9 ms·

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 t

• Gud 4mo ago
  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.
  • tokioyoyo 4mo ago
    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.
    • Gud 4mo ago
      So 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 ago
    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.
    • Gud 4mo ago
      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…
    • palata 4mo ago
      > 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.
    • Moldoteck 3mo ago
      weapons are unrelated to plants. Weapons are more about enrichment.
  • tialaramex 4mo ago
    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.
    • Shitty-kitty 4mo ago
      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.
    • Gud 3mo ago
      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...
      • ViewTrick1002 3mo ago
        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.
  • Scroll_Swe 4mo ago
    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...
  • esarbe 4mo ago
    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.
    • Moldoteck 3mo ago
      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
• rayiner 4mo ago
  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.
  • pydry 4mo ago
    >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.
    • TimorousBestie 4mo ago
      > 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.
      • pydry 4mo ago
        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.
• UltraSane 4mo ago
  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.
  • esarbe 4mo ago
    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...
    • palata 4mo ago
      > 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".
    • coryrc 4mo ago
      "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.
      • UltraSane 4mo ago
        Thankfully the US has now removed the linear no threshold model and the As Low As Reasonably Achievable radioactive emissions goal which were irrational and made nuclear much more expensive than it should be.
• wat10000 4mo ago
  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.
• palata 4mo ago
  > 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.
• Moldoteck 3mo ago
  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