apparently less educated on this topic than me.
> But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special".
You haven't even considered, much less pre-empted, any of my arguments. Energy consumption is special - as it is required by thermodynamics for manipulation of the material world. It's clear that most of it will come from the sun eventually - but as I've pointed out there's reasons to expect this to take a very long time.
> So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared, and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
Coal didn't disappear at all in that time frame - usage increased, significantly! But you only use the finished products now and don't see the cooling towers. UK economy is a rounding-error and not a meaningful model of the global energy economy, because wealthy countries like UK 'import' a huge fraction of their energy consumption. The energy required for their building materials, cars, machinery, consumer goods, etc still needs to be consumed somewhere - but it will never show up in local energy statistics. This represents the bulk of the hardest to electrify energy consumption. When you see a graph of fossil fuel usage increasing in India, China, Germany - do you not realise that is your personal usage too?
You first celebrate the fact that energy prices in UK have spiked (because lower profits for retailers, who recover their losses from whom ??), and now that UK has to import rather than produce steel (because it looks greener on paper ??).
> At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified .. So then the question only comes up for the freighters
Ah yes, it 'only' comes up for the most difficult and energy intensive types of transport. You ignore air travel too.
Bulk carriers and freighters will continue to exist for structural reasons, and their usage will increase: manufacturing has natural network effects - it makes sense to geographically concentrate it (there is less duplication of expensive capital investment), more food will be transported as population booms in regions with less arable land, and biofuels/clean carbon sources will be transported just like crude because production will naturally be concentrated in regions with more arable land and sunlight.
Air transport will continue to exist because people want to travel, and it is the fastest way to deliver many types of goods.
> In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic
30 years at current rates is catastrophic damage to the planet, I don't understand why you want this. Also wiki says this ship was 'obsolete at time of construction', essentially built to be a historical novelty, and that it was laid down around the same time that the UK's first nuclear reactor connected to the grid.
> You've not addressed a single one of my arguments
I can't really make out any coherent argument. You seem to believe in a very strange nuclear powered fairytale world, which most resembles the video game series Fallout but you say you haven't played it, OK.
You demand that we should care only about the global picture, where the data is fuzziest, and only about the total energy system, all so far as I can tell in order to swell the focus on... coal, which is obsolete - that for some reason you both recognise can't be used because we'd destroy the climate and yet you believe we'll keep using it anyway because somehow the present is the future and don't accept that things change? I'm sure you think you're making sense.
It took me longer than perhaps it should have to see why you singled out Germany which in most ways is on a typical curve for a wealthy industrialized country. I realised it's the disappearing nuclear plants that make you angry. But they didn't matter, which I expect makes you even angrier. Germany's efficiency savings over that 25 year period were much larger than its total nuke energy buduget, what made the big difference was renewables again, just like in the UK.
> I don't understand why you want this
It doesn't matter whether I want things, it matters that your "argument" consists of believing that nothing changes = over a fifty year timespan no less - and I was illustrating that's entirely wrong.
India, China, Germany are just examples of countries who burn fossil fuels to provide for your standard of living.
I explained, in some detail, why a) I expect decarbonisation to take a long time, on the order of 50+ years b) why the UK cannot be extrapolated to global economy c) Why it's not even true that UK residents themselves use less fossil fuels for energy than they did 20 years ago.
Instead of engaging, you try to read between the lines and psychoanalyse me while throwing juvenile insults. It's pointless, hostile, disrespectful, and frankly it says a lot more about the state of your mind than it does mine.
You claim coal is obsolete in 2026, the highest coal consumption year on record, in direct contradiction of the panels of global energy experts who have time and again agreed that these usages are 'hard to abate' (i.e unlikely to become obsolete soon). China expects to be using enormous quantities of coal (and gas) industrially in 2060 - their net zero plan hinges on capturing and offsetting the carbon released. What do you know that legions of global experts don't?
I'm all for decarbonisation, and I've likely dedicated far more of my time, effort, and money to that cause than you have. I think a healthy amount of nuclear in the mix (on the order of 25%) will bring us to net zero sooner, mitigate the enormous damage done to our planet, and help hedge our bets against future developments (as you point out, we can't really be sure how the economy will change).
Like I said, Germany is an example of the thing you say isn't happening.
In 2000 Germany uses about 14 exajoules of energy, somewhat less than 2EJ are nuclear electricity and the rest is almost entirely fossil fuels But in 2025 the 2EJ of nukes are gone, there are 2EJ of renewables and the total is now only 10.5EJ. So both the absolute amount and the proportion of fossil fuels fell in this period in which you believe the UK offshored some of its fossil fuel consumption to Germany.
This is a game of musical chairs and for maybe the next decade or two you'll be able to make increasingly contorted arguments that somehow the same problem was just moved, but it's already looking flimsy because of just how fast solar deployments are.
"Carbon capture" has been a pipe dream for decades at this point. If you don't have a plan B you don't have a plan.
I'm pro-renewables, and I've worked, studied extensively, and invested in that field. There remain significant hard-to-abate uses (fact) which I believe (opinion) will slow down decarbonisation to a 50+ year timeline - this in line with the views of many experts.
> Germany is an example of the thing you say isn't happening.
I was wrong to include Germany in that list, it was an editing mistake hence why I didn't pick up on your reply. I can see that derailed the conversation. I only meant to list countries which were unlikely to decarbonise as quickly as UK due to a larger share of hard-to-abate uses (which UK residents still depend on), separately I was listing countries with increasing fossil fuels and I merged the sentences carelessly.
I chose Germany because I was looking at lists of exporters of steel and cars to the UK, not nuclear energy stats. As you point out fossil fuels have fallen slightly as a share there, not grown. I didn't say though that Germany isn't rapidly scaling renewables, you've just assumed I'm some kind of anti-renewable luddite. The fact remains you likely drive a car made with fossil fuels in Germany (I do).
You cite the 30% reduction in German primary energy consumption in 25 years as evidence against my prediction of decarbonisation taking 50+ years. In the same period, emissions have fallen closer to 40%. I doubt that the remaining 60% will happen in the next 25 years
* Germany did outsource hard-to-abate energy uses in this time frame (energy intensive industry production indices fell ~30%, 15% since the war, UK closer to 40% - both countries now manufacturer higher up the value chain, and import more high embodied carbon commodities)
* They did not decarbonise the remaining hard-to-abate uses in proportion to the 30% reduction you cite (cement is a possible exception). Closer to 10-20% max across a range of industries
* The biggest change coming in the next 10-15 years is the electrification of transport, which could reduce emissions by another 20+%, the so called 'easy-to-abate' uses.
* Hard-to-abate uses remain hard-to-abate - cement emissions decreased 30% in 25 years, it will be even more difficult to achieve the next 30%, let alone 70%.
A fall in the share of fossil fuels from 84% to 77% during a rapid 30% decline in heavy industry is broadly in line with my slow decarbonisation prediction - heavy industry is harder to abate than other uses, if you export it you can electrify faster.
Does 2EJ/year not matter to you or not? When it is energy savings or renewables, you say it is significant. When it is the reduction in nuclear power you say it is negligible. The proportional fall in fossil fuels in Germany you celebrate is 84-77 = 7% of the mix. (1/0.93 - 1) * 10.5 = 0.8EJ.
> maybe the next decade or two
I'm just predicting it will take closer to 50 years, not that it won't happen. In two decades you can just check global emissions - if they're down by less than say 2/3 I'll be right, there won't be any need to argue. If they're down 80 or 90% I'll be wrong.
> "Carbon capture" has been a pipe dream for decades at this point. If you don't have a plan B you don't have a plan.
China's 35 year decarbonisation timeline assumes CCS for approx 5-15% of today's emissions, up to 5x the UK's current emissions. Are they wrong about 35 years (too high?) or wrong about CCS (too low?) or both? They also expect 10-20 EJ/year nuclear. Are they wrong about nuclear too?