> There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc.
You seem to rely on quite outdated information. Renewables are the cheapest source of energy in human history. The recent explosive growth is fueled by pure economics rather than feelgood.
The same thing is happening with storage with the prices plummeting. With the recent auctions landing at $50-60/MWh.
In many regions unsubsidized renewables + storage are now the cheapest source of energy, undercutting coal and gas. Nuclear power does not even enter the picture due to the absolutely insane costs involved.
I would nothing more than to enjoy those cheap prices. Here in Sweden (and EU in general), while energy prices has drop in response to renewables, grid fees and energy taxes has increased more than to cover any savings. Grid fees are now the wast majority off the bill, which pays for grid stability and transmissions that is required to operate a much more variable energy production. grid stability and transmissions are primarily a government responsibility, and when cost goes up they forward that costs as grid fees and taxes.
To put some numbers down, a quertly bill recent had $1400 usd as grid fees, while the energy consumption came down to $300. Those numbers could be specific to that house, that energy company, but it is a story echoed by more and more people in this region. The consumption cost could be $0/MWh, and the grid fees alone would still be way more expensive compared to the full bill just a couple of years ago.
In Sweden we have recently seen an explosion on costs for ancillary services as new markets has been added which needs to be built out. But they have lowered in cost after a year or two. The same will happen for the most recent markets.
Then Sweden has a problem with low population density, large grid and high wages which makes labor intensive infrastructure like the grid cost more.
We can hope/pray/predict that prices will go down in a year or two. I have yet to see any politician or providers give that promise. The government have approved new grid stability power plants (based on natural gas), and those have both investment costs and operational costs that the government want consumers to pay for in the next decade/s. In addition, the hydro power plants that already exist and was built during the 20th century need to either be refitted or removed in order to comply with EU environmental standards (and prevent mass extinction of several endangered species). That will also increase costs for grid stability for the next several decades. On top there are plans for new transmission to even out the difference between the north and south part of the country, and those are predicted to take a decade or so to build. They are not short term projects with short term price hikes.
Look at the market dynamics and volumes. It is like everyone rushing in with home based storage for the ancillary markets being promised a ROI within months.
That lasted... months...
What is your suggestion? Nuclear power does not solve it, and won't be online until the 2040s either way.
There are no easy solutions or free lunch, only true costs. Nuclear has its benefits and drawbacks (most which don't need to be repeated). Hydro power is a great natural resource, except for that extinction aspect and flooding risks. Solar and wind is great for use cases where that production variation matches the consumption and human behavior. Natural gas and other fossil fuels should just not be used in the grid, and the arguments in favor of continued use are simply wishful thinking or malicious.
What is simple is that the energy bill is going up in a speed that is much faster than inflation, while the cost of production of energy is going down. As such, the production cost of energy is a poor indicator for the price that users of energy is paying. If we want cheap energy than what we need to care about is the true cost of energy delivering, since that is what the energy bill will reflect. That include the cost of production, the time and place of production, the cost of maintaining grid stability, transportation, and market inefficiencies.
Home storage works, but gatekeeps reliable power to the relatively wealthy. You need days of it at minimum for any reasonable long term plan. Seasonal storage is the problem, nightly storage is pointless to discuss.
Just dumping external costs onto the grid as a whole is not where I want to see society going - said as someone who could easily fill an entire shed full of whole home battery storage.
A reliable and cheap power grid is so much taken for granted in developed areas of the world it astounds me. Dismantling it in favor of everyone being their own little power generation and storage island is just going to continue to create have and have nots.
Of course no one really seems to bring forth the costs to industry when they talk about this stuff. Cheap power inputs are the wealth of a society. You don’t get to be rich without it. Asking every factory to co-locate generation to their metal stamping fab or whatever is ridiculous.
At this point I think many places have gone so many decades putting their head into the sand and making this an ideology that there is actually no solution. I fully expect to see wide scale rolling blackouts in many developed economies in the next 20 years.
When I see some actual numbers that are not just financial engineering or parasitism I will start to change my views on the subject. It’s fraud and grifters all the way down the stack.
Renewables really aren't that cheap unless you view them entirely in isolation. Sun doesn't shine all night and wind doesn't blow continuously, it needs to be viewed with storage to represent a complete picture. Rooftop solar is more expensive than nuclear due to the zero economies of scale, residential storage is staggeringly expensive, and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.
Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidized so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China. Generally recycling costs aren't considered and at least in the west there's no plan to recycle at least the fiberglass in turbine blades, leaving them to be buried.
I'm all for renewables but the way they're positioned is unrealistic.
Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it. Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
If we're being pedantic, nuclear is renewable too thanks to seawater extraction. There's a practically unlimited amount of uranium in the ocean and the rock underneath it.
Rooftop PV in the US now costs around $3/watt including BOS (balance of system) and labor. This means an average 6kW home installation is less than $20k -- without storage. (This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.)
Yes home storage adds more money but a grid-tied PV installation without batteries is very useful in many parts of the country: Using the grid as your "battery" at night, a $20k investment can make your net electricity cost zero or even negative.
A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
$20,000 for a 6kW system with a 15-20% capacity factor that lasts 20 years means you're going to generate a total of 157,000kWh. That's 12.7c/kWh. Before factoring in anything that might happen to it, including damage, cleaning, replacing your inverter. That is not cheap electricity -- the LCOE of nuclear is 9-15c/kWh. That's within spitting distance of Vogtle before you add storage.
Sure the panels may last 30 years, so you can juice the numbers and maybe you live in the middle of Nevada so you can get the upper end of the capacity factor but I mean, my estimate assumes nothing happens to those panels before the year 2055. My estimate also doesn't include financing costs for your car-sized purchase or any changes to your insurance premiums.
If you add a PowerWall for $15,000 that lasts 10-15 years, that doubles the cost despite increasing the capacity factor of the system, once again assuming you have zero issues with it until 2040.
> A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
I'd do it myself and I'd be happy too, because it's neat, but that doesn't mean I'm getting a good deal or that residential solar is a cheap way to get electricity.
I suspect the people who are happy with their financial decision don't understand the difference between opex and capex, and aren't factoring in the opportunity cost of their $20-35,000 investment. If you invest $20,000 in bonds at 5% for 20 years you have $53,000 -- or in the S&P 500 at 9% you have $112,000. Historically electricity prices have grown closer to 2% per year.
Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The LCOE for consumer solar is between $81 and $217 per MWh. This is MUCH more expensive than grid based solar.
>...This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.
The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
>...A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone a lot further if spent on other solar projects) - don't you think that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels? This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run.
Thanks for the info. I thought maybe they were combining consumer rooftop with them, but didn't take the time to double-check. From the June 2024 report, the consumer rooftop cost range was $122 - $284. The commercial and industrial was $54 to $191. If inflation has caused the Community & C&I to increase that much, it is likely the consumer cost has also noticeably increased unfortunately.
It used to be that panel cost was the most important factor in PV system cost. Now the panels are nearly free and everything else determines the system cost.
> ...and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.
That's an awkward way to try to frame "solar is cheaper than nuclear" as a negative for solar power. Why should anyone care when solar became cheaper than nuclear? If you're looking at different alternatives in the year 2025, the relevant fact is which is cheaper now. All the more so since the cost for solar power, even counting the cost of storage, has been dramatically decreasing over time so the advantage is likely to be even better in the future.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US...
I honestly like the idea of nuclear power, but it seems goofy to do cost comparisons between solar and wind power being deployed right now and some hypothetical version of nuclear power we don't and might never have. I imagine nuclear power probably could be cheaper if we changed everything about how we designed, built, and maintained nuclear plants.
I also imagine that level of investment and tolerance for policy change with other power generation sources could produce equally significant cost decreases. China's growing lead in the renewable power supply chain, material recycling, rare earth materials, etc, are all examples of challenges with renewable power than can probably be solved with time and money. Shouldn't our utopian future version of nuclear power be compared against a future where we make similar investments in changing how we approach renewable power to solve all those problems?
Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting? What problem are you solving? The final bit of emergency reserves?
> Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidizes so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China.
This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
If the fossil fuel supply chain is disrupted we get an energy crisis within weeks.
What happens if the renewable supply chain is disrupted?
Well.... all existing installations keeps working for decades and in the meantime we need to figure out an alternative. After a couple of years our emergency reserves would start to work harder due to old installations aging out but the impact would be near zero.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it, Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
Which is of course why all western reactors are struggling with cost. You do know that modular reactors has been a talking point for the nuclear industry since the 1950s? That is what the industry generally bounces to when large scale projects balloon in cost. They just never deliver.
> Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting?
The only storage that matters at scale is pumped hydro, and the cost for that is not "plummeting" at all because it's built out. Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar. The gap must be made up by either peaker natgas plants (which are costly, non-renewable and emit some carbon dioxide) or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
> Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar.
I love how the talking point has switched from "storage can't even cover an hour" a couple of years ago to now apparently having trouble with "multiple weeks". How quickly reality shifts.
When we're talking about emergency reserves, because that is what you are trying to paint as the end of the world, then who the fuck cares where it comes from?
Having that problem means that close to 99% of our entire energy system is renewable. The final piece is trivial to solve with synfuels, biofuels, hydrogen or whatever when it is deemed necessary.
In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. is enough to run the entire grid without any other energy source for 16 days.
That is trivially repurposed as our car fleet is switched to BEVs.
Or just use whatever aviation and the shipping industry settles on as they decarbonize.
> or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
This tells me you don't have the slightest clue how the grid works and are reasoning backwards from attempting to justify a trillion dollar handout to the nuclear industry.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
> In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc.
Just so we're clear ethanol produced from corn is almost the same carbon intensity as the gasoline, and it's worse for the climate when you factor in the land use changes. [1] The whole program was just a giveaway to corn farmers from the Dubyah administration. Even the rosiest image painted by the renewables industry association says it's 26% less carbon intensive (but they neglect land use). Ethanol is basically fossil fuel with extra steps.
Was the carbon emitted from burning this ethanol sequestered in the ground or was it already in the air and is just cycling the same amount of carbon involved the atmosphere?
You can look at the linked study, it's a complicated topic but this is net carbon add. It's a combination of the fossil fuel based fertilizers, tractor fuel, moving the corn around, processing the corn into starch, fermenting the starch and moving the end product to blending sites. It also includes carbon released due to changes in land use.
> Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity
With nuclear power, there's no such thing as 'too much'. It's economically optimal to produce flat out ("baseload") because continued production really is "too cheap to meter", as the saying goes. The cost is pretty much all in the plant itself, which is why a lot of research into next-gen nuclear is about building smaller and cheaper plants.
> But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed
Yes? That's how a "baseload" source works. And we should not pretend that intermittent renewable sources aren't going to have the exact same issue, only to a far greater extent (especially as they scale out to "99%" of the system). You can address this by not putting all your eggs in the intermittent basket.
So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down?
The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.
You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.
Here's a history refresher:
The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?
The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.
If you've decided to build a nuclear plant already (and there are plenty of reasons for such a choice - for one thing, it adds diversity to the mix when combined with intermittent renewables) that energy is no longer "horrifically expensive", it's already paid for. If you're worried about "producing too much" (which could happen with either nuclear or renewables), putting it in storage makes sense.
Again, you don't seem to comprehend how the grid works.
Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid. Both renewable power and nuclear power competes for the most inflexible portion of the grid. A fight renewables win hands down and nuclear power is forced to throttle down.
What happens when nuclear power is forced to throttle down? It becomes more expensive due to being nearly 100% CAPEX.
Like I said, Vogtle costs 20 cents/kWh running at full tilt. Somewhere at 40 cents/kWh running half the time.
Do you notice how many instances last week renewables supplied 100% of the grid load? Mind that this is late winter in Australia.
What do you do with your nuclear plant all those hours? Shut it down? Bid negative to make renewables shut down?
In Australia old traditional base load coal plants are forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. That is the reality today. In South Australia coal plants were phased out in 2016.
> Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid.
A heavily renewable grid is in trouble whenever the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. A heavily nuclear grid is in trouble whenever demand happens to exceed the limited amount of baseload it can provide. These events tend to be uncorrelated, so one can expect that adding some nuclear to a heavily renewable grid (and vice versa) will save a lot on costly "grid stabilization" services from peaker plants and/or grid-level storage.
A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense. But its "baseload" profile seems to provide an attractive bundle of bulk supply plus some amount of stabilization compared to a "99%" intermittent renewable mix. Why shouldn't we try to reduce the high variable costs of storage and peaker plants to whatever extent turns out to be feasible?
Renewables are far better at throttling than nuclear or any other technology.
It's maybe the most consistently misinterpreted fact in the renewables debate.
I put this down to years of headlines about negative prices "caused by" solar, and when you go and look at the stats, there's always fossil plants running for contractual or operational reasons.
But also to a bizarre fear of negative numbers.
Running nuclear full out and using low or even negative prices when required to incentivize people to shift demand to match supply is a far saner, cheaper, cleaner way to run a grid, yet we have people celebrating the opposite.
You of course have not heard about storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
> These events tend to be uncorrelated,
Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
It does not seem like you did dare to look at the South Australian example. Again:
How will you run your nuclear plant in a grid that daily is ran to 100% by renewables?
> A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense.
Now you are making up something because you can't accept that nuclear power does not solve the problem at hand.
There you have a coal plant shutting down daily with all the thermal stresses and cycles coupled with that because otherwise they would have to bid negative.
In Europe we see nuclear plants voluntarily time and time again withdrawing from the grids due to sustained low prices.
You try to shift words and meanings to step around the question of who pays. But all you do is force people to spend 20 cents/kWh, excluding transmission costs, on horrifically expensive nuclear power.
You reason like an engineer trying to design an imaginary perfect system not seeing the forest for the trees, or caring the slightest about the cost to the end user.
That can be a fun thought exercise, but reality will laugh you out of the room.
> storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
How is storage "exploding globally" when the bulk of long-term grid storage is still provided by pumped hydro, a technology that's built out? Short-term high-flow storage can be interesting in combination with any inflexible source (either nuclear or intermittent renewables - for one thing, it can solve the "plant has to shut down and restart every day" point you mention) but is only a small part of the problem.
> Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
The point is that the correlation may be imperfect enough that nuclear can meaningfully contribute to addressing that problem, whereas extending intermittent renewables to "99%" of the grid cannot. (To be sure, there's also some limited upside from diversifying the geography of renewable sources, but that doesn't extend to anywhere near "99%".) If a shortfall remains, it can be made up by some combination of rarely-operated peaker plants with cheaper CAPEX, plus some demand response/load shedding, especially from industry.
Your link says "battery storage and pumped hydro will have complimentary roles to play - batteries focusing on the flexibility and speed and ability to provide system services, and pumped hydro on dealing with longer storage requirements, such as extended periods of low wind and solar output." It acknowledges that battery electric storage is short-term only, meant to smooth out daily peaks.
At current costs batteries are best suited for daily cycling. A few years ago batteries were best suited for multiple cycles per day on the ancillary markets.
Given the recent auctions in China we are starting to see batteries where a cycle every second or third day is enough.
It is essentially optimistic technobabble for the technology losing out about a potential issue coming in 10-15 years as we decarbonize.
Please do explain why we should lock in a solution for that today instead of solving it with the technology at hand when we get there.
The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even.
If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth.
Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible.
I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency.
The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out.
The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry.
We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit.
As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions.
Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.
> This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
> Or you know, just diversify renewable supply chains?
That's happening about as fast as seawater extraction. There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the environmental price.
Regardless fuel costs for nuclear plants are roughly zero, about $0.0015/kWh, and there is more than enough uranium on land. And of course reprocessing spent fuel is a totally viable solution; most of France's uranium is closed loop. The entirety of the cost is in building and financing, which can be solved with policy changes.
> I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
If you're comparing solar + wind to not(solar + wind), then either you're mainly comparing to fossil fuels, or discussing a world that doesn't exist.
Sure, you like nuclear. You can say "oh, well, if we snap our fingers and magically have the world be different than it is, then nuclear would outperform solar".
Magic doesn't exist, and if you take two people in any country and task them with adding 5GW of reliable generation, one person with nuclear and the other with solar + battery, solar + battery will achieve that goal faster and cheaper every single time, in every country on earth.
> I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
Nuclear power is irrelevant in our energy systems today. The only comparison to make is fossil fuels and with that renewables give us major advantages.
For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry. The west quickly diversified from their fossil fuels, but we have not been able to do the same with nuclear energy.
But I don't see you complaining about supply chain issues regarding how Russia absolutely dominates the nuclear energy sector?
> There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the price.
So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty? And don't start talking about all the other stuff we need to build said supply chain and nuclear power plants.
But it is fine when nuclear power does it right?
And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
What are you even attempting to do here? Just muddying the waters because nuclear power evidently does not deliver and you can't bring yourself to accept it?
That person you are arguing with is not arguing with you in good faith. They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach. The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling, and they could not come up with a better idea if things go bad, I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
> They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach.
I support renewables. I think it's important we understand the whole picture, and think we should construct them even if they're expensive and imperfect. However people seem to think that they're basically free and completely harmless to the environment while neither is true.
> The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling.
Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production. The renewables industry has historically and also continues to receives significant subsidies. So does the fossil fuel industry.
> I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem. Yes, you can put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
That is why we are seeing massive 40 year PPA agreements, the state taking the entire financial- and project risk and similar steps to force the paltry few proposed nuclear projects over the final investment decision line?
Modern nuclear power is absolutely insanely subsidized.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
Not true. Basically every nuclear plant ever built has been, if not directly financed by government, backed a guarantee to purchase every MWh produced at a fixed (or index linked to inflation) price. Hinkley Point C - under construction in the UK - are guaranteed £92.50 per MWh produced (in 2012 prices index linked to inflation - so already this has risen to £133.81/MWh and the project is still years from operation). This guarantee lasts 35 years once the plant becomes operational. For comparison, current wholesale prices in the UK are roughly half this.
As a species collective we understand the big picture.
> Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem.
Sure to you because you apparently never had that job.
It's trivial to see you are just reciting from memory and not experience. Waste is a problem in that it is generated and must be handled, transported, stored safely. Perhaps you mean it's not a long term problem once stored?
Good job making it clear you don't understand the problem. Thankfully others do. Please continue to rant online out of the way such that you stay out of the way.
> Nuclear power is irrelevant in our energy systems today.
I dunno, it's been producing 20% of US power for decades. Same as renewables. Seems relevant.
> For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry.
12% come from Russia. [1]
> So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
I feel like environmental implications are relevant to discuss, and I think the topic is relevant.
> You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty?
Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. They have a 96% recovery rate. [2]
> And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
It didn't matter in my original post either which is why it's under "if we're being pedantic."
Like I said, irrelevant compared to the fossil fuel supply chain supplying 80%.
> 12% come from Russia. [1]
Of course ignoring the intermediary steps in the supply chain which Russia controls ~50% of. But Kazakh uranium being processed in Russia is Kazakh!
And this of course ignores that my main point was that Russia is the largest player in the global nuclear technological sector.
Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
> Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. [2]
And now we again "solve" nuclear power by saying that reprocessing works. Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Just make nuclear power even more horrifically expensive! No problem!
> Which falls to 7.6% when counting the useful energy and not staring yourself blind on the electricity grid.
Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
> Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
> Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Are you able to quantify this are compared to renewables or are we just assuming? Remember in terms of costs, it's basically entirely construction -- fuel costs almost nothing. So even if reprocessing is relatively expensive, adding cost there won't really change nuclear energy prices.
> Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
Renewables are relevant given their trajectory and that they make up ~90% of new installations due to being the by far best option today.
Grid infrastructure has a lifespan of a couple decades. We are seeing a complete disruption of the grid, but it will take a couple of decades for everything to shake out as the existing fleet of fossil and nuclear plants ages out.
> France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing. But relying on Russia for your energy supply chain is fine as long as it is nuclear power?
> Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing.
They do the reprocessing at the Orano La Hague site on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. They also historically reprocessed for Germany there and continue to reprocess for Japan. You can look these things up before you respond, you know. [1]
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid the flamewar style in the future? And especially please avoid personal attacks? We'd appreciate it.
You truly are out of your depth here. France is considering building a site to reprocess uranium for us in commercial reactors since the only plant available, which they have been using for decades, is in Russia.
> The French government is "seriously" examining plans to build a site on French territory to convert and enrich reprocessed uranium. At present, Russia is the only country in the world that can recycle uranium for use in nuclear power plants.
> ...
> Specifically, to convert its reprocessed uranium (URT), France has no other option but to perform this stage in Russia, the only country with a conversion plant for URT through its public operator Rosatom. The subsequent enrichment stage could be carried out in Russia or the Netherlands.
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. The other user did it as well, but I have the impression that your violations were somewhat worse.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid the flamewar style in the future? And especially please avoid personal attacks? We'd appreciate it.
> That means it’s fully within China’s purchasing power parity advantage sphere, where everything costs 40% less than in the west. That means zero tariffs.
You seem to rely on quite outdated information. Renewables are the cheapest source of energy in human history. The recent explosive growth is fueled by pure economics rather than feelgood.
The same thing is happening with storage with the prices plummeting. With the recent auctions landing at $50-60/MWh.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...
In many regions unsubsidized renewables + storage are now the cheapest source of energy, undercutting coal and gas. Nuclear power does not even enter the picture due to the absolutely insane costs involved.