The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.
China which is fairly sensible on this stuff and which plans to be world's largest nuclear producer by 2035 actually added 1GW of nuclear and ~300GW of solar last year because it's cheaper.
I'll give you maintaining existing nuclear makes sense. But as a British tax payer the cost of our upcoming Hinkley C is eye watering (£48bn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...)
I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens.
On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.
All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.
Don't talk about Americans that way!
Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.
- https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...
> Nuclear waste is small and solid
As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.
> You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.
Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore. In the ideal case we invent better reactors where you recycle all radioactive parts as usable fuel and the output is truly 'spent'.
I don't disagree with you that the pros of nuclear (as opposed to fossil) outweigh the cons. But there are cons, and eventually we'd be better off harvesting our energy from the sun.
> Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore.
Things obviously need to be weighed against each other. Burying it in a mountain does make it safe to store indefinitely, but obviously not easily accessible. It can be dug out again, however, if it becomes useful again. It's going to be more expensive, but you pay for the safety.
> As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.
One of the articles I linked makes the argument that Fukushima is not as tragic as people think.
Quote:
> But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.
That would depend on the category of the waste:
- High level waste - Transuranic waste - Low level waste
where high level waste comes in two classes: spent fuel and reprocessing waste, the latter being liquid (possibly not green).
https://ieer.org/resource/classroom/classifications-nuclear-...
You can just bury it deep in a mountain
Belgium is notably lacking in mountains, which is why they now start building a site for low level nuclear waste storage, adding to the cost. For high level nuclear waste they have to build deep underground, waterproof, bomb-proof facilities at high expense:
As for the article by Shellenberger you linked, please note that he is a right winger criticising wokeism etc, who claims eternal growth can continue like until now without ecoogical impact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger
Edit: I just found out that Shellenberger now works on finding the Aliens:
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth", Shellenberger claimed sources have told him that intelligence communities "are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information" about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)
Same wiki.
Ad hominem. Criticize the argument. Your opinion about Shellenberger or even his other opinions are irrelevant.
I don't particularly like him, but that does not mean all his points are invalid.
As for the validity of his statements, please read his Congressional Testimonies in said wiki and see if that changes your mind.
More of a political problem, from what I hear. This is, if anything, worse: simply not knowing is a research problem, but knowing how to do it and yet having an influential group saying "no because reasons" could be genuinely insurmountable.
So imo not really a political problem.
It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!
During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response:
> Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.
So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour.
[1] https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-lea...
Vs. coal?
Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.)
-----
Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here:
> Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.
Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?
Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh.
Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't updated for 6 years:
Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with new ones? Possibly, since the existing power generation is clean so there is less rush.
Does spending the effort on building new nuclear outweigh the opportunity costs for others? Given new nuclear plants in Europe are taking 20 years to build I have strong doubts. It seems absolutely clear that wind/solar + batteries can get most countries to 80-90% clean energy faster and at lower cost. And after that happens nuclear seems a very awkward addition to the mix since it is not cost effective to run when it’s power is only needed 10-20% of the time.
Yes.
(I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)
We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
It is happening, all over the world, with a persistent and rapid growth curve.
> We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
Better cut those tariffs on cheap Chinese batteries (and aluminium for the transmission).
Not that anyone would build one in the current political reality, but China produces enough aluminium that it would be viable to make a genuinely planet-spanning 1Ω power grid connecting your midwinter nights to someone else's midsummer days.
Chernobyl was supposed to turn low enrichment uranium into plutonium for Soviet bombs. They made design choices that compromised safety to make plutonium production more efficient.
But submarine/ship reactors are tiny compared with commercial reactors and 5+ times more expensive (although its hard to break out the true lifetime cost of the reactor from the submarine/ship).
Even modern commercial SMR designs (a few by companies that make Submarine reactors) are likely to cost a couple of times more per MW than large existing reactors
BTW - The US Navy has lost 2 nuclear submarines, which are still being periodically monitored - page 7 https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/NT-25-1%2...
It’s a very semantic claim.
They have lost nuclear submarines (USS Thresher), lost nuclear missiles, depth charges, torpedos and bombs. They have crashed nuclear ships and submarines.
Yeah, they haven’t had a nuclear reactor leak (that we know of).
Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development.
Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
If, it was to be from some kind of storage, Extra capacity would be needed to allow recharging of the storage
Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.
Obviously it’s possible for solar, hydro and wind farms to stop producing, but that’s what storage is for.
https://blackout-news.de/en/news/electricity-prices-in-germa...
> "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible." — "Nuclear Follies". Forbes Magazine. 1985.
Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
They also fund major parts of the establishment - just look at UK politics and House of Lords.
There are plenty that are anti nuclear and don’t get Russian funding.
I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infrequent and so we have very hard time estimating and thinking about probabilities of them happening.
Personally I think that keeping existing reactors running is better than the alternatives, but I'm not so sure about building up new reactors compared to building more predictable green energy sources.
"The health burden of European CPP emission-induced PM2.5, estimated with the Global Exposure Mortality Model, amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349938542_Disease_b...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...
But only nuclear accidents get the media attention, because they are big and infreqeunt. Similar to deaths caused by aircraft crashes vs deaths caused by car crashes.
There is a certain threshold for radiation exposure where if exceeded the animal isn't deemed safe for consumption anymore. The vast majority of these cases are from boars in certain areas of Germany nowadays and affect less than 1% of all killed boars [1] [2].
[1]: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fast-3000-verstrahlte-wildsch...
[2]: https://www.wildtierschutz-deutschland.de/_files/ugd/173a38_...
Meanwhile coal kills millions each year (mostly the old and children).
And what are these predictable green alternatives? Only hydro is reliable and is heavily restricted by geo. We’d need massive breakthroughs in battery technology to make solar and wind reliable in most of the world (by population).
Look up historical weather patterns days with no sun and no wind, you need massive, massive amounts of energy storage.
A country can go from well functioning to disasterous shit show in 8 years.
> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).
The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?
It does the oppose of this:
> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)
Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.
And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
Destroying a whole valley for hydro is something locals could easily oppose. Similar with huge solar farms. You can be a proponent of a technology but anti a particular project.
What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of the argument being forced into these positions, its artificial and contrary to the desires of people who want action on climate change who support nuclear and don't.
Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or supporting a combination of renewables and fossil fueled power plants (which sometimes goes under the name of reserve energy and other times as thermal power plants). Usually it is combined with some future hope that green hydrogen will replace that natural gas at some time in the distant future.
We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Opposition to the fossil fuel industry should be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants, and a plan to phase out and decommission existing ones. It is difficult to respect people who claim to believing in a climate crisis but then stand there with a shovel when the next gas peaker plant is being built, then arguing how bad nuclear is to combat the climate crisis.
But we now have two lessons that teach us that being anti-nuclear was stupid: the Ukraine war and the current US administration's adventure in the Gulf.
Did those plants suddenly became manageable? No.
Did those plants suddenly became cheap? No.
Do we suddenly have a solution for the waste? No.
Have new uranium deposits suddenly been discovered? No.
They are only expensive because externalities of other solutions are not captures or are subsidised. Wind and solar are expensive if battery storage is included in most of the world.
Waste is mostly a solved problem. Much more solved that waste management for coal plants in any case (whom also produce a lot of radioactive waste in addition to producing tons and tons of co2)
We have more than enough uranium. Currently only a small fraction is economically mineable but we have played that game before with oil.
Not at all. Some people are depopulationists.
E.g. China is too small to have an isolated closed market for a competitive and efficient semiconductors manufactoring
Leaders are looking at Japan and they are panicking. Fascists are demanding more white babies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement
"Before the 1980s, it was unclear whether the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases was stronger than the cooling effect of airborne particulates in air pollution."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
The original 1980 plan for the Energiewende "Energie-Wende: Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran" called for Germany to move towards "coal+gas" or "coal+solar" scenario. Only later were added any consideration for climate change, but the highest priority, the big evil, was nuclear technology.
Greenpeace has it's roots also in the opposition to underground nuclear weapon tests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace#Origins
The book _The Power of Nuclear_ by Marco Visscher does a good job tracing the history from the shock of the nuclear bomb in 1945 to the enthusiasm of the 1950s and the increasing scepticism of the 1970s and 1980s.
Financing green movements, working with governments, especially Germany (Gerhard Schröder now holds good positions in Russian energy companies, Angela Merkel had good relationship with Putin). Puting worked in Germany as KGB agent before his ascension.
"Wandel durch Handel (WdH, German for "Change through trade"), also known as Wandel durch Annäherung, is a political and economic notion, mostly associated with German foreign policy, of increasing trade with authoritarian regimes in an effort to induce political change. Although most strongly associated with Germany, similar policies have been pursued by several Western countries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel
For example, West Germany has helped with building Soviet gas network.
https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-R...
All subsequent goverments of Kohl, Schröder, Merkel supported expansion of gas imports from Russia. It was cheap and reliable even during Cold war.
And little bit of money from Gazprom to politicians always helped.
https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-l...
It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires.
Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river right next to the house fire we are fighting?
So this myth is what you need to tell yourself we need nuclear?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE
It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW
80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors.
It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of... "Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases"
They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed.
It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain.
The authors are editors of the journal this was published in.
Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot.
This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.
Like I said. The costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C.
Imaginary cheap and fast to build nuclear power is amazing. It also does not exist. In South Korea those costs are from before the corruption scandal.
In China they are barely building nuclear power. It peaked at 4.7% of their grid mix in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. For every plan they release the nuclear portion shrinks and is pushed further into the future.
Then I just see you trying to handwave the study away. The entire point is literally to prove that Denmark does not need to rely on its neighbors, and still get a cheaper result.
And like I said. Denmark is the hard case due to the winter sun being awful. As soon as you go south in latitude the problem becomes vastly easier. We’re talking like 99% of the worlds population having more sunlight than Denmark.
I wonder how many people actually believe that we are in good shape so mankind should have no development whatsoever. Just stay as is or even go back decades just to preserve the environment. The first world need more energy because we're greedy and etc.
Yes hello, these are both my opinions, do I exist for you or not ;)? You can say that we are in a climate crisis AND be anti-nuclear.
I think people who are anti-nuclear and environmentalist are wrong, but it's not an insane opinion to have. There's no fact you can point to that says nuclear is safer than renewables. I just don't see how the world is realistically going to switch to renewables. We've already seen oil companies use those as distractions from nuclear.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production we have.
By far.
And that includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.
People overestimate the danger from nuclear energy by incredible amounts.
That doesn't mean that close exposure to a running nuclear reactor won't kill you in short order. That's why we build these things with shielding. A lot of other things will kill you in short order if exposed to them: cars/trains in motion, for example.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...
Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.
Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power station named "Bankside". They burned tonnes of oil right in the heart of London until the 1980s to make electricity. People weren't happy about it, but they designed, built, and operated the station because although any fool can see there's toxic smoke pouring out of it into your city, electricity is pretty useful.
In practice nuclear power stations get built somewhere with abundant cheap water, far from population centres yet easily connected to the grid. England has more places to put a Nuke than say, a Hydro dam, but they are not, as you've suggested, "geographically independent", unlike say solar PV which doesn't even stop you grazing animals on the land or parking vehicles or whatever else you might want to do.
"It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here"
Nuclear power is definitely more geographically independent than solar. There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe: https://www.altestore.com/pages/solar-insolation-map-for-the...
The only thing a nuclear plant - any thermal plant for that matter - requires is cooling. But that doesn't need to be freshwater. It can be seawater or waste-water, like the Palo Verde plant.
That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.
That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.
> That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.
Compare:
If you believe COVID exists you need to use hydroxychloroquine.
It makes you sound like you don't even believe in the problem you are proposing an (unpopular with experts) solution for.
That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying.
What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.
> unpopular with experts
How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
Fundamentally, unless you know the Navy's answer and can apply it to override those lawsuits, it doesn't matter: politics can't be wished away just because the wrong people have power.
> The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.
Increasingly not; as with all things, you have to aim for where the ball will be rather than where it is, and for this topic that implies that for any given proposed new gas (or nuclear) plant you have to ask about the alternatives, which also include "how fast you we build energy storage, and what would it cost?"
Just leave that part out, it only detracts from your message.
"I think environmental orgs should support nuclear as it is low carbon and generally aligned with their goals. I'm disappointed that many of their members seem to be unaware of the true record on plant safety, particularly compared with coal"
Adding anything about them not believing in climate change makes it sound like you are repeating talking points you picked up from fossil fuel funded propagandists, who to this day are pushing that message.
(Your opinions on nuclear also reveal that media diet, but in a much more subtle way).
Pretending it's all the fault of the bad environmentalists is a bit ridiculous. A nuclear powerplant is a tricky thing to create. A lot of projects had delay, often not due to any environmentalists or anti-nuclear people, but because the parts failed their internal control, which demonstrates that it is tricky to build. A nuclear powerplant is a huge provider that cannot be turned online for usually ~10 years, so you can also understand the complexity and the uncertainty: we are not able to predict the price of electricity or what will the electricity grid will look like in 2-3 years, and yet they need to predict it for a given region in 10 years.
And some environmental laws are frivolous or turned out the be incorrect (the same way some people who at the time were against some environmental laws turned out to be incorrect years later), but some laws are just legitimate and it is simply not fair to pretend that the opinions of some people should just be discarded because you have a different opinion. I myself don't always agree with some law, sometimes anti-nuclear, sometimes pro-nuclear, but a given fraction of these laws will exist, it is just the reality. It's like saying "communism would work if it was not for people who don't like communism": people who don't like communism will always exist and if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic.
And yet, our world contains multiple cases where it is the case that nuclear is being built today, at reasonable costs, and with great success. The two examples I've given in this thread are China and the US Navy. Some others include Japan and South Korea, both of which are notably not dictatorships.
What's frustrating in this discussion is policy and management decisions made 50 years ago are assumed to be the steady-state immutable reality in western countries.
My argument is not that nuclear is the best economic play. It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.
It is simple: some environmental laws are a legitimate ask from some people, whether you or I agree with the ask itself. It has nothing to do with the nuclear, it is about your argument framing the existence of environmental laws as the reason it does not work. If nuclear cannot work well in some countries because in some countries there are people who ask legitimate things, the problem is not these people, the problem is that the nuclear model is not adapted to the reality of these countries.
But again, as I've said, it is not even the case: the difficulties with nuclear are not limited to "some environmentalist".
> It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.
That does not make sense. If you want to write a software that does something, you don't just spinning up Linux, Windows, Mac, and start writing code in Java, C++, python, typescript, erlang, ... at the same time. What you do is: you write a decision matrix, score it, and _choose one strategy_.
In the context of the climate crisis, the strategy can mix different technologies ... or not. The fact that it does not does not mean that this particular strategy is worse than another. In particular, budgets are obviously limited, so spending X$ on project A may lead to a successful project A while spending X/2$ on project A and X/2$ project B may lead to both projects A and B failing. (and if you don't think it's true, just increase the number N of projects until X/N$ is ridiculously too small to do anything. According to your sentence, you said you should be spinning up every options all at once as aggressively as you can, so you cannot do only N-1 projects, you need to split your money amongst the N projects).
When it comes to climate change, I was 100% pro-nuclear 20 years ago. Now, in some countries, it is too often a money pit (not because of regulation or the bad environmentalists) that is wasting money that could have helped the climate. If you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should spend your time, money and energy to real solutions instead of achieving nothing by trying to do everything all at once without a plan.
I truly can’t comprehend where this massive boner for new built nuclear power comes from. Sci-fi?
You’re putting the answer you want to hear (“because they are nuclear fans”) in the question, making it extremely obvious but then stating it is “odd”, as if the answer wasn’t straight forward.
Disingenuous – is the word describing this, I believe.
Also you need to check your concepts. “Climate change” is what we want to prevent (more like catastrophe, really, by now).
Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables, only makes sense in a few geographic locations. Not all, or even most!
Even keeping old reactors running gets super expensive as they get past their designed lifetimes, and very often doesn't make sense.
The engineering is indeed already done for electricity, and storage and renewables are cheap and getting cheaper. Nuclear is at best staying the same high cost, and getting more expensive is these large construction projects rise due to Baumol's cost disease.
Opposing more nuclear in the US in the 1980s wasn't fully irrational, the US managerial class have way overbuilt nuclear and we didn't need all the electricity. Then we didn't have much growth in
The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living, it's the anti-EV and anti-battery advocates, and to some degree it's retrofitting the wide variety of highly-cost-sensitive industries, such as steel or fertilizer or concrete, to use carbon neutral methods. Or maybe sustainable aviation fuel.
Nuclear had it's chance to be a big contributor to climate action back in the mid 2000s and 2010s, it failed that challenge in Georgia at Vogtle, in South Carolnia at Summer, in the UK at Hinkley Point C, in France in Flamanville, and in Finland an Olkiluoto. Every one of those failures is a very good reason for a climate activist to oppose nuclear.
All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle.
Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more.
If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon.
If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.
Sticking with well proven technologies, such as batteries and solar which are deployed at massive scale by profit oriented investors on the Texas grid, makes far more sense than wasting precious few dollars and approvals on pie-in-the-sky nuclear projects that never meet their promises and might not even finish construction.
Building nuclear is hard, risky, expensive, and slow, in the very best cases. It's a shitty technology unless you have zero renewable resources in your country.
I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.
This is not the cheaper option.
You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
This is a complete myth, somebody pulled "a week" out of their butt a decade ago, it gets repeated a ton, but it's not based on reality or studies or numbers. This is a consistent problem with online nuclear advocacy: there's no basis for the numbers, nobody calculates anything, and if they bother to do a calculation they only calculate the upper bound and then assert "see look a big number" and say that's a proof of impossibility.
What event requires a week of storage? Nobody can name one! When has there been a week with zero generation? No one can name it! The assumptions that one has to make up in order to make a "week" even sound plausible are in turn themselves so implausible.
> There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
Imagining there's a fixed battery capacity is a very short sighted view, it's growing by 10x every year.
So let's take your "week" as the measure, even though it's wrong. If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.
The 2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025 amounts to a bit under 3 days of California's average 750GWh daily electricity consumption, not 4 days. And more broadly, I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible.
To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs.
Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves.
Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
It was pointing out that the comment making off-the-wall requirements of battery storage was already not aware of the order of magnitude of existing batteries.
You don't know the exact
> To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs.
What's your implication here? If you are trying to say this means that batteries can never scale, it's certainly not making that point. Even the distinction between grid and EVs is immaterial, because where do EVs get their power? The grid. That's all flexible demand, that can be shifted a huge amount.
> Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves.
The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries.
Unlike oil, we are in the early days of discovery for battery materials, because we never looked for them before. Just recently fracking in the southeast quarter of the US turned out to be producing a fair amount of lithium, which nobody had bothered to even investigate before.
Batteries are a new technology, not an old technology like oil, and the dynamics are far different. One can't simply recycle reasoning that applies in oil without examining the first princiles.
> Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
"Even if" is a preposterous thing to say, of course it will!
EVs are higher value destination for grid batteries, so more batteries will go towards that right now. And as long as there might be "diversion" as you say, there is need for more production capacity, and production capacity will expand.
Such as? Is your proposal that we use lead acid batteries instead of lithium based batteries? Those have much shorter lifespans, which drives up cost. Sodium batteries? 9 GWh of sodium batteries were shipped in 2025.
To be blunt, you're just hand waving away the massive disparity in scale between battery production and the storage demands of a predominantly wind and solar grid.
We’re seeing the Cambrian explosion of battery technology. From early BEVs utilizing the highest performance to even deliver a viable product to a plethora of options depending on your use case.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/25/google-to-deploy-worl...
Wasting trillions of tax money and decades of opportunity cost on new built nuclear handouts is extremely shortsighted.
Of course, there's no guarantee that any of those fission ideas will actually pan out. Likewise with these battery chemistries. Investing loads of money into intermittent sources with just the hope that some future battery chemistry will solve storage at grid scale is not what I'd call a wise plan.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
Anybody who over the past few decades has been saying that we could not deploy batteries on a massive scale needs to reevaluate their bad assumptions, because they are wrong, and moreover we should not trust any of their current assessments until they can reconcile what they got wrong. The tech curves of batteries have been clear for decades, this tech development should not have been unexpected.
* The USA uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day
* The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day.
* Global battery production in 2025 was ~1,600 GWh, of which 300 GWh was used for grid storage [1].
At our present production rates, it'll take 100 years to provision 12 hours worth of storage at 300 GWh per year. Batter production is set to increase to 6.8 TWh per year [2], but only 12% of that is predicted to go to grid storage, or about 800 GWh per year. Even at 2035 rates, we're looking at 37 years of production to fill 12 hours of storage (12 hour of electricity storage for 2025 electricity demand rates, which will be higher in 2035).
Yes, batteries are being deployed at a massive scale today. But electricity generation is on an even more massive scale that dwarfs battery production rates.
1. https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/global-lithium-...
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...
Mmmhmm, grid scale deployment is not grid scale now? You are redefining terms, which means you don't work in the field and are not at all familiar with the field, yet you make broad and sweep proclamations of incredulity that have no factual backing, and we are supposed to trust you purely on judgement?
You cite last year's deployment rate, without noting a massive increase in planned deployments for this year. You neglect to cite the year before it, which was much smaller. You looking at a puck headed to the goal, under a continuous accelerant force, and saying, "the puck is here, therefore it will never hit the goal." That's a ridiculous thing to assert, because you don't hold that afactual standard for any other technology, just batteries, yet seem to understand that all other technologies have continually changing amounts of producition.
BTW, your link is "demand" and disagrees with most other sources.
> At our present production rates
That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.
If nuclear has 0 GW new this year, how do you think it could ever get to 2GW/year, right?
You have no reasons for these strange beliefs that defy data and trends, you just assert incredulity. It's completely irrational.
I'm not expecting readers to trust me purely on judgement, I'm expecting them to do the math and realize that battery storage deployment and electricity demand are multiple orders of magnitude off, even with the projected increases in battery projection.
> That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.
Again, I did cite the projected production figures for 2035. Did you miss that part?
Battery technology seems like a proven technology to me?
What's the annual production figures for iron air batteries, flow batteries, etc.? Sodium batteries are at 9 GWh delivered in 2025. Google tells me that flow battery capacity is 500 MWh to 1 GWh, but doesn't provide any figures on actual production deliveries (production capacity is not the same as actual delivered production). There are no iron air battery facilities currently in production, with the earliest plant trying to open in 2028 with 500 MWh per year annual production.
None of your suggestions are remotely close to operating at grid scale, and there is zero guarantee that any of them will prove more feasible than lithium based battery chemistry.
Meanwhile, the statement that "fusion has been achieved in a lab" is optimism and wishful thinking beyond words. What energy return did that get? What was the cost? When will there be GE of generation, mic less basic safety engineering?
Those who advocate against the shipping reality of batteries, and moreover assume that they will get more expensive, are not using numerical thinking and are not thinking like scientists, engineers, or technologists. They are merely rooting for a tech like a sports team. Nuclear does not need any more fans, it needs engineers and scientists that can achieve some sort of radical breakthrough that makes it a desirable tech.
You're inventing a straw man that's easier for you to attack.
No goalposts are being moved. My point was, and still is, that batteries do not presently scale sufficiently to make a predominantly wind and solar grid feasible, and our current projections even a decade out do not see them scale to that point either.
We don't know if some breakthrough in battery chemistry will make it scale. Could such a breakthrough transpire? Sure. But will it happen? We don't know. And thus we should not gamble massive infrastructure spending on the assumption that this breakthrough will happen.
What’s the source on this? I just googled it, and the sources I see are saying 5TWh by 2036, with increasing supply chain risks over time…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-ca...
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
I heard the projection on a podcast from a battery builder (maybe Form Energy's CEO?) in 2021 that we were at 200-300 GWh in 2021, and would have 2-3 TWh 2026, and 20-30 TWh in 2031. His "naive" prediction was correct, all the other projections have been flat wrong.
Another example, sci fi author Ramez Naam in 2020 reviewed his prior projections from 2011 and 2015 here:
https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-...
Even just diurnal storage for a completely renewable grid is a truly enormous amount of storage.
We’re seeing the reshaping of the entire global energy system. Either we jump on the train or get run over.
To reiterate, this is just for 12 hours of storage. Seasonal fluctuations can depress renewable generation for days or even weeks.
1. https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...
BESS increased 45% y/y in 2025, and is looking like higher growth than that in 2026 already ~60% (1). Im optimistic that the mckinsey conservative linear estimates of growth are missing the s-curve of scaling new tech, just like they did for solar. They only have to be wrong by a little y/y and we get to 1000ghw a year by 2030 (note, they released a more recent study that pulled 800gwh/year in to closer to 2030 [2], the previous study was already too conservative) . At 1twh a year we're seriously chipping away at emissions, we're done in 15 years if nothing else changes (which of course it will, both on the demand and supply side). Still, thats actually incredible!
1 https://www.energy-storage.news/over-17gwh-of-bess-deployed-... 2 https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/week-in-charts/ba...
The projections for battery growth might be off, sure. But it's also possible the growth is a little bit under the projections year over year, and then we're looking at much less battery production five years. You're invoking uncertainty, but only considering it in one direction.
Yes, im explicitly considering it only in one direction, as I said I’m optimistic. I have seen plenty of data, my own & others reasoning that leads me to believe in the optimistic case here.
EDIT: look at the graph in that second McKinsey link. Look at the step for 2024, and then the massive step for 2025. And then they project much tinier steps for 26 and beyond? That’s obviously nonsense. And we can tell it’s nonsense as the number for 26 are coming in at another 60% increase y/y, and all reports point to huge increases in deployed capacity this year. And they have it at like 20%. Cmon, that’s nonsense.
Rather than just proclaiming the projection as "nonsense" it'd be a lot more productive if you shared an alternate projection and explained why it's methods are superior.
And this also disregards that second life automotive batteries are incredibly hot on the market. All those TWh of batteries will become available for stationary use when the cars are scrapped.
Maybe not in western markets due to labor costs, but definitely in developing economies.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization.
Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.
The only situation where deliberately operating a nuclear plant at under 100% output is when nuclear makes up a very large chunk of a country's generation capacity. It's not that only French nuclear plants can reduce output it's that only the French have ever been in the situation where their nuclear capacity exceeds their minimum electricity demand.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
The difference is that nuclear will keep running at night, in the winter, regardless of how strong the wind is blowing. A cheap, but intermittent source of carbon-free energy is not comparable on a dollar-by-dollar basis to a non-intermittent source of carbon-free energy.
The common retort is to use batteries, but let's put this in perspective: France uses 1,219 GWh of electricity daily (note that this is just electricity and doesn't include things like transportation, fuels in smelters, chemical feedstock etc.). 12 hours of storage would be 600 GWh. Seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar are even more extreme, and might need days worth of stored energy. But let's be humble and just see what it'll take to provision 12 hours:
At $150/kWh that'll be 90 billion dollars. These batteries will be good for 2,000 to 5,000 cycles. Let's say 4,000, so it has an 11 year life span. Over the course of 55 years that'd cost $450 billion. Just for the storage, mind you, France has to build the renewable generation on top of the storage.
On the flip side, the Flamanville Nuclear plant has a lifespan of 60 years. You could build 12 Flamanville nuclear plants and satisfy 100% of France's electricity demand. At €19 billion euros, or about $22 billion USD building 12 Flamanville plants would work out to $264 billion. The cost of storage to even out intermittent sources is much more expensive than just building the nuclear plants.
Even with a 7% cost of capital that gives a levelized cost of storage of $65/MWh or an additional $33/MWh on top of the levelized cost of electricity of solar to spread it across day and night [1].
With a 4% cost of capital the still being designed EPR2 with 30% savings over Flamanville 3 comes in at €93/MWh or $110/MWh [2].
So solar costing less than $77/MWh or €66/MWh + storage should be cheaper than EPR2.
[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
[2] https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/02/lessons-from-france...
Building a series of nuclear reactors with overlapping schedules (about one completion every year or two) in one country should help. But it’s simply far easier to find cost reductions for wind turbines which are manufactured in the thousands per year or solar panels and batteries which are manufactured in the millions.
Within a generation costs lowered, but between generations they exploded.
And the reductions were to small to make a dent in how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is in 2026.
I'll be sure to read oil daily about the benefits of LNG plants too.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects.
The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster.
People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work.
The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.
As always this is a political problem, not a technical or economic one.
The Hollande government put a law on the books that made it illegal to increase nuclear generating capacity beyond the then-installed 63.2 GW
The only way they were even allowed to build/operate the single EPR in Flamanville was to shut down two old reactors in Fessenheim. Even that was questionable, but shutting down more perfectly fine reactors would be economically suicidal.
That law was only rescinded in 2023 (by 2/3 majority), and so after that they began plans for the 14 EPR2s, six now, eight later.
Now that that is in place (and France currently has more electricity than they need), the newest energy strategy calls for massive reductions in solar and wind build outs.
https://www.consultations-publiques.developpement-durable.go...
Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example of this: the plants are so much more expensive per megawatt than what the navy builds day-in-day-out because of 1) lawsuits every step of the way 2) regulatory paralysis and 3) we haven't been doing it for 50 years so the talent and patterns aren't there.
Which directly contributes to your later point:
> We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi
I wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi. Nor would I consider the ongoing rollout of reactors in China, which haven't seen the cost overruns of western nations, scifi. I'd consider those things consequences of the systems they were developed in. China's power plants have come in at about $2M/megawatt, which is coincidentally almost exactly what the US navy spends on their reactors and appears to be the cost of doing business in a well functioning environment. Solar is cheaper in the buildout (~$1M/megawatt), but not nearly to the extent that opponents of nuclear have made it out to be. It turns out when you make it almost impossible to do something, it gets really expensive!
These are problems we could solve through policy, but the lasting gift of the Boomer generation's rise to power and refusal to relinquish it is that US policy, industry, regulatory structure, and infrastructure were largely frozen-in-time 50 years ago and have been trying to cope with the crumbling shell of that ever since.
Military small reactor designs use fuel enriched to levels higher than what we want to be standard in civillian reactors. Second, military nuclear reactors are expensive as hell, and we wouldn't want to power our society with them.
We build nuclear submarines because operationally they are unsurpassed, there's no alternative, and the operational benefits are worth sky-high costs. When it comes to the grid, we have cheaper, more flexible, and faster to deploy options.
That's quite a comparison given China's governance and environmental record. China will take your land, poison you, imprison you if you protest and suppress any mention of it on social media or in the press. Of course a business can get a lot done in that environment, is that really something to aspire to?
Some level of permitting reform is warranted but I would think hard about whether you want to adopt China's policies.
Given the current geopolitical trajectories we are going to be adopting their policies one way or another.
Similarly the US navy does not have to produce commercially viable nuclear power on an all in cost basis. Different goals, different situation.
I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s.
>But this time it's different!
Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
What you haven't heard every decade since the 90s is that storage, solar, and wind are cheaper than nuclear. Technology has changed. We're no longer running 486dx or pentiums, we have something better.
>> But this time it's different!
I didn't say that, and I'm not sure what you're referring to. Do you think energy technology is not going through a massive disruption, completely different than the 1990s, or 2000s?
> Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
This is very cryptic. Climate change doesn't threaten the industrial supply chains for nuclear, it does threaten the standard cooling sources though, such as rivers and other aquatic ecosystems. "If we don't do it" not sure what the "it" is bet no path leads to cannibalism.
Ignoring the fact that the nuclear plant already exists, this still seems like the right way to go mostly because it's impossible to build this nuclear power plant for $16B in the US anymore (or so it seems).
> $5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power.
After some research, I learned that thermal powerplants (coal/gas/oil) completed in 1985 cost about 0.8B to 1.2B USD per GW. 5.6B USD in 1985 for 2GW sounds like a terrible price -- at least twice the cost.
Just to put some numbers on it, a 1GW conventional reactor consumes about 25 tonnes of enriched uranium per year, while a 1GW coal plant goes through 3.3 million tonnes of coal.
I'd double my electricity bill if that means saving somewhere between 3 and 9 million lives per year[1], better health for myself and the people around me, and that's completely ignoring climate change benefits where prevention both saves money and reduces deaths/displacement/poverty in the long term
Either short-term solution is fine (nuclear or full renewable), but we're currently doing everything piecemeal. Plopping down a few big reactors in 20 years while people (in countries without salt planes, at least) are still trying to get permits for the remaining reasonable wind turbine and pumped hydro locations... it just feels like seven-mile boots for the energy transition
If we can make seven-mile steps by plopping down wind/solar plus the required storage in gigawatt quantities, all the better, but that hasn't been happening. We'll run out of uranium eventually but, for now, such reactors buy time. Of course, this discussion has been happening for so long that the "it takes too long to build" naysayers will get their way soon, even at the slow pace we're currently going full renewable at. It's now or never, we need to commit to an option, no matter which one
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-...
Then 7B in 2046 money which is probably $15 today.
So when you compare average cost per year over the complete expected lifetime of the plants, nuclear is good, but when you compare the up-front cost to build it, yeah it looks bad.
Another thing is that nuclear in the US is far more costly than in e.g. France. The key is that France standardized a few reactor designs that they kept building again and again, which made both construction and maintenance cheaper over time. While in the US, each nuclear plant is a unicorn, which can perhaps result in better individual designs but ends up more expensive.
Cumulative emissions matter. We simply don’t have the time to wait the 20 years it takes to build new nuclear plants.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-wind-power-ope...
[2] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-utility-scale-...
[3] https://www.nei.org/getContentAsset/47fa8caa-9b0d-4029-932c-...
I assume property taxes for a gas turbine are likewise OpEx but they just disappear in the noise of buying enormous amounts of methane as fuel.
Taking china as an example they currently build solar, coal and nuclear. No country is building only solar/batteries.
Further if we build more nuclear we'd be better at it and it would be cheaper.
100% solar is a straw man though, as much as the simplicity of it sounds nice.
> Further if we build more nuclear we'd be better at it and it would be cheaper.
This is far from being clear, nuclear is one technology that tends to have increased costs the more we do of it. Even in France!
The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Human labor is very expensive, and every time we make humans more productive, that makes human labor more expensive, because their time becomes more valuable. Technological growth does that.
The cost of nuclear is primarily in labor and long-term financing, due to the very long lifetime and upfront labor cost. Until somebody has some sort of technological breathrough to decrease the labor cost of nuclear, it's not going to be able to compete. Even decades ago it had trouble, and now it's far worse.
Simply saying "use PV plus batteries" really does not engage with the scale of storage required. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Annual global battery production is around 1,500 GWh, and only ~300 GWh of that production is used for grid storage.
Even just provisioning enough batteries to satisfy the requirements for diurnal fluctuations of solar is far beyond the scale of what battery production can provide. Let alone fluctuations due to weather and seasonal output changes.
The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.
Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.
Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.
Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.
With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.
With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.
And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.
And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.
Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark
https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...
So Denmark replaced lot of imported fossil fuels with imported wood.
Could we scale this form of energy generation to energy requirements of China, India?
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/danish-firm-molten...
One problem I've heard about this idea in the past is that cars and their batteries are expensive, and people won't want to run down the lifetime of their car battery more quickly by also using it as a home battery rather than just for driving.
Obviously this can be solved either by making it so cheap to replace car batteries that nobody cares, or by legislating that people have to use their cars this way. But is either of these solutions easy to happen any time soon?
So if you get paid double the value of your battery the incentives are there for an economic model to work. Today.
And batteries are only getting cheaper, gas is the opposite.
Plus batteries take surplus solar/wind, at these times they have a negative value. Add that and the economics are a no brainer. It’s a matter of time.
As an insurance against unspecified lack (how much for how long?) of wind and solar (and batteries, cable capacity, hydro, etc.) base load is supposed to swoop in and save the day when those temporarily fail locally. So, it's a valid question to ask how much insurance we need against that. Nobody seems to really know. There are loose estimates of course. And people seem to assume it's months and that renewables are going to 100% be offline throughout that very very long period. In reality in most connected energy markets, we have a short gap of a few weeks or so in winter at higher latitudes of reduced output that we already manage to cover with flexible generation.
It's more constructive to think in terms of dispatchable power rather than base load. When the sun doesn't shine or there is no wind, it's nice if you can quickly bring online additional generation, tap into battery reserves, or bring in power from elsewhere (via cables). That favors flexible power, not inflexible power. Nuclear and older coal plants are a bit inflexible. Shutting down and starting up a nuclear plant is really slow and expensive and requires a lot of planning. And especially older coal plants need quite a bit of time to bring their boilers up to temperature such that they build up enough steam pressure to generate power. Until then, they are just blowing smoke out of the chimney. Modern coal plants are a bit better on that front. Same with gas plants.
The modern ones only need about 10-20 minutes or so. Still quite slow but something you can plan to do. Slow here means expensive as well. Because shutting them down when there is a surplus of renewables (which is a very common thing now) is really inconvenient. Which means consumers have to pay extra for perfectly good electricity from renewables to be curtailed. That happens by the GW in some markets and keeps consumer prices higher than they should be because they have to pay for gas/coal that is technically not actually needed.
Batteries have a much lower LCOE than gas or coal plants (never mind nuclear) and it's being produced by the TWH per year now. A lot of markets are serving much of their peak demand using batteries now. Australia and China are good examples. Even in the US, you see batteries being deployed at a large scale now. That's starting to push gas and coal out of the market. A gas peaker plant that rarely runs is just really expensive.
Do fossil fuel companies overstate the importance and scale of base load to justify additional fuel subsidies? Indubitably - but don't let their bullshit hide the truth within it that actually is a critical requirement for our power grid.
What baseload is is electricity supply which is only economical if you use it all the time. Nuclear falls into this category because of its very high capital cost and low op-ex. If it's cheaper than dispatchable power (nuclear isn't) it's nice to have as much of it as the minimum demand that you see on the grid, to lower costs. If it's as expensive, or more expensive, than dispatchable power, that's fine, you just don't need it at all and can replace it entirely with dispatchable power.
It's similar to wind and solar in this, which also aren't dispatchable (though there supply curve looks different than the constant supply curve which "base load" is used to mean). Except wind and solar actually are cheaper than dispatchable power so they make economic sense.
The term is half marketing term and half a theory that constant supply non-dispatchable power would be significantly cheaper than dispatchable power so we should organize the grid around it. That theory didn't really pan out (apart from some places with non-storable hydro, and a few with geothermal).
basically, base load means the lowest point of demand on the grid. And you matched that with slow-to-respond thermal power plants (coal mainly, also nukes). Because those are slow to respond and are most profitable running at 100%, so you tried to keep them there. So called base load generation.
But note there is no rule of the universe that says you have to meet the base load demand with some static constant power source, you can get it from anywhere. And now, since renewables and batteries are cheaper than this base load generation, it knocks them off the grid rendering it unprofitable. So the whole concept of base load supply is obsolete. Anyway, the linked blog explains it better.
The article you send is perfect example why it's not economic to build new coal or nuclear power plants in US. The reasons are: very cheap natural gas and no CO2 tax. In US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity.
In Europe the situation is very different.
"Europe is in the opposite spot. The continent's main gas point, the TTF benchmark, nearly doubled to over €60/MWh by mid-March."
https://www.briefs.co/news/u-s-natural-gas-just-hit-a-record...
It's always a peculiar response that outright ignores certain power combos, and it always seems to come in nuclear discussions.
Btw battery is rapidly changing the math on > US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity
california went from 45% gas in 2022 to 25% gas in 2025 almost entirely because of batteries (and more solar), and they're just getting started. I know its not generally true across the US, but very soon batteries are going to be pushing a huge amount of gas off the grid.
Gas is far better suited economically to backstop a variable grid. I wish it werent true, because i dont hate nukes, but it is just economics.
I will also point out that california is down to 25% fossil sourced power in 2025, from 45% in 2022. Due to renewables and batteries, and there's far more coming. The amount left to backstop on gas in a few years could plausibly be 10%! which is amazing.
And once you have diesel generators, it turns out that batteries are more expensive than just buying a bit more fuel.
The future is all about sovereign power generation and distributed reliability.
The transition from coal to gas gave us cleaner air (and less CO2) but it definitely also had costs, some of them in the form of many thousands of dead Ukrainians, some of them in the form of concessions to the US.
But when higher prices stick around industries close or never opened.
This doesn't go away under socialism/communism/collectivism. If you set the price too low, you either have to build far more production capacity at public expense than needed, or you cope with regular blackouts.
The complexity now is doing it without delays. China shows that it can be built very cheap and fast with good supply chain
I mean, thank you, the USSR already showed this, no more is needed.
Because these plants run for 80+ years (some countries are now considering 100) while most renewables run for 25 at most. And also because `plus batteries` doesn't exist. The world battery capacity isn't enough to power California for a single week. Large scale battery technology isn't even in its infancy, it just doesn't exist.
Don't forget, you've paid for the nuclear power plant once. You will pay for a new set of renewable capabilities every 25 years in <current-year + 25> dollars.
[1] https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...
The sample size is extremely limited. Six systems are not at all robust enough for global conclusions. This popsci article of yours doesn't hold up to scrutiny and neither it nor the study are enough to make sweeping generalizations like declaring the common 25 year lifecycle a myth.
Edit: If you don’t trust my source , please show one of your own that proves they need to be replaced at 25yrs
how much this would cost for the same guaranteed power output?
would it be more or less than 21B?
how it would look like in areas that have winter with snow?
And unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this is going to stop any time soon.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-pumped-hydro-energystorage-renai...
The Belgians apparently typically invert the meaning of . and , in numbers (from how they are used in the US).
To make large numbers readable, Belgians use either a period (.) or a non-breaking space. Example: Two thousand thirty-six is written as 2.036 or 2 036. In formal Belgian French, the space is increasingly preferred over the period to avoid confusion with the Anglo-American system, but the period remains very common in Belgian Dutch and everyday shorthand.
the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective.
my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of humanities energy needs because it’s not efficient enough. we should still keep building solar. but if we aren’t building nuclear too its not enough growth
Do we need Facebook? Do we need Instagram? Do we need deepfakes and AI music?
MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)
> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.
Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).
Ivanpah is is not the largest solar power plant in California. It's an experimental solar-thermal plant. Talking about megawatts per year is not a meaningful term (megawatt-years would be). Ivanpah despite its much talked about failures delivers between 350 and 850GWh per year.
The largest solar plant in California is Edwards Sandborn, producing somewhere around 2500GWh per year (it's newer so numbers are less published).
Diablo Canyon produces around 18000GWh/year, which is huge.
But with all costs combined, Diablo's price per MWh is close to ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS off of a massive initial capex. Modern solar battery installs trend towards $30-60 for the same output.
So I'm sure your tour guide had some neat numbers but you should be careful not to repeat them verbatim (or unremembered).
It would make way more sense to use J and J/h instead
Apparently there also used to be a phaseout policy which is being rescinded: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/belgium-and-czechia-ram...
I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
Further background: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fifth-belgian-re... (2025)
> "Belgium's federal law of 31 January 2003 required the phase-out of all seven nuclear power reactors in the country. Under that policy, Doel 1 and 2 were originally set to be taken out of service on their 40th anniversaries, in 2015. However, the law was amended in 2013 and 2015 to provide for Doel 1 and 2 to remain operational for an additional 10 years. Doel 1 was retired in February this year. Duel 3 was closed in September 2022 and Tihange 2 at the end of January 2023. Tihange 1 was disconnected from the grid on 30 September this year."
> "Belgium's last two reactors - Doel 4 and Tihange 3 - had also been scheduled to close last month. However, following the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February 2022 the government and Electrabel began negotiating the feasibility and terms for the operation of the reactors for a further ten years, to 2035, with a final agreement reached in December, with a balanced risk allocation."
It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.
Funnily, I have almost the opposite view. I'm terrified of old nuclear because those first gen power plants are all missing a lot of safety lessons. Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.
I want old nuclear plants to be either upgraded or decommissioned. I have much less concern about new nuclear (other than it taking a very long time and an a lot of money to deploy).
A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.
You can upgrade certain components, and safety systems. However things like the containment structure or pressure vessel can't be changed. You for example can't retrofit a core catcher, but you could improve the turbines, I think Steam Generators as well, replace PLC's, Tsunami proof your site by building a larger tsunami wall / making your backup generators flood proof...
> Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues.
These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
"Japan’s Energy Plan: New Policy Shifts Nuclear Power Stance from Reduction to Maximization"
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01195/
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Are they planning on restarting the Fukushima plants? I didn't think they were.
There was never any chance of "restarting" them, so not sure why you brought that up.
> On the contrary
was about. Contrary to what?
This was about the Fukushima reactors that were completely destroyed? In response to a discussion of Belgian reactors that are completely different?
No need for any special casing.
Still count.
For the general public no harm can come their way.
Unless they through some mechanical failure manage to walk underneath a wind turbine shedding or collapsing.
Same with solar. Which is even less risky.
For nuclear power the about all effects from a large scale failure will impact society through either radiation or life changing evacuations.
And then society is on the hook to pay for the entire cleanup work.
For renewables the only people who get harmed are those who work in the industry. The risk for the general public is zero.
In this case, we find that nuclear nuclear reactors are 2 orders of magnitude more dangerous than gas and coal power plants.
In his posthumously published memoirs, Valery Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK had significant design flaws. Legasov's suicide in 1988, following frustrated attempts to promote nuclear and industrial safety reform, caused shockwaves throughout the scientific community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Improvements_since_the_Ch...
A list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Design_flaws_and_safety_i...
However, the units that are still operating were modified after the accident to remove at least a few of the elements of the accident chain that made the reactor inherently unsafe.
Still no containment, and still not anywhere close to the requirements for Western reactors, but they seem to be operating reasonably safely.
And other than Chernobyl no melt downs.
So they seem to be fairly reliable if they aren’t run by clowns.
And you reckon that the site operated for 44 years on a Gen II design without melting down is somehow an insisted or how unsafe those reactors were.
If that earthquake and tsunami had been only a bit different in either magnitude or location, those reactors could be operating still now.
Or if the plant operated had hardened those backup generators and water pumps a bit more.
There are 70 AP1000 reactors in operation, construction or planned.
Look at this:
Because of its simplified design compared to a Westinghouse generation II PWR, the AP1000 has:
50% fewer safety-related valves 35% fewer pumps 80% less safety-related piping 85% less control cable 45% less seismic building volume
Isn’t this the kind of thing hackers and tech advocates should be getting a raging hardon over.
This reactor does nearly twice as much as its predecessor using half the materials to build, at least for some systems.
And your telling me it just a regular commercial off the shelf run if the mill garden variety earthquake.
Man to I need to touch grass.
One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.
The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.
You had a good argument up until you went there.
I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'
Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
Happy to be proven wrong, but https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Yep. It's called radiophobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
And it is far, far deadlier than nuclear energy itself.
That has happened exactly once.
And affected an area about the size of half the continental US, causing expensive countermeasures to be taken for 40 years and counting.
Maybe once was enough?
Norway 2025: https://www.dsa.no/en/radioactivity-in-food-and-environment/...
"Every year, sheep herds in selected municipalities must be brought down onto cultivated land and given clean feed for a certain number of weeks before they can be slaughtered, in order to bring the levels in the meat down below the maximum permitted level."
Germany 2026, 3000 boar at 100-200 euros compensation each:
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fast-3000-verstrahlte-wildsch...
Scotland was done after "only" 25 years:
https://robedwards53.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/25-years-on-ch...
“It has taken nearly 25 years for the contamination of Scottish soils to decay to officially safe levels – and we're 1,400 miles away,”
Northern norway - scotland - bavaria - ukraine, that's about half the continental US affected for decades, so it's a fair comparison wouldn't you agree?
When did a dam failure in the Ukraine affect wildlife in Sweden for 30+ years? It's kind of a several-orders-of-magnitude larger area being affected for orders-of-magniture longer timespans.
Exxon valdez and even deepwater horizon is ancient history, Chernobyl is not, in fact it's current events. And will be, for the foreseeable future, as will Fukushima.
No Japanese alive today will stop paying for Fukushima for as long as they live. Are any other costs from the tsunami still ongoing?
>Happy to be proven wrong, but
Won't prove you wrong but maybe it will make you reconsider the link as a support of your argument:
Danger is what could happen, not what has actually happened.
A loaded gun is dangerous even if it hasn't been fired yet, nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam.
> nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam
Banqiao dam was a single hydroelectric installation, for which the estimated death toll of its failure is in the ballpark of every nuclear death combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Sorry but this isn't true. You base this claim on what has happened but not what could have happened, which is a mistake.
The actual truth is that 1 Chernobyl almost ruined Europe. If the heroic individuals who managed to stop the graphite fire had said "f it I'm outta here" instead of sacrificing their lives, it would have made large areas in far corners of Europe uninhabitable, and even larger areas unsuitable for farming, for decades.
This is not hyperbole, it is a likely outcome based on the amount of material that would have been released and prevailing weather patterns.
It didn't actually happen, but it could have. We were spared the worst case scenarios from Chernobyl.
100 Chernobyls would not have been 100 Chernobyls that lasted for a week, most of them would have pumped out sterilizing levels of radiation for months. Nothing humans have done to date would be comparable to such a scenario.
Danger is not related to what has happened, but what could happen. This is important to keep in mind when discussing things that will have consequences for centuries. Many things happen over centuries, we're not even a century from WW2 yet.
>To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim
Figuratively, of course. I meant that the deepwater event is handled and done. We don't actively need to consider how to handle it today. Nature is still recovering but you can eat any fish you catch in the gulf without worrying about the oil spill and you don't need to clean any birds.
Chernobyl is not over, and won't be for the foreseeable future. It could cause new fallout 100 years from now, our grandchildren might have to pay for a new sarcophagus, at the very least pay for maintenance of the existing one. It is an ongoing cost on several national budgets.
Only a very few things that humans do really compares to the the consequences from nuclear power. It's troubling to see it being so severely misunderstood and belittled even on a forum like this. If we decide to do it it should at the very least be with a good understanding of the actual risks.
The big fear for me would be that this happens to a nuclear power plant that is located in a densely populated area (of which there are many). Chernobyl was bad, but imagine the impact if the exclusion zone contained a major city.
That’s how safe and important these things are.
I don't think something being done in war time is evidence of it's safety! If anything, way tends to encourage more risk taking.
There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common and more importantly don't allow Soviet engineers to design and operate your nuclear power plants.
I mean, when we get Chernobyl 2.0 with hundreds of millions of victims, will the fact that it was caused by "variables that can be easily controlled" somehow make the situation any better?
The safety lessons we learned from all gen 1 reactors was to apply passive shutdown mechanism where if input power fails fission ultimately stops. That's not something that can be applied across the fleet because it requires more infrastructure and an almost complete redesign of the reactor's setup. Which is why these early reactors all have a potential risk of thermal runaway.
Edit: It looks like all gen Is have been decommissioned as of 2015, which is great. But we really should now be talking about decommissioning gen IIs and leaping forward to Gen IVs.
1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths
2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done by a power generation mechanism.
> Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Yeah, crazy stuff happens and radioactive spills have longterm effects on the environment that are hard to address.
> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
That's a non-sequitur.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Japan has spent the equivalent of $180B cleaning up the mess Fukoshima left behind. [1] Decomissioning the old reactors and replacing them with the safer to avoid unexpected disasters which cost hundreds of billions does seem like a good use of money. Far better than just hoping something unexpected doesn't happen.
We could for example argue that Japan, by stopping it's nuclear power plants for long time and replacing it's cheap nuclear electricity with expensive imported gas electricity caused more deaths than by direct radiological impact of Fukoshima accident.
"Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident"
https://docs.iza.org/dp12687.pdf
"In an effort to meet the energy demands, nuclear power was replaced by imported fossil fuels, which led to increases in electricity prices. The price increases led to a reduction in electricity consumption but only during the coldest times of the year. Given its protective effects from extreme weather, the reduced electricity consumption led to an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that the increased mortality resulting from the higher energy prices outnumbered the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting that applying the precautionary principle caused more harm than good."
In term of money, you have look at the sums that Japan has been pouring into importing gas, which was needed to replace the missing nuclear power generation.
"With the Japanese government’s blessing, these companies are encouraging other countries to use more gas and LNG by investing US$93 billion from March 2013 to March 2024 in midstream and downstream oil and gas infrastructure globally."
https://energyexplained.substack.com/p/japan-1-how-fukushima...
I'm not actually arguing that Gen II plants need to be decommissioned immediately. I'm arguing that they need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
The process that takes can look like running the Gen II reactor while a replacement Gen IV reactor is being built and then decommissioning after the IV reactor is up and running.
I'm not against using nuclear, far from it. But I do think we need to actually have a plan about how we evolve the current nuclear fleet.
Why? The overwhelming majority of Gen II reactors aren’t on the east coast of Japan.
And the lessons learned from Fukushima Daiitchi can be applied elsewhere to mitigate similar risks.
My opinion is it’s more prudent to run the existing fleet for its economically useful life, remembering that reliable base load can have more value than intermittent wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
You also don’t get process heat not district heating from wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
Fukushima was a demonstration that these reactors can still melt down. It doesn't take exactly fukushima to cause a meltdown.
The reason to prioritize decommissioning is because the new generations of reactors are completely safe. There can be no meltdown, even if they are explicitly sabotaged. Then the bigger risk becomes not the reactor but the management of waste.
What Gen II reactors are is effectively a landmine in a box. The proposed solution to avoid detonating the landmine is adding more pillows, buffers, and padding, but still keeping the landmine because it'd be expensive to replace.
I think that's just a bad idea. Unexpected things happen. They don't have to (and probably won't) look exactly like a Tsunami hitting the facility. So why not replace the box with a landmine with one that doesn't have the landmine. Yes it cost money to do, but it's simply safer and completely eliminates a whole class of risks.
TBH, probably the SCWR. They seem like the easiest to build without a lot of new surprises.
> Which Gen IV reactor can not melt down, even if explicitly sabotaged?
One like the BREST. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor) . Funnily my preferred reactor, the SCWR, would probably not be immune to some sabotage, specifically explosives around the reactor. But a reactor which uses a metal coolant would be. It just so happens that the nature of a SCWR cooled with water means that the reactor core has to be much beefier anyways, so it's a lot harder to really damage even if that was an explicit goal.
<eye roll> this is just bullshit.
Which Gen II reactors are subject to war, exactly?
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, where one employ was killed by a drone strike?
What’s the status of the four new planned(?) reactors at Khmelnitski?
Wikipedia seems to indicate that two new AP1000 reactors are under construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmelnytskyi_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
A country that is having a hot war with its neighbour Russia(!) is getting the fuck on with it, while the rest of the Western world still thinks windmills are cool.
Potentially any of them. World governments aren't static. Mitt Romney was literally laughed at for talking about the Russian military threat in 2012.
> two new AP1000
These are Gen III+ reactors, which thoughout this thread I've been saying we should be building to replace the Gen II reactors.
If Ukraine was building new Gen II reactors you might have a point.
> That's a non-sequitur.
I think this is to establish that the large number of deaths from the disaster weren't due to the nuclear plant, which people seem to assume.
There are plenty of smaller nuclear power reactor issues listen on Wikipedia, but the three big ones are Chernobyl, but that was an RMBK, which no one built except those crazy Russians, TMI which didn’t kill or injury anyone, and Fukushima Daiitchi which resulted in one death.
So we’re not really talking about deaths from nuclear power reactors, because there aren’t any, discounting Chernobyl because that won’t ever happen again.
So we must be talking about the deaths from that one natural disaster associated with the Fukushima Daiitchi meltdowns. Otherwise, I dint know what deaths you’re talking about.
More people injur themselves falling off ladders while trying to clean their solar panels than nuclear power ever will.
Good luck.
State your case, enumerate them.
The idea that nuclear isn’t safe, and can’t be competitive in thr market is just nonsense.
Seventeen AP1000s are currently in operation or under construction. Four are in operation at two sites in China, two at Sanmen Nuclear Power Station and two at Haiyang Nuclear Power Plant. As of 2019, all four Chinese reactors were completed and connected to the grid, and as of 2026, eleven more are under construction.
It goes on…
Two are in operation at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant near Augusta, Georgia, in the United States, with Vogtle 3 having come online in July 2023, and Vogtle 4 in April 2024. Construction at Vogtle suffered numerous delays and cost overruns. Construction of two additional reactors at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station near Columbia, South Carolina, led to Westinghouse's bankruptcy in 2017 and the cancellation of construction at that site. It was reported in January 2025 by The Wall Street Journal and The State that Santee Cooper, the sole owner of the stored parts and unfinished construction, is exploring construction and financing partners to finish construction these two reactors. The need for large amounts of electricity for data centers is said to be the driving factor for their renewed interest.
Twenty-four more AP1000s are currently being planned, with six in India, nine in Ukraine, three in Poland, two in Bulgaria, and four in the United States.
China is currently developing more advanced versions and owns their patent rights. The first AP1000 began operations in China at Sanmen, where Unit 1 became the first AP1000 to achieve criticality in June 2018, and was connected to the grid the next month. Further builds in China will be based on the modified CAP1000 and CAP1400 designs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000
The fact is, nuclear power is a 21st century success story.
My case is that Gen II reactors have a design flaw which gives them a risk that should be eliminated. We should replace Gen II reactors with Gen III or later reactors as none of them suffer from the same problems as Gen II reactors do.
The rest of your post is about AP1000, which is a Gen III+ reactor. A fine reactor to replace Gen II reactors with.
I've made this point, to you, a couple of times so now I feel like you aren't actually reading my responses.
I'm not interested in one sided conversations.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant was destroyed by the Tsunami. It didn't spontaneously combust.
A lot of other infrastructure that was impacted/destroyed by the Tsunami claimed lives. For example, a dam broke due to the Tsunami and that dam breach killed 4 people. Which coincidentally happens to be 4 more than were killed by the nuclear power plant when it was destroyed by the Tsunami.
More people die from car accidents and heart attacks. More people get radiation poisoning from sun exposure. Also non-sequiturs because we are not talking about that here.
It is very tangentially related because the nuclear accident in the current thread was caused by an earthquake that also killed people. Not something that affects the discussion about how we should handle nuclear plants in the future because "This number is bigger" is a meaninglessly point to make.
This is actually an article about Belgium taking over nuclear plants for restart.
> should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters
How did we get to natural disasters?
Well:
You brought up Fukushima, where a natural disaster destroyed a nuclear power station. You also incorrectly claimed that Japan had "decided" to "decomission" "these" reactors, rather than "rebuild" them.
Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission. These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
I think most people who read this interpreted this as "these" meaning "Japan's reactor fleet". Because that's the only interpretation that makes at least a little sense (though it is wrong).
It certainly can't mean the reactors at Fukushima, because those have been destroyed, there never was any question of "rebuilding" them and so no "decision" not to do that. And not due to some unfixable "design flaw", but due to a Tsunami that another plant of the same design withstood without damage.
So: we got to natural disasters because you brought up natural disasters.
And yes, technical equipment and infrastructure gets destroyed in natural disasters. Like that dam in Japan that killed 4 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami. Like that nuclear power plant that killed 0 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami.
What. The. Fuck. Are. You. On. About.
That has never happened.
Radiation poisoning. From sun exposure.
Are you ok? Would like some water? Do you want to sit down?
If you think that’s a thing, I don’t know what to say. I hope you don’t vote.
You should stop now before you embarrass yourself. Go away and do some reading. Come back when you’re read to play with the big kids.
We’re doomed!
I'm sorry this isn't something you knew.
Also, be aware you are violating HN posting guidelines. I'm not going to interact with you further because you are just flaming.
There have been plenty of direct deaths caused by coal power. Coal dust can be quite explosive and has caused a lot of deaths over the years. And plenty of coal fired boilers, both stationary and mobile (locomotives) and failed causing plenty of deaths.
By that definition housefires also lead to very few direct deaths if most people die due to smoke inhalation instead of burning alive.
Unlike with nuclear that, even if we entirely ignore CO2 emissions and climate change the remaining "indirect" damage due to pollution and long-term effects on the environment are largely know and quantifiable and are astronomically higher per MHw produced compared to nuclear power.
This is not true at all.
Direct Occupational Deaths (Mining & Accidents)
Even in a highly regulated environment like the United States, coal mining is not a zero-fatality industry. United States: According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), there were 8 coal mining deaths in 2025 and 10 in 2024. This is a massive improvement from 1907 (the deadliest year), which saw 3,242 deaths.
In countries with less stringent safety oversight, the numbers are much higher. For example, China's coal industry—though improving—has historically recorded hundreds to thousands of deaths annually.
In 2022 alone, hundreds of people died in global coal mine accidents.
Chronic Disease: "Black Lung" (pneumoconiosis) is still a leading cause of death for miners. In the U.S. alone, thousands of former miners die every decade from lung diseases directly caused by inhaling coal dust.
Huh? Are you not counting coal mining, which historically caused thousands of deaths per year and presumably still causes at least hundreds per year (not sure what info we have on that from China).
"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.
> 2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Sure, but Belgium has to be prepared for something like the North Sea flood of 1953 - which climate change is only going to make worse.
> 3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Irrelevant.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Correct, but a nuclear power plant in Belgium should be safe enough to survive the kind of disaster which is likely to happen in Belgium - which is very much a topic of debate.
If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
The actual death toll of the accident itself is zero.
There was one incident of cancer that was ruled a "workplace accident" by an insurance tribunal that went through the press without much vetting.
However, this was for his overall work at the plant, largely preceding the accident.
The WHO says there has been and will be no measurable health impact due to Fukushima.
What caused a lot of deaths was the evacuation that almost certainly should not have happened.
"The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Nuclear is insured. The German nuclear insurance so far has paid out €15000,- since it was created in 1957.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Nuclear_Reactor_Insuran...
For comparison, just the German nuclear auto-insurance pays out north of €15 billion per year.
There is a reason both Japan and Ukraine maintain and are actually expanding their nuclear programs.
You should read the article you linked to. It actually explains that nuclear is defacto not insured, and that is the reason why they have only paid 15000 euros in total.
The TLDR is that basically no matter what happens, the cost is covered by the government of the country the plant is located in, and secondly other governments.
This is course also true even if nothing goes wrong with the plants, future tax payers pay for decommissioning, maintenance, storage etc.
The cleanup bill is real.
The inability to get insurance is real.
The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
The possibility of Fukushima scale accidents all depend on local conditions. And it may be as trivial as upgrades and component changes over the decades leading to safeties protecting the component rather than the larger system causing defense in depth to fail. Like happened in Forsmark in 2006.
Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history. There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
Which obviously doesn't prove what you think it proves...
This still feels irrational compared to other dangerous industries.
> The inability to get insurance is real
It's real, but how much of it is rooted in emotional fear or bad industrial policy?
> The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
And that's one of the lessons to learn from the Fukushima accident, that's why Canada changed their evacuation plans to be more granular for example.
> Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history.
Storage gets very expensive as your share of renewables increases (because the capacity factor of storage goes down then). Having an amount of clean firm generation (nuclear) brings the overall cost of the system down.
edit: capacity factor might be the wrong term for storage, the point is their rate of utilization goes down and so does their profitability.
> There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
I don't understand what we could effectively do with civil nuclear builds decades ago cannot be replicated today. Let's also talk about the cost of the transition to renewables in Germany please.
>"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
Wikipedia asserts one "suspected" death, which I think is within bounds to call "basically zero". It does list a couple dozen injuries.
> The displacements resulted in at least 51 deaths as well as stress and fear of radiological hazards
Apparently wildlife is thriving in the radiation zone.
Intensity of radiation fades over the years (exponential decay). The bad stuff is gone fairly quickly. Decades means pretty low levels.
Just leave the radiation zone as a nature preserve, like the Chernobyl zone.
How can that be irrelevant. The disaster was directly caused by a very specific external factor that was not properly accounted for when it was built i.e. it's not generalizable to all nuclear plants in different areas.
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Because it doesn't make sense from a risk management perspective, the risk is astronomically low and impossible to estimate, just like the potential damage which might be huge and again impossible to estimate. How do you even calculate the premiums or anything else for that matter?
> Irrelevant.
Well, that needs more nuance.
You have to understand that Japan is unusually well prepared for natural disasters. From earthquake resistant building codes, to alarm systems, education, to building, to earthquake refuges. I would venture to say that it is the most earhquake-prepared country in the world (although I have no proof of that point and I don't feel like looking for evidence on that it). Earthquakes that would have killed hundreds in other countries are footnotes in the news in Japan.
The earthquake alone was not enough to bring down Fukushima; the reactors shut down, as designed. The earthquake wasn't the direct cause of many deaths. It is difficult to estimate given the circumstances, but tens or maybe hundreds.
So in in that sense, yes, the earthquake is irrelevant.
However, after the earthquake, came the tsunami. That did shut down the Fukushima backup generators. No generators means no cooling, which means meltdown.
The tsunami also killed the most people. Now, why is this relevant?
Because the Japanese have had drills and tsunami education for decades. They have seawalls, strong buildings, and prepared infrastructure. The tsunami hit the least populated areas of the coast. In short, they were aware, trained and prepared, and they were not hit where most people live.
And still, ~15000+ died. That gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.
Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business, with virtually unlimited damages if something goes seriously wrong. I'm sure all the reactor operators reviewed their flood procedures after Fukushima and a 1:1 repeat is unlikely, but why didn't they do so before the incident? What other potential causes did the industry miss?
In this case it was indeed a large-scale natural disaster which caused the accident, but how sure are we that some medium-scale terrorism can't do the same, or some small-scale internal sabotage or negligent maintenance? The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.
What would be the net effect? (I think it would be roughly on par with gas or hydroelectric and an order of magnitude safer than other fossil fuels even with this extremely pessimistic hypothetical)
It wouldn't be a linear increase i.e. you can more or less estimate how many people would die per MWh produced in hydro, gas, coal etc. plants.
With nuclear if somebody dies that means a some sort of catastrophic event likely occurred regardless if a 1 or 100+ people die the reactor will be out of commission and it will cost a massive amount of money to contain it.
Three Mile Island was a success in the sense that even the worst case scenario the safety measures are sufficient to more or less fully contain it.
In Chernobyl's case... well yes it proves that if you let incompetent and stupid people build and operate nuclear power plants horrible things can happen.
No, as it involved a partial meltdown, not a complete meltdown.
I mean we allow coal plants to vent radioactive material. Surely nuclear considering it an accident is an improvement.
> Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business,
Well, let me introduce you to airplanes — flying is inherently risky, and so many people have died on commercial flights. We should abolish it immediately!
> The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.
Maybe. I'm more concerned about coal plants that are, as we speak, dumping metric tons of harmful materials, including radioactive ones, into the atmosphere we all breathe, which causes approximately 100_000 people to die each year.
These are real things happening right now, not some hypothetical problems that may happen, but haven't in the last 60 years of commercial nuclear reactor operations.
Seriously, all you can cling to are what, 2-3 major accidents in all this time? With negligible death tolls? Please. This is just concern trolling.
If we demonstrate scientific honesty and begin to apply the same level of techniques that are used to obtain the result of "10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt", we can come to the conclusion that even a small accident at a small nuclear power plant can destroy life on planet Earth as a phenomenon.
No, then the original statement would have to have been "we should keep paying big bills so we can have safe nuclear", but it wasn't.
To be more direct, using statistics about incidents to claim something is safe a fallacy. Something extremely dangerous that is kept safe through effort and expense won't appear in the stats until you remove the effort and expense.
What are talking about?
* China's installed coal-based power generation capacity was 1080 GW in 2021, about half the total installed capacity of power stations in China.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_China
India is the fifth-largest geological coal reserves globally and as the second-largest consumer, coal continues to be an indispensable energy source, contributing to 55% of the national energy mix. Over the past decade, thermal power, predominantly fueled by coal, has consistently accounted for more than 74% of our total power generation.
https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documen...
There is of course a large installed base - a coal plant will last 50 years. The fact that developing countries have large installed coal capacity is neither here nor there.
Almost every plant is bespoke, leading each plant to have unknown failure modes and rates. Additionally, insurance works by pooling risk amongst a large group of individuals but the statistical uncertainties of failure rates (too few events) and low total rate of plants leads to an incredibly uncertain risk profile.
Yes, more frequent failures would make it easier for insurance companies to estimate the risk and calculate premiums but I don't exactly see how that would be good thing...
Also, obviously, that could lead to an issue with one being an issue with many.
Or not having your plant destroyed by the biggest Tsunami in recorded Japanese history, much larger than the size they planned for when they built the plant.
Or upgrading the seawall to the size mandated after scientists found out that Tsunamis of that size could actually happen, despite having no historical record of them. One of the reasons TEPCO was culpable.
A sister plant of the Fukushima plant actually survived a slightly higher crest and was even used as a shelter for Tsunami victims, because one engineer had insisted on the sea wall being higher.
German plants for example, despite facing no immediate Tsunami risks, have bunkered and distributed backup generators as well as mandatory hydrogen recombinators. Any German plant at the same location would have survived largely unscathed.
Another backup would have been a pipe leading away from the reactor, where one can, from a short distance, pump water into it and it would cool the reactor.
After SL-1 we realized that that we needed to allow a reactor to fully shut down even with the most important control rod stuck in a fully withdrawn position.
The fixes are still simple and cost little.
I used to work at Boeing on airliner design. The guiding principle is "what happens when X fails" and design for that. It is not "design so X cannot fail", as we do not know how to design things that cannot fail. For Fukushima, it is "what happens if the seawall fails", not "the seawall cannot fail".
Airliners are safe not because critical parts cannot fail, but because there is a backup plan for every critical part.
Venting explosive gas into the building seems like a complete failure to do a proper failure analysis.
About costs: it is actually cheap. 95% of the average total cost of a MWh is in building the plant. Comparisons sometimes show the cost of a MWh from wind or solar, but is a fallacy because they assume an infrastructure on the side to ensure 24x7 power generation (i.e. they point out a marginal cost instead of average total cost).
Wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries are cheap!
Until you factor in the gas peaker plants that need to be built watt-for-watt unless you’re okay with poor people freezing in the dark, or melting in the heat. Because rich people can afford their own back up generators or on-site batteries.
The problem is as much time as it is money. We have reactors producing energy now, it will take a decade plus to replace them, and due to both climate policy and supply issues around the wars in Russia and the Middle East, we can't afford to do without the energy for that decade...
Fuck climate policy.
There could be an earthquake any moment now that ruptures a massive natural CO formation that would eclipse any anthropogenic generated emissions in matter of hours. What have we done to mitigate that risk? Nothing.
There is a non-zero chance Earth will be relieved of the responsibility of harbouring complex life any moment now by a loose pile of gravel travelling at 60 kilometres a second. Zero mitigation.
Let’s work out this food-housing-energy deal for everyone before we mandate unaffordable unreliable energy that results in unaffordable everything.
Maybe your shielded from that because your own a mid six figure income at $UNICORN, but I guarantee you the rest of us have had enough of this climate change fucking bullshit luxury belief.
It no longer rains enough?
Are you a time traveller?
Otherwise you can’t possibly know that.
When it comes to climate and weather, no amount of recent past data can reliably predict what’s going to happen next.
I'm not going to argue long-term weather cycles versus man-made climate change with you.
Climate change isn't a risk that needs mitigation, it is not a contingency of hypothetical events. It is happening right now, and lives are already being claimed.
Maybe you are shielded from that and want to keep your lifestyle rather than adapting.
We don’t actually know that.
We don’t have a second, identical Earth, where an industrial revolution powered by coal and oil and gas didn’t happen.
"Fukushima Daiichi Accident: Official figures show that there have been 2313 disaster-related deaths among evacuees from Fukushima prefecture. Disaster-related deaths are in addition to the about 19,500 that were killed by the earthquake or tsunami."
According to the "World Nuclear Association" (mission: to facilitate the growth of the nuclear sector by connecting players across the value chain, representing the industry’s position in key world forums, and providing authoritative information and influencing key audiences)
Source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
You are correct that there were only few deaths but there was radiation damage, and if you sum that up then Fukushima was definitely noticable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
That RMBK was built by those crazy Russians who thought it was reasonable to not even bother with a containment vessel / building.
1) There are at least 403 cases registered of Fukushima residents developing Thyroid cancers after 2011 and the study is still ongoing. This is five times the expected cancer ratio.
Of those at least 155 cases of malignant cancers happened in children (Sokawa 2024). We know that thyroid cancers are rare among young people... except in one special place were a sudden increase in similar cases was registered since the 80's. This place is called Chernobyl. Children that lived in towns around Fukushima daichi where the accident happened have three times more probability of suffering thyroid cancer than children that lived in towns farther from the plant.
2) Not the strong excuse that it seems, after the company was warned by scientists about the possibility of such earthquake and the urgency to improve their safety measures. They had a lot of time to fix it, and did absolutely nothing
Which was really just pure luck.
It was melting down. Humans could not go in to stop it, robots could not go in to stop it. Pure luck it didn’t go a lot bigger.
Also it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water, which will have impacts for a very long time
No it didn’t
Like I said at the time, you could melt all of the cores down at the Fukushima Daiitchi site and dissolve them all in to the oceans and it would be undetectable in sea water.
The oceans weigh around 10^21 kilograms, and the six reactor cores at Fukushima Daiichi would weigh, what, several hundred tons and contain, what, several tens of tonnes of radioactive products.
We’re talking beyond parts per trillion.
I wonder how much money it made Greenpeace. A million? Two million?
It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred. Yes it could have been worse, and I suppose it could have been struck by a meteor too.
> it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water
Citation please. I suggest reading the relevant Wikipedia article in full.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_of_radioactive_water...
The tsunami and tidal wave that took out the generators were unlucky.
The fantastically lucky part was that it didn’t create an explosion and spew much more radiation into the air. We couldn’t do anything to stop it, just stand back and hope for the best.
that was immensely lucky.
"Gen I refers to the prototype and power reactors that launched civil nuclear power. This generation consists of early prototype reactors from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Shippingport (1957–1982) in Pennsylvania, Dresden-1 (1960–1978) in Illinois, and Calder Hall-1 (1956–2003) in the United Kingdom. This kind of reactor typically ran at power levels that were “proof-of-concept.”"
https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati...
But I think my point is still valid. These Gen II reactors should be retired and replaced.
AIUI fission was stopped basically immediately. The problem was removing the decay heat from the fission by-products; without pumps to move cooling water that didn't happen.
I think modern reactor designs have enough passive cooling that this failure mode can't happen. There are a lot of active reactor plants where it still could be possible though.
You used plural? What disasters are you talking about?
Even Chernobyl wasn't technically first generation (not that it has anything to do with power plan safety in western countries anyway).
Three Mile Island kind of proved it was fairly safe given that's the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors (like tsunamis or being designed and run by soviet engineers..)
> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors
The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.
4th biggest quake ever recorded in history hit at the exact spot where the tsunami could overpower the protective wall at the reactor. Yet nobody died from the radiation.
Meanwhile the 20k people who died in the tsunami are forgotten. No one demands we stop building cities by the ocean.
> Meanwhile the 20k people who died in the tsunami are forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
- a nuclear missile test site
- theft of radioactive material
- incorrect disposal of research or medical equipment
- radiotherapy accidents
If you can't be bothered to examine your sources for relevance, why should we?
Tell me you don't work in energy without telling me.
Most heavily regulated industry on the planet - constant upgrades and safety reports.
There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.
We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.
That's a bit of an impossible ask.
To give you a comparison with airplanes, F16 aren't "upgraded" to F35s. But there is an upgrade process, and F16s today are vastly different from F16s as they were in 1978.
Likewise for nuclear plants, reviews are done following incidents and new discoveries, and overhauls are done, both in terms of process and material changes. Gen2 plants aren't the same as they were when they were built.
Even assuming all bad stuff, nuclear is statistically ok https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Time and Cost seem like excellent reasons to get started now, so we can finish by 2035 and get some materials purchased before inflation gets even worse.
All of the excellent arguments Pro-existing plants apply to new ones too.
I think people have missed how much of a hockey stick graph renewables deployment can look like. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-bo...
"Fish disco", for example.
Like maybe you're right... why not also support Nuclear plants, which we in fact need for baseload energy? Surely there are better places to cut the budget than other carbon-free energy sources.
I have no argument with building out solar and wind maximally. I will always push for new Nuclear as part of the mix.
The grids have dispatchable power. But that is a different concerns.
Point out the "baseload power" in this grid:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
You also have to look at it in terms of outcomes. How do we get the most decarbonization the quickest per dollar spent?
Focusing on reducing the area under the curve. Looking at it from that perspective wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power leads to spending longer time entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
Baseload doesn't have a consistent definition, but the general concept is some power plants are cheap at 100% output, but don't throttle back well, so you have a mix of these cheaper baseload plants, and the more expensive to operate peaker plants that are more expensive to operate, but can start/stop/slow as needed. However we don't need that. In any case even when baseload is cheaper than peaker, it is still much more expensive than wind+solar which have zero fuel costs, and so when you amortize the costs out wind+solar plus peaker plants to make up the difference is overall cheaper.
25 years ago I was with you - nuclear was the best answer. However wind+solar have really grown since then and now they your best bet. Because the times have changed I've in turned change. I'm against nuclear because it no longer makes sense even if the price was reasonable. (nuclear would still make sense for ships, I don't know how to push that though)
Edit: Come to think of it, I'd go so far as to say if you have a baseload coal plant today, you should be shutting it down immediately for new wind and solar plus gas peaker plants. It is economically stupid to not be doing that. Now, there may be coal power plants that are not baseload, but instead can be dispatchable. If so, I don't know how the economics of those play out. And likewise, nuclear, although it is baseload, probably is cheap enough to continue running as long as it's not too expensive to keep maintaining, and I would keep it running for the near future.
Coal is not an option, nor is oil nor gas. Batteries for something like central/northern Europe is also not an option as a seasonal storage of weeks/months are prohibitively expensive. Hydro power has demonstrated to cause (near) extinctions of several species and ecosystems, modern research on soil has show some terrible numbers in terms of emissions, and the places where new hydro power could be built are basically zero. Biofuels from corn and oil is prohibitive expensive and also bad for the environment, and the amount of fraud currently being done in green washing corn ethanol as being "recycled" food waste is on a massive scale and not something Europe can build a seasonal storage on. Green hydrogen is not even economical yet for being used in manufacturing, not to mention being burned for electricity and heating. Carbon capture for synthetic fuel is even further away from being a realistic storage solution.
That leaves very few options, and if current world events continue as they have we will see more governments being elected on the promise of delivering a stable energy market. Wind+solar+Gas peaker plants are not that. It was already an bad idea when it got voted as "green" in EU, as it cemented a dependency on natural gas from Russia and middle east. In 2026 it should not be considered an option. Gas need to be phased out, as should the last few oil and coal plants.
you people have been saying that for at least twenty years. In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe, sentiment is increasingly pro-nuke but your adage keeps things still. Of course yf you never start, you never finish.
Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.
> twenty years
When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.
I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.
I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.
But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.
I'd be willing to engage with SMRs on the merits of actually constructed systems, but if you open https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-... and restrict to "operational" all but two of the projects disappear.
I doubt they are talking about the same thing as the US companies. So it would be useless to extrapolate their economics.
UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.
It's certainly not £0.01203/kWh, or even in the same order of magnitude.
Later
(For context for non-Brits: there is a price cap of £0.2467 kWh currently, which many people are paying (or very close to that))
As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.
In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.
More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.
If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?
Because there's a minimum demand you must be able to supply.
Here in Norway we get just about all our power from hydro, and we have a lot of pumped storage lakes which we use as "water batteries". However, eventually hydro relies on water falling from the sky.
Not long ago there had been some really dry years, and our storage was running at record lows. Had the subsequent year been dry we'd be in a real pickle.
Another aspect here is that production is one thing, but grid-scale renewable production rarely happens right next to the primary consumers, and has to be transported. And the grid might not be able to.
Again here in Norway, we had a situation not long ago where the price difference between the north of Norway and the south of Norway was 100x because the south struggled to produce while the north was overflowing, but there was insufficient capacity on the grid to send all the energy being produced up north down south.
I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.
First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.
As you explain in your next paragraph, none of Belgium's power plants are within their planned lifetime. Tihange 1, Doel 1 and 2 were operating on an extended service cycle for a decade before their shutdown. The two youngest reactors (Doel 4 and Tihange 3) surpassed their planned lifetime last year.
This is pretty much the summary of the whole discussion. Building new nuclear is a debate, seeing as renewables are dirt cheap it might or might not make sense to build new nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Shutting down existing nuclear capacity to replace it with Russian or Saudi or Qatari oil and gas though........
It’s a proven technology with decades decades in service.
We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.
What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?
The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.
That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.
Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.
No one said "scrap", you're making up a lie and arguing against it. They're saying keep one and build more of the other.
On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.
H2 per lazard even at 25%mix is as bas as vogtle in terms of lcoe. And thats with cheap us gas for the rest 75%
2. Lazard themselves say that their LCOE numbers for nuclear are not indicative.
With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).
But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.
One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.
I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?
Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate. We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.
On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Other good news: solar and wind is trivial to curtail at the press of a button. And very cheap to deploy far more than needed on a day with perfect conditions.
Thus the obvious solution is keep your nuclear running at full load 24x7 and vary the rate at which you feed solar and wind into the grid on those days of optimal production. Idle solar is nearly free, which is one of its largest benefits! This way you have enough solar and even short term battery to meet peak daytime demand even on relatively cloudy days, and don’t need to overbuild your nuclear fleet. But you still get seasonal energy storage in the form of extremely dense nuclear fuel.
Nuclear compliments renewables quite well if you remove the fake financial incentives of “I must be allowed to be paid dump every watt possible into the grid at all times even if not needed, but cannot be called on to produce more energy when required”. Solar produces the least valuable watts. Nuclear the most. So use the cheap stuff whenever possible but fill it in with the expensive reliable source when needed.
That or you’re just gonna be backing renewables with natural gas. Which is of course cheaper, but not all that green.
I remember, decades ago, that anti-nuclear activists (some of them were even university professors who ought to know better) argued that it was impossible while France had already been doing exactly that for decades (at the time).
New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.
It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.
Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.
I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.
They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.
Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.
The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.
The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the 30+ year lifetime… is not a popular move. It works only in single party states (eg china)
This is just the reality of economics and the world we live in
Also consider that if you’re wrong about the progress of clean tech, and it closes the gaps on storage, the kids “better outcome” is going to be being locked into paying higher energy prices for a lot of their life. (Of course if you’re right it will help them)
I completely agree, but that's a massive "but". Belgium's nuclear power plants are mostly known for their reliability issues.
They are outdated 2nd-gen PWR reactors, designed by a company with no other nuclear experience, operating in some of the most densely populated areas of Europe. Keeping them operating long beyond their original design lifespan probably isn't the best idea - and it is almost a certainty that cleanup costs are going to be significantly higher than expected.
To me it sounds like Engie has struck an incredible deal by offloading a giant liability to the Belgian government.
This is a different choice because the car analogy usually has "buy new one" as a term. Not having to build a new plant makes the choice far less controversial and also cheaper.
Also remember that large parts of a nuclear plant is replaced over its operational life. Control systems, steam generators, turbines, generators, tubing, valves etc.
What stays is the outer shell and pressure vessel. A nuclear plant doesn't just "work" for 60 years. And there's no trouble designing renewables with a 60 year lifespan.
We just don't do it because spending money on getting their expected operational lifetimes from decades to 60+ years is betting on extremely uncertain future returns.
They do degrade over time, especially due to weathering of the seals and UV exposure, but all the quoted numbers are worst-case.
(Inverters are more complicated products and may need more frequently replaced)
But we should of course keep our existing fleet around as long as it is safe, needed and economical. In that order.
EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
EDF isnt crying. It's just treated poorly even by looking at ARENH tax which was replaced with another one this year, while ren business gets CFD's and curtailment payments.
French nuclear fleet is extremely flexible, RTE data is public. In fact, due to ARENH law EDF was forced to subsidize competition because otherwise that competition would not exist.
Was the electricity extremely expensive? Yes.
Reliable electricity has a certain worth. And that is vastly lower than what nuclear power needs when running at 100% 24/7 all year around.
And that is disregarding that EDF is already crying about renewables crater the earning potential of their existing nuclear fleet due to load following and increased maintenance costs. Let alone horrifyingly expensive new builds.
But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.
In "most" military situations, the enemy would not want the dam destroyed - because it's a valuable part of what they want to conquer, or doing so would flood their own supply lines, or whatever. And having a well-placed reservoir could save your butt if a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#City_firestorms got started.
To keep providing power to the grid, everything from coal to solar to nuclear needs "forever" maintenance. Yes, an unmaintained dam is a hazard. That can be neutralized with a strategic breach, or (some locations) letting the reservoir silt up. But high-rise buildings, flood-control dikes, and quite a few other things are also "people die if not properly maintained" hazards.
The Banqiao dam failure alone is the worst power plant failure in human history by several magnitudes.
Not many dams have the potential to kill that many, but there are thousands of damns with potential to make Chernobyl look like a minor little affair.
As for wars, you just need to go back to 2023 for the last major dam to be blown as part of war. It "only" made 60k people homeless and killed 200-300. Just last year another dam was hit by drones but didn't burst.
Between the direct costs (at the plant), and still having a 1,000 sq. mile exclusion zone 40 years later, Chernobyl really isn't overshadowed by the potential of thousands of dams.
And by the hellish standards of that war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain... - 200 to 300 dead is a rounding error.
That is the weakest aspect of hydro - it causes massive green house gas releases during and in the aftermath of construction, and destroys vast ecosystems.
By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.
The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.
The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".
Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...
* Also: https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?
German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.
Shoving immigration diatribes randomly into unrelated discussions is really tiresome. Sir, this is a comment thread about nuclear power.
To nuclear power?
If you really think Europe isn't dependent on anything foreign other than energy and labor, you really haven't thought it through.
Because of powering AI?
> And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places.
That seems fundamentally OK? The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.
If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children, the only thing that needs to happen is better education and the situation is actually good. We're on a reasonable trend with AI and robots. People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.
It really isn't. The raw materials in our lives are a tiny fraction of our living costs in the west. 200 tons of concrete, steel, and plastic etc. in appropriate proportions is enough for a very nice house, yet it would cost less than a tenth of the sale price of that house: what you need to turn it into a nice house is expensive human labour.
The raw materials are cheap because we have machines to help extract them; before we invented them, those materials were also expensive.
There is the point that how wealthy the competing humans are is also a major factor. But you're trying to bypass an argument about resource scarcity by pretending that resources aren't scarce. If you follow that path to its logical conclusion you're probably going to end up in a very confusing world because then it won't make sense why everyone doesn't just get a house (if someone can't afford a house, why not just upskill and learn how to build one? It isn't that hard and there are a lot of people who don't own a house but really want one and are more than happy to work for the privilege).
Not particularly. We've ridden massive increases in both quality of life and population (at both the per-country and global scales) over the last two centuries.
The floor is 2-300 USD equivalent, because that's what subsistence farming is, and it took two centuries to go from $1500 to $18811: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca...
> We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary.
that's a massive shift of goalposts from "not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources".
I actually agree with this vision. But I wouldn't say every human not being a millionaire is "the #1 problem" today.
Don't leave us all in suspense.
>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.
It sounds like one of those not very nice ways you describe more so than an active societywide choice. People aren't exactly choosing in the wide sense of the word. Their states population keeps going up despite often many decades of below replacement birthrates (thus aleviating pressure in places that retain higher birthrates) whilst they feel like they struggle with housing, childcare, pressure on their wages trough migration (and other things) and leave the parental nest at historically late times.
What states, exactly? The EU as a whole has a population growth rate of 0.3% according to the world bank - that's as close to flat as makes no difference (and that's accounting for immigration!)
The only EU countries with a >1% growth rate are Ireland and Portugal.
The population has not shrunk a single year since the world wars but the natality has been below replacement since the start of the 70's if you take the colloquial replacement natality rate and since the world wars if you take the more realistic one.
I think just about every surrounding country is similar.
That growth is indeed slowing down but that has more to do with the natality continuing to drop.
There are indeed eastern european countries with far less migration which saw declines pulling the average down.
>The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources.
Taking this as true (it very evidently isn't), then since Europe already has declining birth rates, the logic step would be to prevent migration no? An influx of people would hurt.
>There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.
You say this as if this "amazing outcome" came out of nowhere, magically. People are forced into this because finances make it hard. That is not very nice.
>If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children
Why would this happen? From your comment, it doesn't seem to be something to expect?
By the way
>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.
This sentence is so extremely out of touch as to be insulting.
I agree that Europe needs to be energy independent. And population decline is a global problem.
Nuclear was the correct solution in the 90s. It's not now. Arguably you need to keep a small amount going to maintain a nuclear deterrent and subsidise it for that purpose, but that doesn't need to be any more than the current level of production.
In my state the immediate costs to parents for raising a kid up to the age of 18 are around eight median gross incomes with the opportunity costs usually estimated about as high. This means having a kid loses parents around one quarter to one third of their total lifetime income. That's before even considering environmental factors. I don't think there's a decision an average person can make that's more ecologically destructive than having a child.
Having kids is a financial and ecological disaster. As an outside observer it's remarkable to me people are still having any kids at all, which speaks to the strong subjective factors overpowering whatever objective considerations one might have about it.
That said, if the most thoughtful potential parents don't have and raise civic-minded children, the percentage of new humans raised by less "enlightened" parents will increase, leading to a downward spiral.
For my part, I'm confident that the world is a better place because my two daughters are in it, and I'm definitely a better person for having been their father.
There's no better investment.
Kids are an investment, not a sunk cost.
Sure, that's doable. Millions of working parents in powerty in every G7 country can attest how easy it is.
Objectively if no-one has kids then there will be no more humans. I guess you could consider that an ecological win. If you don't, then someone has to have kids.
But Christianity and Western Civilisation can kiss its own arse goodbye if it thinks this is a reasonable ideology to instil in to its young people.
Don’t have kids because it’ll economically ruin your life, and it’s bad for the environment anyway.
Righteo then, get on ya spaceship n fuck off to Mars then. Free up some resources and economy for us who believe having a family is the most important thing humans can do and that Western civilisation is actually pretty neat!
Have you looked at the TFRs in India and more developed Muslim countries lately?
Mostly under 2 and still dropping like a stone. Turkey, Iran or UAE are every bit as much on the road to disastrous demography as Europe is, only with some delay.
Does not surprise me... in both Europe and East Asia, the worst and deepest drops in fertility happened in previously very socially conservative societies (Spain, South Korea), while the trend was less sharp and sudden in, say, Scandinavia.
Israel may be mankind’s only hope.
As far as I’m aware Israel is the only developed Western nation with a fertility rate above replacement.
Of course, it’s more nuanced than that.
Definitely seems to be a positive correlation between religiosity and fertility rate.
Absolutely insane take imo. You do you man.
As a mid-fourties family-less man, I absolutely regret many of the decisions I’ve made that got me here.
I’ve realised I’ve been playing at a low steaks table. Smashing box and doing drugs is something a guy should do very briefly, if at all, in his early twenties. This is not a Man’s Game.
Then he’d better man up and focus on what is Good and Right or his life will be a fucking waste.
I mean even just purely selfishly, being frail-aged and having no one who genuine cares about me is fucking terrifying.
I had my first kid accidentally in college and dropped out to focus on that. Very grateful for it.
> I had my first kid accidentally in college and dropped out to focus on that. Very grateful for it.
Good man.
That said, medical tech is speeding up like everything else, so non-human surrogacy, artificial wombs, longevity meds, are all likely to impact this balance on similar timescales to such a cultural shift.
Factually incorrect.
The best way to ensure big families is to foster a culture getting marriage younger, stating married, and starting families younger.
Women have their best years of fertility from about 17 to their early thirties. Telling young women to prioritise long educations and a career over family is counter productive to carrying on a civilisation, and has largely gone on to be proven something many women regret - unsurprisingly.
Strong, cohesive, multigenerational families don’t come simply from encouraging young people to have unprotected sex, although yes that is a crude component of it.
The fact is that marriage as it is understood in the west today bears little in common with the institution of the same name in the same place in the 1950s, which itself was different from the institution of the same name in the 1800s depending on if you were in a Catholic or Protestant area, all of which differ from the institution of the same name in the 1500s, all of which differ from the institution of the same name in the 1200s, which themselves varied from Roman and Greek marriage that were different from each other. In the present day, the Mosuo so-called "walking marriage" is essentially indistinguishable from what a European or American would call "teens dating and being allowed to stay the night".
> Strong, cohesive, multigenerational families
I didn't say any of those adjectives.
The Mosuo case demonstrates your claim is false, regardless.
Furthermore, when the fear is a concern of not enough workers in the next generation to pay out the pensions of the old, it is unclear why any of your list of adjectives matter.
You think all cultures are equal?
They’re not.
Only one culture gave us pretty much everything the modern world enjoys today: Western European culture.
Microchips, invented be Westerners. Electricity. Telecommunications. Space travel, space probes, space telescopes. We pioneered and perfected all of those things. First to end slavery. Universal suffrage, gay marriage. We did all of that. Modern medicine, antibiotics. First to solve HIV. Eradicated malaria, tuberculosis, polio. All Western achievement.
Other than the Jewish tradition you mentioned, the others are merely irrelevant.
Other then Israel in the Middle East, basically no one is queuing to get in to countries other then Western ones. Everyone wants to come to the advanced European economies, France and Germany, the UK, and the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia.
Why? Because we’re awesome and everyone wants what we have.
That’s about as ecologically true as calling a bunch of crop fields grasslands.
The biodiversity and nature loss around the world are staggering, and the meagre gains on one tiny continent don't offset that.
Also, even if true, a lot is likely due to people leaving the countryside and migrating to the cities during the latter half of the 20th century. To feed these urban populations, an enormous amount of food needs to be imported from other countries. So really the deforestation has been exported, same as pollution from manufacturing.
But since the middle ages, or 500 years ago, how is that common knowledge?
Worst case for a car is that you break down on the side of the road (or I guess the brake lines give out).
Worst case for an old unmaintained gas boiler is that your house explodes. I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.
Edit for the downvoters: A properly maintained old gas boiler will probably be fine for longer than its designed lifetime. Also here's some sources for the cracked concrete: https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actual...
In light of that, planning for their decommissioning is very sensible I would say.
Are you referencing something specific that isn't bullshit?
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...
Is this like when Van der Straeten with obviously no ulterior motive whatsoever decided we needed to shut them down over the ultrasonic scanning of those vats that nobody else does?
Knowing this country we'll drain a shitload of money trough a bunch of committees. Do feasibility studies of nonsensical shit and then eventually fix and improve support of the ceiling anyway whilst the backup system keeps working ...but at 10 times to cost, in a slow way and a couple years later than one would expect.
I believe the downvotes might be from you downplaying the danger of a badly maintained car.
Maybe there just isn't a good analogy for a more than 40 year old NPP.
Maybe an old NPP is just an old NPP.
It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).
https://energy.ec.europa.eu/publications/accelerateeu-energy...
It is not only the oil shock.
Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y.
The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.
The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'.
Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power.
The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.
They should be adopting every sort of energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme...
> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.
We can already capture solar energy at a much better energy efficiency than living beings. Making hydrocarbons with hydrogen extracted from water by electrolysis and concentrated carbon dioxide has acceptable efficiency and already almost one century ago it was possible to do this at a large scale where fossil oil was not available.
The step that has the least efficiency for now is concentrating the dilute carbon dioxide from air, which plants do much better.
There is no doubt that the global efficiency of such a process could have been greatly improved if only a small fraction of the resources allocated to much more frivolous goals had been allocated to this purpose.
While other alternatives are speculative, it is enough to look outside to see plenty of PoCs that this is feasible.
And alternatively just making hydrogen but storage is a problem with that.
So simple with negative peak energy prices...
But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
The only way you can make it work is state subsidies and/or forcing people to buy the more expensive nuke power. Which will be unpopular. But maybe you can sell it as a “grid backup fee” or something.
The planned solution is hydrogen power plants, but no one wants to build them because the infrastructure, including electrolysers, is way too economically unfeasible.
Therefore, Germany is and will continue to be dependent on coal and gas, as these are the main producers every night. That's your 'grid backup fee' for you.
If we have to burn some gas to cover the occasional long term weather issue, I’m ok with that , if we’re at 90+% decarbonized at that point it’s still a huge win.
Not having enough energy or having it cut off by a neighbour is very expensive.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
Like the LFSCOE study is only using one source of renewables through all weather together with 2020 data on battery costs.
Which is why I linked a recent full system analysis. With Danish data so a vastly harder problem than a place with abundant solar. So tell me what they missed.
They even tilted the study heavily towards nuclear power and assumed that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive.
Still finding that renewables are vastly cheaper when it comes to meeting a real grid load.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i...
The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.
Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification.
China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type.
If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.
But their government has actually explained it. They purposely diversify any tech that doesn't have a clear winner, so in the long term a winner appears and they can focus on it.
And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.
You actually have to build out intermittent renewables much faster than nuclear even for comparable generating capacity due to the much shorter lifetime of the equipment. See Little's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law
China recently signed up to the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear generation. In the same time period, worldwide electricity generation is predicted to rise by 50-100%, so the nuclear share will grow by 50% - 100%.
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...
www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html
https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
But chinese nuclear is built faster and cheaper vs our units even during messmer in france. So their price guarantee is lower too. Probably similar to what distributed solar got there of 0.4y/kwh in the past. Albeit subsidies for solar were cut last year to stimulate a healthier growth
(Narrator: yes it will, and no it's not).
Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.
The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.
Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me
because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public.
The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).
Now that is a lie. The anti-nuclear push came from the Greens in the 90s. Conservatives just used it for a quick win once that policy became very popular in Germany.
It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice.
Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation.
A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view.
Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore.
In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent.
(1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation.
(2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around.
(3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent.
Like often: there is no silver bullet.
The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1].
[1]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...
Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
No one wants to bet $10s of billions of nuke capex against the relentless progress of batteries and other tech over the next 10 years, and then the 30+ years of plant operations. It’s a suckers bet , so the only ones who can take it are nation states.
First it should be said that this thread is primarily about decomissioning existing nuclear power plants. It makes enormous sense to keep operating those plants until we have a world like the one you describe, regardless of how much newer plants would cost.
But more importantly, your assumptions about the future are very optimistic. I'm sure the Germans also thought they were being very smart when they decided that nuke capex was not worth it because gas was so cheap and easily available, and then now we are finding out that this decision crippled their economy because it caused a dependency. In my opinion throwing all your chips into a technology that requires materials and production capacity you don't have, and in some cases doesn't even exist yet, is a real sucker's bet. All your rosy scenarios would fall apart in one second if China decides to stop selling batteries to you.
in the medium term its going to be batteries + solar/wind + gas backups for rare weather events. If we get the total annual use of gas down to a very achievable 10% we're still massively winning climate wise. California is getting there, 45% gas in 2022, 25% gas in 2025, and adding batteries at massively increasing rate. Full coverage of an average night is within sight, using gas just for shortfalls.
We can hopefully transition the last peaking gas backup usage to something else in the long term (hydrogen? SMRs if they ever exist?) but it isnt _that_ important in the grand arc of saving the climate.
No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y.
Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1]
> The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical.
Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost.
But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one.
In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks.
Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth.
1 https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
That is just economics.
The intermittent nature of renewable means that overcapacity is structurally required to arrive to match partially the demand.
As an example, Germany has > 100GW of Solar installed capacity for a country where the average power demand is around ~60GW *total*.
Overcapacity means that the price of electricity naturally goes to zero (or even to negative) as soon as the sun shine. And this is very visible on the EU electricity market currently [1].
It is (obviously) terrible for the profitability of the means of production and it is not sustainable: No investor sane of mind would put money on the table for a system that sell at negative price when it produces...
To compensate that, most EU countries created the CfDs (Contract for difference) system. A minimum price is guaranteed by contract to the investor and the State pay the difference when the price are too low. The UK did it (and it costs billions) [2], France did it (and it costs billions) [3] and Germany is doing it [4].
So we are subsidizing and using public money to create an artificial profitability on top of an industry that we know is not profitable due to overcapacity caused by bad public policies.
Considering that this overcapacity is also reducing the profitability of nuclear powerplants in the first place (because nuclear is CAPEX based).
The pain is triple: The final consumer pays (1) the cost of the Grid restructuring for renewable (2) the cost of the Cfds to maintain the system alive due to overcapacity (3) the additional €/MWh to the now reduced profitability of the historical production means.
So yes, at the end, the price increase.
And it is what we see currently everywhere in Europe: Electricity price are increasing continuously even if Solar/Wind LCOE is lower than ever.
[2]: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/another-record-year-cfd-s...
[3]: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/euro...
[4]: https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/germany-to-reset-gove...
Elsewhere in the world, Australia is saving money due to the rollout of renewables [1]. So is the UK [2] 3. A billion in march alone.
1 https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/record-battery... 2 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/28/wind-pow... 3 https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-wind-and-solar-s...
The subsidy is that different technologies secure a premium on the CfD. For a UK solar farm the strike price most recently was £65 per MWh. In case you were wondering no, nobody will run a gas power plant for £65 per MWh, even before Trump's war spiked price 50-100%
Yes, the offshore wind farms are significantly more expensive than a solar CfD, their strike prices were close to £100 and for that much money (adjusting for inflation) you could definitely get interest from gas plants, especially before the war - but now we're into the weeds about platform diversity. A Middle East war seems like a particularly stupid time to insist we shouldn't desire diversity...
Because of how summer works, this "But solar energy is expensive, gas is cheaper" is going to take a break for a few months because it will seem very silly, but it won't go far, expect it back in autumn.
You can already see it in charts, initially BESS shifts some of that peak midday sun energy to evening usage where it's worth more to us, but gradually competition drives down that evening price and so the BESS cuts deep into the night chasing those higher prices. It's most exaggerated in Australia today, where the reason the power is relatively cheap when you wake up before dawn isn't that somehow coal is less expensive at night - it is because much of that is solar power from yesterday and if they don't sell it to you now for whatever price they can get they've wasted a whole cycle, 'cos the sun, with free power, is coming up like it or not.
If you live in Arizona or in tropical climate maybe. For anybody else it is bullshit.
Solar production fell to few percents of its peak when the sky is covered.
Many European regions can spent multiple weeks during Winter with the sky entirely covered.
BESS is nowhere near the capacity required to even go pass a single day. And it is unlikely to change even over the next 10y.
So hoping to run entirely on Solar + BESS for a multi week Dunkelflaute is living in dreamland, no reality.
What happens in practice is that country like Germany will need to have a backup Gaz that matches its peak consumption in Winter if they want to go full renewable.
The other option is to throw the problem on your neighbours with interconnects. This is what Germany does with mainly Norway, Sweden and France. And this is not a sustainable solution.
These periods coincidentally
The next one in july should be interesting!
Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds.
Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...
The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)
All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.
The search is not expected to conclude before 2040 at the very earliest.
Meanwhile I've been filtering the german coal byproducts with my lungs, and paying my electricity 2-3x more per kwh than the french
Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
Me neither.
BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive? The prices for consumers were still raised
That's a very dumb point actually, without nuclear Ukraine would be in a much tougher situation energy wise. They're getting their shit fucked regardless, and they seemingly have 15 active reactors producing energy right now, if russians wanted to blow them up they would be long gone.
> BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive?
So what? Energy is a national security matter, electricity is a service, subsidies are fine. Btw these prices are inflated because of European wide electricity schemes (or scams, depending on how you want to see it)
Even if germany got free, unlimited and non polluting electricity right now they'd need 50+ years to make up for how much pollution they released compared to france since ww2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
Reality, on the other hand, is that nuclear power is what keeps the lights on in Ukraine in this war, and Ukraine is looking to expand.
The ARENH program is not a subsidy, it is, in fact, a reverse subsidy. It requires EDF to sell electricity cheaply to its competitors.
Waste is irrelevant for bombs due to parasitic isotopes. You clearly have zero idea about the topic.
France pays no subsidies(yet, epr2 is another topic). In fact EDF was forced to pay a tax till this year called arenh to subsidize competition. This year that tax was replaced by another tax. Many read the law wrongly about 70eur. It's not that EDF will get guaranteed CFD. It's that EDF will be forced to pay EXTRA tax IF it sells above that limit. French prices dropped both in 2025 and now in 2026. French households have lower prices vs german ones per eurostat.
Basically all your statements are nonsense antinuclear rambling
How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US:
"The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[6]" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Some German state governments even made this explicit, stating that they would not allow a repository to be designated until the German nuclear exit was finalized in their official coalition agreements.
Another nice little trick was changing the language to require the "best possible" site, rather than a suitable one. Sounds innocuous, but anyone with a bit of experience in algorithms know that in theory, this actually makes the task impossible, because how can you definitively prove that there isn't an even better site that you haven't looked at yet?
In practice it has made the process of finding a site incredibly lengthy, difficult and expensive. It doesn't help that the BASE, the Germany federal agency for nuclear waste has been completely taken over by the Green Party, so there is no interest in actually finding a site, and they spend almost their entire budget every year on spreading anti-nuclear propaganda.
The german government and institutions were (are?) full of pro gas (pro russian/russian tied) people who spend decades in the government before bouncing of to russia to work for petro companies. It's hard enough when you try, so imagine how hard it is if you don't even try
> Gerhard Schröder, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, has worked extensively for Russian state-owned energy companies since leaving office.
It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse, and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste, plus a large amount of contaminated salt mine material, sitting above ground right where it started.
I reckon they would rather not want a repeat of this.
2. It was an old mine turned into a research mine. It was never intended for actual use.
3. The waste there is mostly medical and low-level other waste like gloves.
4. It is actually safe where it is, moving it is another giant waste of time and money whose sole intent is to stoke fear and create costs.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140118011319/http://www.haz.de...
Most of the waste in asse is from medical and research sectors
Which problems make them considerably hotter - politically - than no-reuse type reactors.
We need EU-level nuclear missiles and we need them fast. We also need EU-level nuclear-powered submarines and maybe carrier groups.
Interestingly the US/UK/USSR dumped loads of nuclear waste in the ocean in the 1950s-70s and I recently read that there was basically no trace detectable of any of it.
And do you know, even if there's no trace today (sufficient dilution), if it also didn't have an impact on the ecosystem in the area at the time?
Pah! We have a lot of those places but excessive federalism has every German state blocking any concrete plan.
I personally live close to a commercial Asbestos dump (an old mine) and absolutely nobody cares about it. It's so unimportant it doesn't even have a Wikipedia article.
Yet the second radioactive waste is concerned (even if it's just old rubble) everybody seems to lose their minds and refuses to even think rational.
So what do you think is going to happen when (not "if") one of those rockets has a malfunction and blows up?
Some was stored underground in the past with bad results because the former mines were unstable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_re...
Meaning no region can be selected by a politician with out committing political suicide.
Rejecting nuclear waste site is an easy and almost cost-free way of garnering browny points with the part of your electorate that has been indoctrinated into massive radiophobia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
It is almost cost-free because in reality, nuclear waste is so low in quantity and so easy/unproblematic to store "temporarily" that it just isn't a real problem. Politicians know this. So they can play this game.
And once pressure builds enough you dig a hole in the ground like you always could have and like the Fins just did and start storing.
Growing up in the USA, my home town was contaminated with uranium, thorium, and radium due to a nearby uranium processing plant that later became a superfund site. It was in the soil, the water, and sometimes even the air. I knew far too many people who've died of cancers, and I, like many from that area, have thyroid issues from exposure.
Obviously, fuel refining hasn't just carried on like that, in the US and Europe at least. But it's one of many handy cudgels to use whenever folks get excited about nuclear.
Going in the opposite historical direction is the other side of that ledger. The actual plant in question was shut down in 1957. The AEC stepped in years earlier to triage the operation, after actually establishing formal exposure limits in 1950, which didn't exist prior to that point. Before that, the company itself had hired staff to control waste and detect contamination. They had to build their own survey equipment because there were no commercial tools available. The worst of the actual contamination was actually incurred prior to that; 1942-1945, when the gloves were entirely off building bombs.
The lessons have been learned. It's tragic and shameful history, but not terribly relevant to modern practice in nuclear power.
Nuclear energy is a God send if managed with extreme care.
Thermal power generation, which is difficult to control, is completely unnecessary in an environment where we have negative electricity prices practically every day from March to October. In Europe, we need rapidly controllable energy sources—obviously more storage capacity.
Due to the many hours during which electricity prices are close to zero, the economically viable full-load hours of a nuclear power plant are reduced to barely 3,000 hours per year, effectively tripling the real levelized cost of electricity (LOCE). In addition to the high costs of nuclear power plants, there is also the enormous expense incurred by the government for military and police security at the facilities.
Since the government prioritizes nuclear power, this leads to heavily manipulated electricity prices, with homeowners with solar panels being among the biggest losers, as they are required to feed electricity into the grid but are effectively paid the full negative prices (usually via weighted average pricing methods)
To demolish a functional nuclear power facility is pure lunacy.
Nord Stream, on the other hand...
Obviously that isn't what would happen. The poor would starve whilst the rich still fed cows to eat steak.
True. But if you're working in public policy in a vaguely-democratic country, and trying to get anything useful done - then the public feels vastly more familiar with "giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs" than with volcanic winters. So, just like "Zombie Apocalypse (wink)" disaster prep - you go with a "close enough" scenario which lets you achieve some actual preparation.
For the 99% - who don't have the time, or interest, or attention span, or cultural identification, or whatever, to sit through all that - NO.
Is your priority further education of the 1%? Or to actually get some large-scale public disaster prep done?
Hopefully the current energy crisis is a wake up call.
I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil fuels.
It's not new, it's that PWRs have to be built and operated with that capability (load following), which most nations didn't bother with until pretty recently because it does have a cost in complexity & efficiency. But France has done it that way pretty much the entire time.
> Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
Nukes with load following aren't peakers: PWRs can modulate output by 2~5%/minute (depending on their exact design and operating mode) between 30 and 100%. They're not reactive enough to compensate for wind, although they can work with the daily and seasonal patterns of solar pretty well.
The replacement for peakers are mostly batteries (hydro and pumped hydro where that's available but usually where available it's already done)
The EU has north of €1 trillion into new gas infrastructure. That's €1 trillion of commercial interests with a vested interest in negotiating the non-negotiable.
Using fossil fuels for transition is fine, particularly if it's replacing coal with natural gas. But building LNG terminals and installing gas turbines because ding dongs in Dusseldorf got scared of nukes a quarter of a continent away is a great way to raise the continent's energy prices, volatility and carbon continent.
That said, my information is outdated.
Even someone like De Sutter didn't come across as crazy in the European Parliament -- but the German ones, meine Götter!
How is that possible? And what are the consequences?
A significant reason of the “impossibility” of reversing the decision is the regulations around nuclear. Take the problem of micro tears in the concrete. Engie could have maintained the concrete. Because the plant was scheduled for decommission, they did not. So there will be small tears in the concrete. The law does not allow those small tears. Repairing the concrete now is too expensive.
The plant will be owned by the state so now the state has two options: (1) invest a truckload of money to repair the concrete or (2) change the law to allow small tears which have virtually no security consequences anyway.
We all know that the state will choose option (2) but there would be far more opposition if they did so while the plant were owned by a private company that is making profit rather than owned by the state which is operating at a deficit.
Every country should invest massively, nuclear for energy and defense, to eventually protect themselves and solar for energy security.
Bad news: according to the discussions here on HN it appears that there is no consensus on what the good mix of renewable/nuclear is. Therefore us, citizens, will be manipulated by politics.
Especially true now with the explosive growth of data center and AI workloads.
And already-built nuclear is pretty much the cheapest power you can get.
This is about *not* decommissioning working plants.
The reactors in question have been shut down by virtue of being too old (1974, 1975, 1982, 1985). Some of them have cracks in the reactor vessels. Maintenance has been lacking. There was also a case of sabotage which was never resolved.
Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.
At some point reality has to trump ideology.
Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.
If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.
>Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.
In fairness, it's not the same gov that nuked the public service than the one in power now. But on the flip side, the selloff of public services to private sector was a success and achieved the stated goals: Destroy it from the inside and use that as an excuse for more liberalization.
can anyone jumpstart me on this, since when is belgium bankrupt?
It's not.
Belgium is rated investment grade by all three agencies [1]. The cost to insure its debt implies a <2% chance of default in the next 5 years [2], lower than America [3]; the IMF assesses its "overall risk of sovereign stress...as moderate" [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_ra...
[2] https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/cds-historical-data/bel...
[3] https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/cds-historical-data/uni...
[4] https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/cr/2025/en...
Belgium is a curious country that was formed via historical quirks around religion (many Flemish/Dutch speaking catholics not wanting to be part of protestant Netherlands, but that is a gross oversimplification and the history is very complex - read up on wikipedia if curious). Historically the Flemish were the poorer part of the country, but after deindustrialization the story flipped as most of the industry was in the French parts. The result is bitterness that holds the whole country back.
Now detail three strengths Belgium posses.
If you hyper focus on the problems, you’ll be completely oblivious to the solutions.
That being said, Belgium can be and is wonderful. I'm a geopolitical nerd and I loved touring the WW1 battlefields.
Ghent is one of my favourite mid-sized cities in the world! It's got some of the best gothic architecture around, an amazing and creative beer scene, and is not overrun with tourists the way Bruges is. I was there for a conference (I'm Canadian) with a colleague who grew up in Paris. He literally said "If I knew Belgium had this, I would have visited far more often". Belgium gets a bad rap because it got so hammered in both world wars and if you just visit Brussels you're left with the impression that it has little history outside of one preserved tourist block.
I’ll get the ball rolling.
Belgium is tiny about 30,000 square kilometres.
But it produces a metric fuck tonne of food.
You only got to come up with two more now. C’mon, you can do eeeeit!
> They asked
I don’t understand this approach.
You’re on an open discussion board.
Yeah, they asked. Now I’m asking something.
Or do you expect the chair to bang their gavel and tell me I’m out of order.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w...
Debt to GDP ratio of 107%, only Greece, Italy, and France are worse. Even Spain and Portugal are better! It is frightening how many member states are over 80% when they are supposed to be at 60% or better.
And my experience is only with Flanders which is basically one large city, I can only imagine how it is in the less populated areas of Wallonia or Limburg.
But I absolutely think that nuclear is a good option for such a small and dense country. Taking over the plants as they are nearly decommissioned is a stupid move though, but you can't expect anything sensible from this government.
I do take the train quite often as I said, anything on large axes is usually fine (Brussels - Charleroi, Brussels - Antwerp, etc) but yeah smaller lines are usually struggling some more.
I wish we had more ambitious governments in general, not only in terms of energy but also in the (bio)tech scene, which used to be touted as our great strength (we do have a lot of pharma companies though).
Running ancient nuclear power plants in one of the most densely populated countries does not seem wise.
These plants have been running with phase-out in mind for the last 20 years.
Both Doel and Tihange have a long, long list of issues.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-... with the different energy mixes at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/. I know which european country's energy mix I'd choose if I could just pick one at will (with the caveat that running flat countries on hydro is not going to work, so that's sadly not ubiquitously available)
Long term, sure, also France has to transition. Uranium isn't infinite. But an existing reactor? Let's save lives and buy time where we can please :|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
Oh, and good chance that in the summer months (when demand is pretty high, especially in the South of France) they may have to shut down again because of a lack of cooling capacity. France was ahead of the game in the 70's, but should have invested a lot more than they did since then. That they installed more than they needed also didn't help, especially not because the energy produced is sold on the open market at a net loss just to keep the reactors operating.
And last but not least: they have an ever growing waste problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste_management_in_Fr...
The cost of which (besides the maintenance costs mentioned above) has not been accounted for in the electricity pricing. If they did, they'd be running at an even higher loss. Probably the next generation will be presented the bill for that.
And that’s ignoring all the physical effects of the disaster.
Meanwhile the prices dropped further than ever, 20kW peak with 20kWh batteries for EUR 10k, which provides >95% self-sufficiency in a 2p Household and lets you sell more than 80% of the yield (though prices are already very low when the sun is shining). And this is without an EV yet. Please enlighten me: Why are we still having these discussions? I don't see why that wouldn't scale in the US as well, what's the status with flexible energy pricing?
If anything, we need to build fast, flexible power plants, but their lobby groups are well oiled already without our support.
And what are those?
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-invest...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
If you can persuade the population to fear nuclear power, you also guarantee reduction of its (and its allies') ability to build and maintain WMDs deep into the future, across multiple elections and governments that might not go your preferred way.
Meanwhile, of course, the Soviets built nuclear power plants like crazy and used them for military enrichment. Until the day when explosion of their own RMBK reactor added a lot of unintended gravitas to their long-cultivated message in the West.
> In his first term, Schröder's government decided to phase out nuclear power, fund renewable energies
> Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.
Gerhard Schröder has not worked for russian nuclear reactor companies for a reason.
That said, if something really fits into Russian strategic interests, I'd be surprised if they didn't put their thumbs on the scale somewhere, and propaganda + targeted bribes do have some effect on the population.
Already since Lenin, propaganda directed at intellectuals and politicans abroad was the main weapon of the system. USSR formally ended in 1991, but the people and traditions are still extant and after a 90s hiatus are deployed again. The entire Putin's narrow circle of power are old-school USSR 60+ y.o. spooks, they won't change their ways any more than a tiger his spots.
The whole idea of an idealized humanity fell apart as soon as there was stress
> "This government chooses safe, affordable, and sustainable energy. With less dependence on fossil imports and more control over our own supply," he wrote on X.
Really? So nuclear power plants are suddenly the new "clean" hype? Because if Belgium is stating "more control over our own supply", can we mention a little something THAT BELGIUM HAS TO IMPORT URANIUM? So the "own supply" here is ... what exactly? Besides, I question the "nuclear is now clean" campaign that Leyen is doing. She is the ultimate lobbyist. It is also strange how the EU says "russian energy is bad", but then is silent when uranium is imported into the EU from Russia. We are here being lied to by these lobbyists/politicians. And a few make a lot of money, at the expense of the great majority. Why were renewables barely strategically expanded? China did so. Why are democracies so incompetent nowadays?
Maybe something changed in 2024 because [2] "Belgian nuclear plants no longer run on uranium from Russia". It ends with "Engie does not disclose how many different contracts were concluded and with which suppliers, but does say it obtained a sufficient geographical spread of its supply, Belga News Agency reports." So who knows.
[1] https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/BEL/yea...
[2] https://www.brusselstimes.com/1080337/belgian-nuclear-plants...
Say, sorting thrash. EU new idea is to make Europeans to sort thrash into 12 separate beans. So what that all trash goes through sorting process before being dumped, and there are very modern and efficient sorting robots that use AI, etc. that can do sorting much better than any human.
So, maybe, just maybe it is better to invest more into new technologies, instead of turning Europeans into wastes sorting machines.
And this is only one more example where EU countries are doing something plain idiotic, nevertheless, like in the great Buñuel's movie "The Exterminating Angel", nobody is able to admit that there is something stupid going on and it is enough to open the doors and walk away.
Short answer: Russians and Germans. The former had influence in the latter. And the latter gained a measure of economic command over the continent. (With its export and energy model under shock, that influence is near its post-unification nadir right now.)
I'm glossing over anti-nuclear national politics, as well as the genuine fiscal pressure of capex-heavy power sources like nukes (versus opex-heavy ones like gas). But broadly speaking, take Russian influence in Germany out of the picture, or have one other large fiscally responsible economy going into the Eurozone crisis, and I doubt this would have happened.
I would be more worried about the fact that a lot of the garbage that first gets separated ends up getting burned anyway because recycling is not even possible in a lot of cases.
Do you have a source for this, or are you just making things up?
So the stuff they collect doesn't need 12 different kinds of bags/bins, and the (financial) incentives are correctly aligned. I think it's a good system and pretty convenient, but I'd wish they recycle & process the waste even better afterwards. But the hardest part – getting the population on board – seems to be well-established.
Recycling is difficult, some materials are relatively easy (aluminium cans, steel), some not so much (plastics f.e. tend to degrade, some materials are energy intensive to recover). Contaminants are a major issue that still need more public awareness. But we're going in the right direction.
Lets hope we see less policy which is at a very small step back basically: "we're competing to punch ourselves in the face the hardest" in the international arena.
One bug could lead to severe damage to everything and everyone around a nuclear power plant. We see those kind of bugs on the front page daily.
In my opinion it is absolutely irresponsible to start them up in the first. I have seen too much to actually trust in people always getting their shit right.