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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.
by bilekas 4mo ago
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.
- Gud 4mo agoSwitzerland is not in the EU.
- lopis 4mo agoWhile it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.
- yulker 4mo agoJust the opposite. It's literally not in the EU. It's literally in Europe but not in the EU.
- BurningFrog 4mo agoOP was making a geometric observation.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoBy that light, the UK is still in the EU. I bet they would disagree though.
- yulker 4mo agoThe 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.
- jrflowers 4mo agoI like that you ignore that “in” means “inside” in one sentence and then use that exact meaning of the word in the following sentence
- yulker 4mo agoThe term EU describes a membership, it doesn't describe a geographic area. Being in a membership means something different than being in a geographic area. So the term "in" does not have the same meaning across the two contexts.
- p1mrx 4mo agoYou 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.
- jojomodding 4mo agoAh, that's what they're building the power plants for. Blasting things into space.
- selimthegrim 4mo agoMaybe Tim Curry should move there.
- bilekas 4mo agoIt'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.
- ahtihn 4mo agoSwitzerland is not part of the European economic area, aka EEA.
- fundatus 4mo agoIt formally isn't but for (almost) all intents and purposes it is.
- bilekas 4mo agoYou're correct to point it out. Officially not. But basically yes. We have a free trade and they're part of our Schengen area, so for all intents and purposes there's almost no barriers to trade. I should have been more clear.
- esarbe 4mo agoIt'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...
- Gud 4mo agoEvery 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.
- tokioyoyo 4mo agoProcess 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.
- Gud 4mo agoSo let’s learn from that lesson and rebuild nuclear power in Europe? Let’s hope Switzerland takes the lead here, Sweden are already building. The political will is there. Let’s do it?
- adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago1. 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.
- jltsiren 4mo agoPolitical 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.
- UltraSane 4mo agoChina and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
- pydry 4mo agoChina 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.
- UltraSane 4mo agosolar 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.
- pydry 4mo agoThis 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+.
- thomasmg 4mo agoSolar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.
- sharpneli 4mo agoHydro 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?
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoSolar 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.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> 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.
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoThat overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built.
- 4mo ago
- TheCondor 4mo agoDid 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.
- remarkEon 4mo agoYes. 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”.
- geden 4mo agoWhat is the solution? Where are the free nuclear plants? Sizewell C = £40 billion That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.
- subscribed 4mo agoYou'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.
- bjourne 4mo agoAh, 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.
- dev_l1x_be 4mo agoAny country that does not use nuclear using less energy dense alternatives. Compressing controllable energy production should be considered one of our top priorities.
- legitster 4mo ago> 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Danox 4mo agoSwitzerland 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...
- cm2187 4mo agoI 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.
- Danox 4mo agoIt 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...
- cm2187 4mo agoThere are some european success stories in high speed rail too (France). China doesn’t let itself entangled in planning restrictions. US and European countries love over regulation and litigations. That’s a choice, and it comes with a steep cost.
- crote 4mo ago> 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?
- cm2187 4mo agoVS 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.
- moogly 4mo ago> 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.
- otterley 4mo agoThese are not opposites. Both can be true.
- moogly 4mo agoYes but I would say one trumps the other.
- throw0101c 4mo ago> 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.
- moogly 4mo agoIt's not 2004 anymore.
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoThe 5 years of construction is the fast part. How many years of planning and permits did it take before they broke ground?
- 4mo ago
- pocksuppet 4mo agoDo you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?
- qwe----3 4mo agoDo you trust today's politicians with tall buildings, or bridges, or chemical plants, or guns, or fighter gets, or ammunition production?
- crote 4mo agoNo? 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?
- mjmas 4mo agoNo, but they aren't the ones designing them. Politicians normally aren't engineers.
- pocksuppet 4mo agoDo 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?
- Moldoteck 4mo agothey dont hire engineers either. Those are hired by companies that design/build reactors. How many died from Chernobyl bombing in Ukraine?
- latentsea 4mo agoI'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.
- intellectronica 4mo agoSwitzerland is not in the EU.
- prettygood 4mo agoSetting a standard in Europe? What’s France doing then?
- pbgcp2026 4mo ago"The technology is so unbelievably safe". Absolutely! Chernobyl and Fukushima are post card holiday resort destinations ...
- creatonez 4mo agoThere's nothing to fear about these locations unless you are heavily disturbing the soil
- gizajob 4mo agoAlso not in the EU.