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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 aft
by jltsiren 4mo ago
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.
- 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+.
- coryrc 4mo agoIn 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.
- tfourb 4mo agoGermany 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.
- coryrc 4mo ago> 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?
- spikels 4mo agoThe 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.
- pepperoni_pizza 4mo agoCan you share where those numbers are from? I'd like to run a similar calculation on my own country. Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).
- laurencerowe 4mo agoSolar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage. Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly. The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.
- Danox 4mo agoI 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.
- jltsiren 4mo agoOne 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.
- lenerdenator 4mo ago> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days. Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
- onraglanroad 4mo agoEuropean car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind. People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
- lenerdenator 4mo agoI mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it. I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
- onraglanroad 4mo agoThat's a fair point. It's a difficult sell to say you have to pay more to help out your fellow citizens, in most countries.
- willsmith72 4mo ago"we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" isn't this proven to be true? better for the country, worse for a small amount of directly affected people?
- ponector 4mo agoThere is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.
- triceratops 4mo agoHow much per kW?
- tfourb 4mo agoChina 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".
- Danox 4mo agoThe 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.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoIndeed 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.
- budsniffer952 4mo agoYou 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.
- Recurecur 4mo agoIndeed. Good to hear you’re a Trump supporter!
- crote 4mo ago> 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.
- subscribed 4mo agoConsidering 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.
- ViewTrick1002 4mo agoMeaning 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...
- leonidasrup 4mo agoThe 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...
- chickenbig 4mo ago> 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 .
- laurencerowe 4mo agoAll of the EPR builds in Finland/France/UK have seen enormous construction cost (3-4x) and time (decade+) overruns. France expects its EPR2 builds to cost about 30% less but even if they manage to hit that target it will still be extremely expensive.
- chickenbig 4mo agoIndeed, it might be said that they underestimated the cost and timescales to get the project off the ground. But this is generally the case with mega-projects. Guess we shall see how the construction of Sizewell C goes.
- mastermage 4mo agoIsn't Sizewell c already delayed?
- chickenbig 4mo ago> Isn't Sizewell c already delayed? Citation needed. Delayed since FiD? Or since the project was originally announced? To me the latter is rather an unfair given planning permission issues and government changes.
- Tade0 4mo agoHopefully not how the yet unfinished Hinkley Point C is going.
- Moldoteck 4mo ago
- Moldoteck 4mo agoIronically 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...