> "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
> "The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer," signaling it does not back any specific reactor design."
> "This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."
> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.
Corporate equivalent of acting like a douchebag who constantly makes up imaginary stories about how cool they are to distract from them being a complete loser.
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
It’s not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example, the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they’re working for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if corporate speakified.
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective.
The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?
>> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
> I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild
I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing benefit".
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when they've done the research."
It's better that they say these things than that they don't say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.
'We at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and NIKIET feel that the RBMK reactor design meets our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit.'
NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it.
The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons."
There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety if something goes badly wrong that's a problem.
History:
- Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major disaster.
- Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster.
- Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel, plant lost but no disaster.
Alternative reactor history:
- Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant converted to natural gas.
- AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam, had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission.
- Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3]
- Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant that reprocesses radioactive molten salt.
Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a century or so without maintenance. That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried has not worked well.
- "That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid"
Distilled water is pretty corrosive at high temperatures, isn't it? I'm no engineer but I've read that the water-chemistry management of nuclear reactors is a highly finicky topic.
Here's a crazy fact I can't get out of my head: the PWR types of reactors rely on lithium hydroxide in their nuclear water pipes, as a critical corrosion inhibitor. But the US can't make this (meaning, the isotopically enriched lithium of the correct flavor for nuclear reactors); it imports 100% of this key ingredient from foreign countries— currently, exclusively, China and Russia. Our top geopolitical adversaries could kneecap most of our nuclear power fleet, if they wanted, because of the difficult engineering minutae of "water is corrosive".
It's worth examining why they never went forward with builds. In 2023 their cost estimates for power went from a manageable $55/MWh to a barely-managable $93/MWh. And that was before all the additional cost increases that are typical for first projects.
They were unable to paint a story that was financially compelling.
Nuclear's problems are not TMI, it's Summer, and other failed builds. The government will insure catastrophic damages. It will not insure against construction cost overruns, and those may not kill people but they kill companies dead.
The vallecitos reactor site is still there to look for anyone in the bay area, at least for the next few years. It's along the 680 corridor just south of Pleasanton and it's been quietly producing medical isotopes since the 70s. They shut down the power factors after they discovered that the entire Pleasanton valley is a gigantic active fault zone called the calaveras fault, and the site itself is in a rift from from another, smaller fault called the positas fault.
The long de-fueled reactor vessel was removed just last year.[1] Sent to Texas as a final resting place. The containment dome was still in place then. The next step is to restore the Vallecitos complex to "conditions suitable for productive reuse for other commercial or industrial purposes."[2]
So that's the aftermath of the first commercial small nuclear power reactor.
Where did you see that the containment at Fukushima was too small? I thought that most of the release was done because there was not enough storage of contaminated water.
Fukishima containment.[1] The top of the containment vessel is shown in yellow, just above the red cylinder containing the reactor. The containment vessel was a heavy shell, but not much larger than the reactor. It had to contain any steam overpressure resulting from an accident, and didn't have enough volume that the steam pressure would decrease, and maybe condense. The surrounding building wasn't a pressure vessel and couldn't contain anything. Building panels blew out, leaving visible holes in the walls.
Three Mile Island containment.[2] The entire huge concrete and steel building around the reactor and support equipment is the containment vessel. When the reactor failed, radioactive steam escaped into the large containment vessel, where it was contained.
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan , Japan had about 300 TWh of nuclear for a year at the time of the accident. So $180 billion amount to $0.6/kWh over a year if I'm not mistaken. Not cheap. But if you spread over a few decades then that's reasonable.
Sadly I don't have time to go into it now, but they're massively overpaying due to miscallibrated risk tolerance. (Paying tens of millions per QALY is not a good use of money, 1 milliSv per year is an utterly insane goal)
The actual disaster had noticably bad short term effects on only a small area and long term effects on a tiny area.
I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of estimates.
The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through.
South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.
There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.
It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing, nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc.
But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are.
"Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer"
"They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs"
"Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like"
"...."
There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.
I don't think that's an accurate depiction of NRC for builds like at Georgia's Vogtle. Even in California, entire reactors have been installed backwards and the regulatory problems were not the big problem.
Given that France's builds in both Finland and France itself have been similarly disastrous as the US builds, I don't think the NRC seems to be the likely cause. And France is much better at building big things than the US is, their infrastructure costs are a fraction of US costs. IMHO there's something deeper to the lack of success of nuclear as a technology. It's a mainframe trying to compete in the cloud era.
There is an official report detailing why the project in France (the Flamanville-3 EPR) failed, published at (French ahead!) https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville , and regulations aren't a major cause (translating the summary offers a good overview).
I work for a company that provides electronics that end up in nuclear reactors. We don't do batteries, the story is just an example of the kind of headache it is.
Maybe it's true for the actual reactor control system I dunno. Our industrial phones ended up at a nuclear plant once (that we know of) and we only learned about it because the engineer called us for firmware reset procedure. The product doesn't have any nuclear energy certifications (although it is tested for rail and maritime use).
> I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades.
I think it's less an issue of anything to do with nuclear in particular, and more that we're just living in an absolute golden age of charlatans. It's like the 1980's all over again except instead of fraud being doable because of a lack of information, fraud is doable because everyone for whatever reason you'd like to describe is thoroughly committed to pretending it's the 1980's.
It's not necessarily malice, it's very easy to underestimate the difficulty building and running a real nuclear reactor. The 1953 'Paper Reactor' memo still applies fully today: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
Missing vowels + no plan + a leadership team stacked with MBAs, investment bankers, and FAMILY MEMBERS?!?= bullshit private equity "play".
Let me predict what is going to happen: a team of connected "playaz" are going to get real companies with cash and the government to give them money to shake up the nuclear market.
Then the leadership team is going to hire a token staff of scientists, engineers, and public policy folks.
They are going to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a facility (not a reactor, like an R&D facility or "rapid innovation incubator" or something) that is highly publicized and subsidized by state and local business development grants and credits but will either never be finished or never fully staffed.
Nothing will happen for four years until they either fade out of existence or declare defeat due to "regulatory and market conditions" with nothing to show but some powerpoints and press releases.
The hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into the organization is never spoken of or seen again.
Then a couple of years later they'll register another .io domain with missing vowels and start all over again.
this sounds like one of those Google PR moments where they desperately try to paint themselves as the good guys. Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes?
Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's going around these days?
> Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
It seems like these news articles about XYZ superscaler announce agreement to purchase power from nuclear startup come up every few months. My assumption is that there's very little needed from Google et al to sign these agreements, and the upside is very cheap power if the startup miraculously pulls it off, so they might as well.
I suppose like anything there are multiple reasons, but what are the top 3 why California electric rates are so high (compared to the rest of the U.S.)?
Why doesn't the state encourage more capacity to bring costs down? (to encourage electrification/EVs, etc.) Is it because they are phasing out natural gas? Is it to encourage roof top solar? Or trying to reduce consumption by having high prices? Or environmental permitting? "Lobbying" by entrenched incumbents? Or maybe the high price is due to taxes and not the price of generation?
PR staff will talk about the insurance liability and mandated action to improve infrastructure (wildfires keep starting on power lines and then burning down cities) but it's hard to look away from the record profits
My impression was that the California utilities were being operated in revenue extraction mode for decades and prioritized paying shareholders over infrastructure maintenance leading to the crisis situation we are in today. The enormous costs today are due to the need to keep paying owners as well as catching up on the deferred maintenance, and in classic fashion the owners are still gobbling up most of the money and starving the operations budgets.
PG&E is guaranteed a rate of return, meaning its profit margin is basically state-guaranteed. A large share of blame falls on CPUC and the structuring of the utilities. CPUC must decide whether they approve of rate before pge implements them, and I think it almost always does.
I'm by no means excusing pge, they were pretty clearly negligent and failed to meet their obligations. But it's a state-backed operation, which pretty much always means less punishment for failure to operate effectively.
No. Capital expenditures are profit (or really, count towards earnings).
They're long-term investments in fixed assets, not expenses that get subtracted out when calculating net income. You're just swapping cash with assets of equivalent value, so profits don't change.
I'm not sure how PG&E would possibly not increase their profits if they got a rate increase meant to cover infrastructure investments. If they spend 100% of that increased revenue on infrastructure, then 100% of that counts towards profit - not in the future - immediately.
I'm not sure excatly what you mean by "that problem," but economic might means having the ability to maintain massive infrastructure in sparsely populated, difficult terrain. It means paying massive amounts of money to inspect, clear brush, and replace 100 year old equipment piecemeal.
Additionally, that economic might means that we have very high labor costs, and the ways of fixing things that are cheapest may be different for California than other parts of the country. But the utility is incentivized to spend as much as possible on these efforts (they take a fixed percentage of costs as profit), and the regulators have no clue what's going on. So proposing a method that's the cheapest elsewhere will get a rubber stamp.
It's largely forest fires and regulation. Electricity prices are regulated by the state, and at the same time they mandate certain green energy goals. To hit these goals, electric companies have to ignore infrastructure to build renewable energy sources. If the infrastructure gets too old, it risks starting a fire, which could cost the company billions. When the state sees them lose money after a fire, the state lets them raise prices.
It is a very silly cycle which could be ended by either removing green energy goals so they could improve infrastructure, and to not hold electric companies directly liable for all damage from a fire.
It's because the California government doesn't believe in markets, prices as incentives or anything like that. California govt believes in state mandates
You understand there are multiple types of regulation, right? The deregulation you're referring to was with respect to generators being able to sell into the grid.
The relevant regulation here is the state-backed guarantees on returns for pge under authority of CPUC. CPUC approves basically any rate increases pge approves. It doesn't need to do this. It could hold pge accountable based on what they determine qualifies as operating expenses vs. infrastructure improvements. PGE wants everything to count as infrastructure improvement because they're guaranteed a rate of return on infrastructure projects.
Obviously it's difficult to determine what "infrastructure improvements" were actually due to poor management and maintenance vs. what infrastructure improvements are required purely to meet demand (for example) or from "normal wear and tear".
It's hard to reconcile 1) the fact that there's pretty broad consensus that PGE fucked up and didn't fulfill its obligations, especially maintenance and 2) reporting record profits. Clearly there's something wrong with the system, particularly the CPUC-utility relationship. AKA, regulation.
I understand that. I'm simply stating that GGP's assertion that California "doesn't believe in markets" is at odds with the reality that Pete Wilson signed a law that made California the very first state with an electricity market.
While I was going to community college in the late 90's, I had an IT consulting biz where I serviced mechanical engineers and folks in the US nuclear industry who were ex-General Electric (GE NE). I learned nuclear was heavily-regulated (rightfully so) and costly but the main barriers to new sites were insurance, the huge capital investment, and the very long project cycles. As such, these are just too risky for most business people and investors. Nowadays, even with SMRs, the ROI still doesn't make sense given the massive, massive advances in renewables and regional grid storage. Very few Americans want an unproven, fly-by-night startup SMR in their neighborhood or in their county. I'd be okay with just a few mega reactors in fixed sites in very remote areas that would be heavily defended with perimeter security and anti-aircraft/-drone emplacements. I'm not okay with SMRs on flatbed trailers with minimal security in urban areas.
Every compute company knows that power shortage is a looming crisis. They don't have nuclear expertise in-house and are desperately looking for somewhere to put their money that seems to have experience and capability
This is a good thing, but will be fruitless unless the US NRC modernizes in parallel with the industry to actually approve a new reactor in less than geologic time.
The NRC isn't the bottleneck. For the recently completed Vogtle Unit 3 reactor, construction work and permitting work ran in tandem. Early construction work started in 2009 and all NRC approvals were completed by 2012. Neither NRC regulations nor lawsuits ever halted construction. Vogtle 3 was originally supposed to be ready in 2016. It suffered enormous cost overruns and delays due to the companies actually building it before finally entering service in 2023.
The identical AP1000 reactors under construction at VC Summer in South Carolina also suffered enormous cost overruns and delays, again not caused by the NRC or lawsuits. The construction problems were so severe at the VC Summer project that the project halted after spending over $9 billion, it led to the largest business failure in the history of South Carolina, and a couple of company executives went to prison for securities fraud:
The AP1000 was a new design when Vogtle 3 and 4 were planned. It was certified by the NRC in 2005. NuScale had its small modular reactor design certified by the NRC just a couple of years ago:
If you mean that the NRC holds back designs that are more exotic than plain old light water reactors, maybe so, but that isn't relevant to the "looming power crisis" mentioned by bpodgursky up-thread. Light water reactors are the most affordable and fastest to build everywhere in the world. Pressurized heavy water reactors (like CANDU) are also mature designs. Everything else is slower and more expensive to build, with very limited operational history compared to the dominant water based reactor designs.
Ignoring AI (don't @ me) what are we doing with all that compute? Google (the search engine) hasn't meaningfully changed. Shopping is still largely the same as when Amazon first started out. Websites are pretty much the same. I don't understand what we're doing with all those operations.
I guess VOD is new, but does that really demand that amount of compute?
Ludicrous. You can't build a reactor in the US for less than $10 billion. Combine that with natural gas at prices five times less than Europe and that means that no-one will loan money for a project. If they do, it is usually subsidized by naive taxpayers. Meanwhile a windmill can transported on the Interstate in Kansas unattended and installed in two days.
I view nuclear as a prudent diversification of energy sources:
What happens if some supervolcano erupts, and because of the ashes significantly less sunlight reaches the surface of the earth.
Presumably, there will also be less wind then.
Plats survive some time (days) without light. If there is not enough backup power source (peaker gas plats, not nuclear though) the grid could quickly collapse causing a continent-wide blackout from what it would be really hard and it would take a long time to bring the grid up. Cities would be uninhabitable within a few days (no water, not sewage processing, no heating).
Not to be too simple about it, but this does happen every night. We already require (and achieve) sufficient grid diversification, without batteries and all the cool stuff coming in future.
I am not against nuclear, but I do believe we would be fine without it too.
Many birds die as a result of human activity. In the US, the leading cause of these deaths is cats [1]. Cats cause four times more bird deaths than the next anthropogenic cause of death, flying into windows.
Cats cause ~1000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.
By sheer numbers, yes, but the kinds of birds killed are different. Larger, slower reproducing birds such as eagles, condors, etc. are more at risk being killed by wind turbines because deaths in those groups have a much larger effect whereas cats kill a much larger number of birds but they tend to be smaller, faster reproducing species and as such their numbers overall aren't as much at risk.
I think his point was that birds much too large for a cat to take down are taken down by wind turbines, also some birds are much more rare than others, and many large species are relatively slow to reproduce as well.
I’m not saying they don’t but I am saying looking at sheer numbers of deaths as a comparison is misleading because it’s the details of what kinds of deaths that make the difference. Your linked article even mentions this: “ While the relationship between wind turbines and different types of bird populations, particularly apex birds, is understudied, there is some evidence that turbines can hurt those populations.”
There’s plenty meat eaters that care of birds for multiple reasons and perceive their diminution as an issue. One of them might be other animal (that they care less) regulation, like mosquitos and mouses. Another one is the delight to see them flying and singing around. And another one: seeds dispersions that contribute to the flora health.
That just isn't a real problem. A single large American landfill could take 100 years worth of wind turbine blades and not even be 25% full. If we were so inclined, we could also shred them and add them to concrete for sidewalks or the like.
That's fair. Most demolition waste can be crushed and used as stabilisation for new constructions instead of mined rocks, and that's also often cheaper. However you are right to point out the quantity which is small, for now because we didn't really scale yet.
It will be comparatively small even when scaled out. PV waste too.
My biggest concern with wind is not the blades, it's concrete foundations and perhaps steel. Concrete inherently releases CO2 when produced (from calcining of limestone), even if the energy source is non-fossil. Nuclear also faces this issue, of course. PV doesn't typically use concrete footers these days, instead using steel anchors that go directly into the ground.
There are plans to make lime from silicates, but this is not a mature technology.
Mostly people falling of roofs I think. When you have lowest bid contractors going up and down millions roofs each for a measly 10kw of power. The aggregate deaths per kw are worse for residential than other power sources.
Even if the power lines are already a given and you're just looking at the operational cost, home solar still uses them a lot to send power back. Peak usage hours are in the evening when the sun is already down.
Also, home solar is still subsidized, even in Arizona where it makes the most natural sense. I doubt it'd be a thing otherwise, even if the only alternative were utility solar. But I understand the argument that pollution is an overdue emergency and any clean energy is better than nothing.
I believe the opposite is true. You still need these hundreds of miles of power line to get you the power during the night or cloudy days. And it is actually more expensive to handle such network because the power distribution is unpredictable and one need to size the network for the worst case.
It will likely be more expensive than Vogtle, smaller reactors are just more expensive and they go big because it's more cost effective.
What's slightly different is the financial risk profile. Failing on a 1x 300WM $5B project is slightly easier than a $18B 1GW project.
My personal hypothesis is that nuclear decisions are made almost entirely along financial lines, instead of the safety concerns that dominate most debate about nuclear.
I think this is actually backwards. The reactors are build big to get economies of scale. Building 4 small ones, each of which will also go over budget, only to produce a more expensive product out of each (electricity) puts your economics backwards.
$20B for 300MW, and that's before the inevitable massive cost overruns. Continuing the Ontario provincial government's history of lighting taxpayer money on fire for electricity.
In the US, the equivalent to 1GW nuclear would be something like 4GW solar + 18GWh storage. Though it's not fully equivalent because solar + storage is far more flexible and would make a lot more money on the grid, since it can shift power to when it's needed rather than being a constant base of power.
At old NREL prices that would be $4.3B for the solar, and $7.4B for the storage, but the lifetimes don't match up with nuclear either. You'd need to replace the storage after 15-20 years, and the solar after 30 years, if the nuclear plant is going to get a lifetime extension to 50 or 60 years. But 15 years from now, prices for batteries and solar will be far far far lower, we just have no clue how much.
> In the US, the equivalent to 1GW nuclear would be something like 4GW solar + 18GWh storage.
Are you speaking about the precision location of this planned project, or generally about the United States? Really, the US is way too big to generalise about solar efficiency. Compare New England to Southwest US will have massively different solar coefficients. The same is true in Europe: Compare Scotland to Central Spain. Wildly different solar coefficients.
In addition to this, the nuclear plant also needs both major component replacements and refurbishments over it's life, and then decommissioning at end of life, neither of which are cheap or accounted for in the sticker price.
Do you know if there's enough of a market yet for battery recycling at utility scale, and if they pay you to get the old battery?
I know that there are several battery recycling startups, and their biggest hurdle is lack of batteries to recycle. Also that the amount recovered is high enough, and manufacturing progress a fast enough, that a recycled battery will have greater capacity than the original battery.
Not much, but thankfully we've invented wind turbine, batteries, hydro, and a sleep cycle that means our overnight energy usage is much lower than when the sun and us are up.
Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of). Fear of nuclear waste isn't irrational, but highly overblown because catastrophic events are more emotionally compelling than the slow degradation of either living standards and/or environment caused by competing technology.
30 years ago, I would have said the same thing. But right now solar is seeing technological advances at an exponential rate, such that by the time we build a nuclear power plant, get it approved, and get it running, solar will be both cheaper and safer while using less space.
So you claim that and that one "paper" from 2019 calculating worst case and with 2019 battery prices. Bad thing is battery prices are falling through the floor and 6 years make all the difference.
> Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of).
This is simply false. At this point, its falsity has been sufficiently well demonstrated and communicated that you should have known it was false. If you are not deliberately lying, it's only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
I think you probably just disagree with OP about the levels of our energy needs in the future.
If we just sustain human life and pleasure then yeah renewables are probably fine. If we want to pursue highly energy intensive applications and then further if we want to pursue those applications with mobility then we need nuclear.
We can pursue high energy intensive activities with renewables, higher than if we use fusion.
On Earth, solar allows high energy use before we run into limits from direct thermal pollution, since it uses energy already hitting the planet rather than introducing new energy.
In space, the energy available from sunlight vastly exceeds any available from fusion, and the feasibility difference tilts even more toward solar.
For mobility in space, beamed power will be best, and solar works with that just fine, even out to interstellar distances.
I think there are a lot of in-depth trades that can be done to show specifically when nuclear is appropriate vs solar, and I'm sure solar will win a lot of those, but I'm just going to reach for the easy ones here.
Radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, using solar would require long transmission lines. Autonomous vehicles on Mars (already use nuclear energy via RTGs). Any deep space mission where building a nuclear reactor and launching it is lower effort than complex energy beaming.
I don't think a radio telescope uses much power at all. And beamed power should work fine on the night side of the moon, beaming power via laser from collectors in space. The apertures on either end would just be a few meters.
I have to question the moon as a location for such telescopes vs. positioning them in space. We've built (small) space radio telescopes already, but none have been placed on the moon.
Solar and wind aren’t reliable energy sources. They’re not dispatchable 24x7 and fluctuate along various timescales. Storing renewable energy for 24 hours doubles the cost. Storing it seasonally increases the cost 150x. Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.
At this point, that’s sufficiently well known that you should have known it. If you’re not deliberately lying, it’s only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
Life spans of reactors can cause instability. Nuclear requires unstable mines for unstable materials which are unstably finite. Controlled by unstable governments and where by a nuclear explosion causes a very unstable aftermath. I see nothing stable about nuclear.
Unless, you mean renewable being "unstable" in the sense of no wind, no sun equates to no power. Then yes, but only until the fuel is spent.
However, renewables are stable when resources are available, stable in providing consistent clean fuel and stable in cost on upkeep than say one of a nuclear reactor.
Which is why you combine all three.
> Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.
El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, holds a unique distinction as the only island to operate solely on wind and waterpower for 28 consecutive days.
The facility ingeniously combines wind generation with pumped storage hydroelectric generation. Now that's cool.
I do know it. And I know that the intermittency can be dealt with at finite and tolerable cost, and the resulting solutions are likely to be cheaper than those using nuclear power.
Those seemingly stuck on advocating nuclear power do not seem to understand the advances made both in storage technology and in system design to deal with intermittency.
To be fair, Chernobyl was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today.
Anecdotally, I live near the Palo Verde nuclear powerplant in Arizona, we receive all of our electricity through a combination of solar (clouds are very rare here) and nuclear. These 2 factors mean energy is abundant in the state, and necessary in the summer for survival; air conditioning is a necessity due to the extreme temperatures in the summer.
The Palo Verde plant was commissioned in the 1980, and provides more power than any other reactor in the US. Since its not located near a body of water, it uses treated wastewater for cooling. It is a Pressurized water reactor design similar to the ones used on Naval vessels, a much safer design than the one used in Chernobyl, and none of which have ever experienced a meltdown or critical failure. Overall, I've never experienced any anxiety regarding the reactor not too far from where I live, it is the least of my concerns.
I believe the future will need to be a combination of renewables, to put all our eggs in one basket in foolish. Smaller and safer self contained nuclear reactors (like the ones used on Submarines) seem very promising for data centers. AI is on the rise, for better or worse, and it's power demands are constantly growing.
On the other hand, assuming the industry doesn't completely stagnate, "X was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today" will always be true.
I'm not worried about another Chernobyl. We've had one already, all reactor designs have been tested over and over again to avoid a repeat. The real risk is in all the small and seemingly insignificant things working together in unexpected ways. There will always be a nonzero chance of an incident, and due to the nature of nuclear reactors the impact of an incident is essentially unlimited.
Think of it like commercial airliners. Are they safe? Yes, absolutely. They are the safest method of travel available. I have zero worry about my safety when stepping on an airplane. But despite the tiny odds airplanes do crash from time to time, simply because there are so many of them.
An airplane crash has a smouldering crater and a few hundred dead as its result. Not great, but not terrible either: as a society we build a monument and move on. Would we still be flying airplanes if - no matter how unlikely - a crash meant that an entire city would become uninhabitable?
Good hypothesis, I would like to believe the general census would be no. Just because the impact of thought of it occurring is more devastating than the pro of flying to destination in one. I wouldn't want to fly even if there was a .1% of failure whereby it could catastrophically destroy many lives.
I don't refute that we couldn't move on. as we can take the result, analyse and not repeat. Learn from it and move on. Next plane crash causes less crater.
However a nuclear implosion you can't move on and nor is it over once it's occurred. How do you move on from a nuclear imposition? Japan and Hiroshima? They're still fighting the aftermath today and that was a nuclear bomb the same significant difference.
But if the reactor is a protected to 99.9% efficiency and that 1% could cause a aftermath that lasts forever, sure you can take the data like the plane crash and ensure it doesn't make the same sized crater but the results of the first are still devastating. Unlike the plane which is now old news.
If nuclear was a requirement and that other sources of energy were a scarcity then it would be different. But where by we have acres of desert we are not researching enough in to how to harness the energy, have oceans where winds blow, water is nearly endless, do we research that on a large scale for data centres?
It doesn't make sense for nuclear. Technically yes, you are making clean energy but at what expense and on a very dirty political basis.
Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.
The Gen 4 designs, which they also have, are physics safe: literally drop bombs on them and they still won't fail (bombing a nuclear plant in general is an over stated risk for other reasons too). They're building those now too.
> Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.
The same was said of Fukushima. And it was - until a tsunami fried all the backup local power keeping the control systems alive. Turns out the "passive cooling" still requires some valves to be controllable...
Ignoring what Elementl is developing as their material is confusing, what would be some of the practical energy sources for power hungry AI workloads other than nuclear?
Personally I’m skeptical of nuclear power given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity (sure, intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer).
But anyway, if anybody (other than the government, which gave up long ago) can pay the upfront costs of nuclear, it is the big tech companies like Google.
> […] Google has set 2030 goals to reach net zero emissions across its operations and value chain, […]
Man, I remember when 2030 seemed like the future. But now it seems downright aggressive. Good luck Google.
You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have.
If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes.
You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume.
But instead we have expensive electricity (at least here in Australia), where your mind is constantly loaded wit being aware of your energy consumption.
It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen. Instead we had yesterday in Sweden news the opening of a freshly new built natural gas power plant as the solution to that intermittence problem. Of course, those natural gas power plants are paid through subsidizes as grid stability is the government responsibility, and thus the bill for that natural gas is put on taxes and connection fees.
I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
Love how the goalposts magically shifted to ”green hydrogen deployed today!!” even though many grids still don’t even reach saturation from renewables. Storage or green hydrogen is an enormous waste of money in Poland given their grid composition.
That renewable buildout leads to larger fossil emissions being wrong is trivial to verify. The UK as one example of many:
- Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero.
- Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh.
- Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.
Massively decreasing all fossil fueled electricity production of course "extends the life" of these plants. All those plants that were shut down had their "life extended".
You can do the same for Denmark, Portugal, California, South Australia and everywhere else. First renewables offset coal followed by cutting into gas usage.
After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California:
Storage is exploding globally. China installed 74 GW comprising 134 GWh of storage in 2024. Increasing their yearly installation rate by 250%. The US is looking at installing 18 GW in 2025 making up 30% of all grid additions. Well, before Trump came with a sledgehammer of insanity.
Storage delivers. For the last bit of "emergency reserves" we can run some gas turbines. First our existing fleet and then when it becomes the most pressing issue to decarbonize we can utilize the solution aviation and shipping settled on.
Or just run the gas turbines on biofuels, green hydrogen or whatever. Start collecting food waste and create biogas from it.
Doesn't really matter, we're talking single percent of total energy demand.
I love how completely insignificant issues becomes blown up to enormous proportions try to force nuclear power into the conversation.
Lets then have a ban on all new natural gas power plants until its down to a single percent. That should not be a problem if that is all that is needed.
Using UK as an example, the majority of energy is not renewables. Why should they build new natural gas power plants? Natural gas produce more energy than any other source in the UK. They are not going from 98% renewables, 2% natural gas. (https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uks-electricity-was-cle...)
UK should increase the production of renewables energy, but they should also decommission their fossil fuel plants. If they want to use non-fossil fuel solutions, then they should do so and compete fairly and without subsidizes. Same goes for nuclear.
The cost of intermittence should not be paid by the environment or subsidizes, otherwise they are just hiding the true cost that society have to pay.
You seem to advocate for some holier than thou perfect path rather than the messy reality that is a transition of the entire energy system to a new cheaper source while upholding our modern society.
Let’s look at the area under the curve?
You know, we need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, transportation etc. as well.
Let look at what the UK has done:
- Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero.
- Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh.
- Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.
Would you say this reduction in fossil fuel usage is insignificant because they obviously aren’t done yet?
If we want to talk messy reality, then the only realistic way to prevent critical point in global warming is to build everything that is non-fossil fuel, that being renewables, nuclear, experimental storage and so on, while at the same time utilizing market forces and use risk-benefit analysis for each government intervention in order to spend government subsidies as cost effective as possible. Everything is needed in order to do as much as possible to reduce emissions.
For EU regulation that requires lower emissions and environmental issues with hydro power, the messy reality is also that the cost of breaking the law and paying the fines are currently cheaper than the economical and political costs of complying with the law. So that is what the Swedish government are doing. The Paris Agreement is just a goal and clearly there is a lot of voters who see it as incompatible with modern society.
It is also the messy reality that many current governments in EU got their votes in the last election because they bailed out the citizens when the power crisis happened and paid the power bills through taxes, causing major harm in the market and further inflated prices. Building out more natural gas power plants will reduce the cost of the next crisis, which is also the stated goal of the new one that got built in Sweden.
You still haven’t been able to answer why we should waste money on new built nuclear power.
It costs 5-10x as much, does not integrate well with renewables due to the capital structure and takes 15-20 years to build from political decision to operational plant.
We need to decarbonize now. Not extend the life of fossil assets for decades waiting for nuclear power to come online. With this nuclear power producing a fraction of the TWh compared to if the same money went into renewables and storage.
Wasting money on enormous handouts to the nuclear industry is not ”doing as much as possible to reduce emissions”. It is a dogwhistle from climate change deniers to extend the life of fossil assets to stymie their disruption by renewables.
I don’t think you’ve kept up with the renewable industry. The absolute explosion we are seeing is because renewables and storage today are cheaper than fossil fuels.
It started as feelgood moonshot decades ago. Today companies and countries are at a competitive advantage if they can retool their fossil dependent processes and systems to renewables.
> It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen
The only one promising that was the fossil industry, trying to stay relevant by pushing hydrogen as "green" and doing a switcheroo to "blue" fossil-derived hydrogen when green hydrogen inevitably turns out to be nonviable for silly things like mid-term energy storage.
> If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
No. Remember, the goal is to minimize the total greenhouse gas emissions! We're in a transition phase, if that means operating on 97.5% renewables and 2.5% natural gas until we figure out those last 2.5%, then that is totally fine. At the moment natural gas is excellent for peaker plants - especially if you implement carbon capture. Would you rather stay on the current ~50% fossil mix, solely because the transition mix isn't "green enough"? We're trying to save the environment, not trying to be holier than the pope.
If you want to present the plan as renewables and subsidized natural gas as being better than nuclear than be open about it and present it as that. It is not the same as a subsidize free renewables and storage solution.
Those 97.5% sounds very nice. Denmark has well over 100% renewables production from wind and solar, but in terms of consumption only get around 50%. The rest they need to import. 97.5 vs 50 means there is some work to be done.
I recently posted this link (https://svensksolenergi.se/statistik/elproduktion-fran-solen...) that illustrate how much energy that solar farms produce in Sweden. Getting 97.5% from that would be a nice challenge, especially around the winter months. December and January had around 3% production compared to the best previous month (which we could use as a stand-in for 100% capacity but that would be incorrect).
Natural gas is not fine. The geopolitical consequences are terrible, the environmental impact are not sustainable, and the cost are carried almost exclusively through subsidizes. Trying to sell natural gas as "saving the environment" is a political message that I do not agree with.
You're including a bunch of different generation technologies which have vastly different operating characteristics which means they are not substitutes for each other.
For example, nuclear takes days to start from cold and is really only economic if operating at a constant output. Thus you need complimentary sources to help meet changes in demand. These days, typically this means gas turbines.
Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.
> Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.
No, turbo-alternators 'burning' hydrogen do exist. And green hydrogen (produced by renewables) is cheaper than pink hydrogen (produced by a nuclear reactor) because the total cost of renewables' electricity is lower than nuclear's.
I don’t see the connection with my comment but hydrogen is irrelevant and contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation. The technical components for a hydrogen based energy market do exist but are simply unviable financially. Nuclear also struggles to compete on the basis of price in competitive markets but is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity. You could argue (I personally would not) that the higher cost of nuclear can be justified on this basis but the fact that hydrogen is an extremely potent greenhouse gas and is prone to leakage means it doesn’t even have that going for it.
The connection is that "it will also have natural gas capacity" seems false to me as backup turbo-alternators can 'burn' hydrogen ( => no natural gas capacity).
> hydrogen
> contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation
True, however it doesn't imply that it will remain irrelevant.
> unviable financially
For the time being, and less and less. Bloomberg NEF predicts that green hydrogen will cost approximately 1.2€/kg in 2050. Carbon taxes or oil prices may also play a role as nearly all hydrogen is now produced thanks to some fossil fuel.
> nuclear
> is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity
Green hydrogen could also be.
> prone to leakage
This is a major challenge for transportation-related usages, especially in small or not-intensively used vehicles. This isn't in the "gridpower backup" role, as mass and volume of storage isn't a major parameter.
I see what you meant now but still see little scope for hydrogen to have a role in the energy sector.
One reason for my skepticism is that I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen as an energy store for decades at this stage (I'm old) and for a long time believed them but here we are, with little to show for it. In fact, at historical scales, hydrogen's significance as an energy store today is less than it was in the 19th century. As a result, I've adopted "I'll believe it when I see it" approach so I just ignore hydrogen predictions - particularly ones 25 years into the future.
But the main reason is simple physics. It simply has NONE of the physical attributes you'd want in a gas to be used to store energy. It's like if you picked all the attributes you WOULDN'T want in such a gas.
Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult. Everything it comes into contact with needs special materials to avoid embrittlement. It's prone to leakage.
It has dreadful energy density. The worst.
It has potent green house gas effects when leaked into the atmosphere.
It's dangerous and highly explosive and burns with such high intensity (and invisibly) that it requires specialist fire-fighting equipment.
Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal - a fraction of that of batteries.
In summary, hydrogen as energy store makes no sense to me. And it's completely hypothetical. If we are going to talk about hypothetical approaches to storing energy in the form of a gas, then green methane makes a lot more sense. Not that I'd advocate for either but I see some potential for green methane but none for hydrogen given its physical attributes.
> I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen
Fair point, same here (I was born in 1967), however fossil fuels are so effective and adequate as energy sources, as long as we ignored/neglected their dubious effect on the climate, that there was no real attempt to explore other ways.
> Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult
For the "gridpower backup" application there is no transport needed, and storage doesn't have to be compact nor mobile (those are a major challenge for hydrogen in transportation).
Granted, however we are used to store huge volumes of dangerous materials, some gaseous at ambiant pressure/temp (methane...), even into salt caverns, albeit when we began to do so (in the 1950's) it was quite a challenge.
> Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal
Still built at absolutely massive scale around the world without subsidies. With many countries phasing out their renewable subsidies because they aren’t needed anymore.
Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the world cheaper than coal and fossil gas.
The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
Never, because we don't need 14 days of full load capable storage. Most models say we need about 3 days to get 99.99% coverage with a reasonable amount of overbuild & interconnect.
No one generally expects more than a couple of hours of storage to be needed. But for the fun exercise let’s calculate what spending Vogtles $36.8B on equivalent renewables, as in TWh delivered, and the storage gives.
That makes the renewables come out to about $9B.
With storage costing $0.063B GWh and having $28B to spend we can build 444 GWh storage.
That is the equivalent to running Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days straight.
In this calculation we don’t even bother with Vogtles O&M costs compared to near zero for renewables and storage.
Do you now understand how incredibly expensive new built western nuclear power is?
Are you really denying the learning curve based on one paper about France? You don't think maybe there's other confounding factors*? A single survey of a single country isn't counterfactual. Are you really certain that with a relatively fixed design the learning curve wouldn't apply at sufficient scale, all else being equal. The learning curve is one of the most time-tested laws in construction.
*Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear.
In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.)
-Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design
-Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires.
- regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal".
-while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out
For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.
It also includes the US seeing the same negative learning by doing.
We have research on when we have achieved learning effects.
> If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements:
> - It has to be the same site
> - It has to be the same constructor
> - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next
> - It has to be constant labor laws
> - It has to be a constant regulatory regime
> When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world.
From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today.
In the meantime renewables and storage have gone from nascent industries to today be the vast majority of all new energy production in TWh and while costing a fraction of new built nuclear power.
Again, I'd say based on the conditions for the theory to hold, the US couldn't prove or disprove the theory either way. I guess to summarize my stance: we don't know what the learning curve for nuclear is because data that is too messy. That being the case, my prior would weight the theory holding, maybe weakly, given the evidence for it elsewhere. Maybe in a few years we can infer some honest data from China.
Yeah, if we went back in time and built nuclear then we'd have nuclear today, and the fixed costs would have been paid by a previous generation. Is that surprising?
But that doesn't inform us on what the optimal policy decision is in the current year of 2025 given 2025 prices and time-to-build of the various options.
In Australia renewables have the perfect confluence of multiple factors:
- low seasonable variability of insolation in the north
- high wind speeds in the south
- land availability for solar
- high statistical diversification of renewables due to size
- higher than normal costs of nuclear due to first-of-a-kind costs dominating the total build-out costs due to the small energy needs of the country, and higher labor costs
The CSIRO studied this for Australia and released a report about it. Even when you factor in storage and transmission costs, renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear.
The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming there’s no point thinking about deploying nor researching & developing solar / wind because we don’t have the expertise nor technology.
We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either.
Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base.
And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper.
AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear.
How did nuclear slip into your list of power sources that dominate the Chinese grid? You skipped over two other sources that generate double what nuclear does and are growing faster:
I can't speak for the prior poster, but I am highly skeptical that the current business ecosystem in the United States is capable of effectively and safely building new nuclear power infrastructure, particularly if and when the ever-popular but, to the best of my knowledge, never-completed Small Modular Reactor pitch gets involved.
Yeah, we have political issues around infrastructure in the US, but those probably aren’t going away. If we can do nuclear with just technology (no politics), then it might be viable. So, as I said, good luck Google!
I wouldn't call it "a lot" when you put it into perspective.
China has about 60GW of nuclear generation capacity - this is after 70 years of building their first nuclear plant. It has about 1600GW of wind and solar after about 10 years.
In 2024, China added 80GW of wind capacity and 277GW of solar. In the first 3 months of 2025 alone, 60GW of new solar capacity and 15GW of new wind capacity were added. In 2024, 4.3GW of nuclear was added.
Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value.
Hint: it isn’t.
There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants.
Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very reactive at all. Vitrified it’s chemically non-reactive.
Nuclear waste is essentially a non-issue today. Even if there was a way to magically make spent nuclear fuel disappear it would not materially change the prospects for nuclear energy. And if all other issues with nuclear were resolved (the primary one being cost), storage of spent fuel in dry casks for several centuries is a fine and economical solution.
The only scenario in which waste processing becomes an issue is if nuclear is so wildly successful we start running out of cheap uranium and need to do reprocessing and breeding. That is not the world we live in (this is also why thorium is a non-solution.)
The comment they were replying to went out of its way to say “completely closed” which is, of course, not correct.
If we want to say nuclear generates not much in terms of byproducts, that seems like a potentially viable argument. But then, renewables don’t consume any fuel (but the installations are a lot less durable). We’re rapidly approaching the point where we might have to admit that sweeping dramatic statements about either one being universally superior are hard to justify and the differences are complicated…
All these nuclear announcements are smoke screens to cover construction of large amounts of gas fired capacity. Anyone expecting dramatic near term increases in electricity demand will need to go with gas (or renewables, but tariffs make that less competitive); nuclear, especially new designs, cannot be rolled out quickly.
> a proven technology with excellent safety record
Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more.
Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all. It is the only power source which has made entire cities impossible to live in.
I personally don't believe this is necessarily a dealbreaker with modern nuclear plants in rich countries, but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.
> a completely closed fuel life cycle
Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.
Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem. We've been operating nuclear reactors for 80 years now, but permanent waste disposal and reactor decommissioning is still in its infancy. The current state-of-the-art is essentially "let it rot in place and hope nothing goes wrong while we figure out a way to deal with it". I think it can be solved, but unless we've done so you probably shouldn't make it part of your argument.
> If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs
We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example. 9% of global power is supplied by nuclear plants. There are over 400 plants currently operational, and 700 have been decommissioned. We aren't on "baby's first nuclear reactor" anymore.
> implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved
We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.
> You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume.
Not a chance. Although fuel would indeed be quite cheap, power still isn't going to be free: someone has to pay off the massive construction loans.
Consumer power consumption is also a lot more flexible than something like internet. People don't suddenly start to consume a lot more data when their internet gets faster - a single person is still only going to watch one Netflix stream at a time, and that'll work just as fine on a 100Mbps connection as on a 8Gbps one. And all the equipment is already prepared for the faster connection, so it's not like they are saving any money by keeping it slow.
But if your power is free, why bother with gas heating? Why go for a heat pump when resistive heating has cheaper equipment? Why bother isolating your home? Why shut off your lights when you leave your home? Making electricity free means we'll be using a lot more of it, which means having to build significantly more expensive nuclear power plants.
If this was an option, countries with abundant hydro would be providing free power. And they aren't.
> But instead we have expensive electricity
Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity. While building additional nuclear could get us (mostly) off fossil fuel, it is definitely not going to make your power bill any cheaper. Nuclear power is only viable with hefty subsidies - which in practice means turning off dirt-cheap solar and wind to run expensive nuclear plants.
> Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more.
no, these are included in the calculations of "deaths per kilowatt-hour"
> Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, [...]
Nope, it's all included, how could it not be?
> Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up
Yep, yet it's still the safest, which means your argument has to be wrong.
Just to show you the magnitude of your error, the Fukushima accident was directly caused by a tsunami which killed 20,000 people. But your main concern from that event is the cost of cleanup of radioactive material.
More people die from falling off roofs while installing solar panels than from nuclear accidents.
> but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.
Well you're not technically wrong. As you've inadvertently demonstrated with your irrational arguments, since people didn't use reason to arrive at their conclusions, they would not be likely to be persuaded by it.
> Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.
Do you mean to say the waste is significantly worse than for solar panels, wind turbines, etc.?
> Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem.
Inert solid waste sitting in a barrel somewhere is not a problem that is worth talking about.
Again, the magnitude of your error is outstanding. We've been simply releasing all the, radioactive mind you, products of burning coal into the atmosphere for the past few hundreds of years but you're concerned about a tiny amount of solid waste.
> > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs
>
> We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example.
You cherry-picked the single country with the biggest share of nuclear by far.
> > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved
>
> We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.
Ironically, that's because the standards for nuclear plant safety are determined by the sort of irrational thinking you're presenting here.
> Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity.
And that's where the issue is buried, I don't believe you're taking all costs into account.
Is coal really cheaper when you include the health and environmental damage it creates? It literally can't be, the costs of human created climate change will be eye-watering.
Are renewables really cheaper once you consider the end goal of a 90%+ renewable grid? The costs of accounting for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind go up exponentially as you increase the share of renewables in the grid.
Adding the first 10% of renewables is trivial, you need no extra storage since the grid itself will simply absorb the difference.
Adding the last 10% is horribly expensive and I don't believe you're accounting for that at all.
Due to political issues, the US doesn’t have the capacity to engage in infrastructure projects that take more than ~2 years to complete, unfortunately.
> intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer
Solar power is great but intermittence is the main issue with it. If you look at 30 year historical weather data, many highly populated regions have two week periods with almost complete cloud cover. Storage and intercontinental power transmission are usually listed as the solutions to this, but the costs of these solutions are rarely included.
just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night.
So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously.
The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather.
I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?")
With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)
Generally: Renewables and storage solve somewhere high in the 90s percent.
Then throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm.
Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply.
When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed.
Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today.
I love how green hydrogen is assumed to become abundant and trivially easy to retrofit into existing infrastructure but fast neutron reactors are automatically considered infeasible by comparison.
Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.
> Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.
No, that isn't the easiest way.
The easiest — not best, easiest — way to produce massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river.
If you want the cheapest, well, in most cases PV is the cheapest source of electricity — there's variance, sometimes it's wind.
Nuclear is so expensive that it's the same range of prices as PV plus batteries. And when you're using the electricity to make hydrogen, with the hydrogen as the storage system, batteries are redundant.
Since PV needs batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve and all that), it's perfectly reasonable to have both.
And no, hydrogen as the storage system doesn't make batteries redundant. Law of conservation of energy. You are talking about using electricity to split water molecules, presumably more electricity to compress and store the collected hydrogen, and then you have the losses associated with converting back to electricity in a fuel cell or conversion to mechanical energy through combustion.
A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight. Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels. Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.
I have PV panels on my home. I love the idea of decentralized power. But the hydrogen economy is pretty theoretical at this point. Hard to store for any length of time, comparatively low combustion energy, low energy density overall, etc. It may happen, but "may" is a bad bet for long term national policy. I'd rather push more toward electrified high speed trains than hydrogen.
> Since PV needs batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve and all that), it's perfectly reasonable to have both.
Needs storage*, what that storage is depends on other factors.
(* there's a "well technically" for just a grid, in that China makes enough aluminium they could build an actually useful global power grid with negligible resistance, but it doesn't matter in practice)
As it happens, I agree with one crucial part of your final paragraph — hydrogen is hard to store for any length of time (not sure you're right about comparatively low combustion energy but that doesn't matter, low energy density overall is accurate but I don't think matters).
I favour batteries for that because battery cars beat hydrogen cars, and the storage requirements for a power grid are smaller than the requirements for transport, so we can just use the big (and expanding) pile of existing factories to do this.
But hydrogen has other uses than power, and where it's an emergency extra storage system you don't necessarily need a huge efficiency. That said, because one of the main other uses of hydrogen is to make ammonia, I expect emergency backup power to be something which burns ammonia rather than hydrogen gas — not only is it much more stable and much easier to store, it's something you'd be stockpiling anyway because fertiliser isn't applied all year around anyway.
But you could do hydrogen, if you wanted. And some people probably will, because of this sort of thing.
> A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
This is completely irrelevant for countries that aren't tiny islands or independent cities.
Even then, and even with lower 20% efficient cells, and also adding in the capacity factor of 10% that's slightly worse than the current global average, Vatican City* has the capacity for 11.1 kW/capita: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.5km%5E2+*+1kW%2Fm%5E2...
They are of course not going to tile their architecture in PV — there's a reason I wrote "that aren't … independent cities" — but this is a sense of scale.
> Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels.
Panels are as strong as you want them to be for the weather you get locally. If you need bullet-proof (FSVO), you can put them behind a bullet-proof screen.
> Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
The grid isn't the source; if you want to cripple a grid, doesn't matter if the source is nuclear, PV, coal, or hamster wheels.
> Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.
> And mis-estimating the environmental risks is exactly what went wrong with Fukushima.
It took a massive earthquake and tsunami to cause this, and the number of deaths/injuries due to the power plant is a rounding error compared to the earthquake and tsunami. Fukushima actually did most things right with the notable exception of not putting the backup generators on the roof. Had they put the generators on the roof, neither of us would have ever known the name "Fukushima".
When evaluating the Fukushima exclusion zone, compare it to the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. In that case, we still haven't cleaned up all the oil, and up to 450 miles from the initial spill. By comparison you want to transition to ammonia as a fuel source, which you correctly note is easier to store long term than molecular hydrogen and far more energy dense. Sounds like a good deal since molecular nitrogen is incredibly abundant as well.
Now I want you to imagine there's an ammonia spill in the magnitude of Exxon Valdez. Long term, the ammonia would almost certainly dissipate faster than crude oil, but the immediate acute toxicity would be far worse. You're killing basically all sea life in the area, the fumes would take out most birds and even quite a few people. If the spill were on land, it could severely compromise the ability to grow crops in the region for a long time. And that's not in the face of a massive earthquake and tsunami, but inattentiveness on the part of a single ship's crew.
The point being that large scale energy production and storage will NEVER be fuzzy and completely safe. The most common metric is deaths per unit of electricity. If a power source is small, even one death can be unforgivable. For massive amounts of power, statistics matter.
Note that the nuclear stats include both Chernobyl and Fukushima. This is notable since Chernobyl was a worst case scenario with a flawed design that has never existed in Western commercial reactors precisely because it was so unacceptably dangerous: no containment vessel, graphite moderation, graphite fuel rod tips, lack of education for its staff, a culture of secrecy, etc.
In the meantime, nuclear has provided obscenely large amounts of electricity since its inception. I'm all for expanding solar and wind, but folks really need to understand the real enemy is fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas, etc. The single largest threat to our survival as a species isn't a multi-kilometer exclusion zone but a CO2-laden atmosphere that makes the entire equatorial zone uninhabitable, and that's precisely what we're looking at within a century.
The faster we can move off carbon-based fuels by any means necessary, the better. That includes nuclear. Excluding nuclear from the conversation out of hand is lunacy.
Hydrogen is already used in many industrial processes (~1e8 metric tons/year), including turbo-alternators, while there is not a single ready-to-be-built model of industrial breeder reactor.
Not only was a design ready to be built, it was built. Went online 39 years ago. Produced 1.2GWe at peak. Not only produced power on its own but reprocessed spent fuel from other nuclear reactors.
Decommissioned 28 years ago. Because it didn't work? No. Because it wasn't safe? No. Because it wasn't reliable? No, it had a 95% availability rate.
It was taken out of service due to political pressure and legal maneuvering, not technical reasons.
Facts: Superphénix was a prototype. It didn't reach its goal (reaching the industrial stage). Not a single model of breeder reactor reached it. Mentioning its high availability rate neglects planned shutdowns (planning enough of them improves it). Its load factor in 1996 (just before its shutdown), more relevant, was 0.31, thus well below the minimum viable for an industrial reactor. Some people consider the project to be a success, but no expert or its operator has ever said so (they proclaimed their confidence in their ability to achieve industrial operation by an unspecified date), and its successor, named "ASTRID", launched 12 years later, which was supposed to design and build a reactor for €5 billion, spent more than €700 million on studies alone before being put on hold, so "it worked, but everything has to be redesigned...".
Yes, hydrogen is clearly a much easier technology to make work than fast reactors. Why is this even a question? For example, fast reactors have the issue that in an accident, if fuel melts and rearranges, one can have potentially have a configuration that is prompt supercritical on fast neutrons. This is functionally an atomic bomb.
Also, even in a Fallout Future where everything is nuclear powered, hydrogen is still needed! Some 6% of today's global natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen, and a good chunk of that is for ammonia synthesis, which is necessary to feed eight billion people.
The main hang ups for fast reactors in the US are: (1) our regulators are less sanguine about occupational safety for plutonium workers then the French and Russians (carcinogenic Pu nanoparticles —- the high energy ball mill can make sand deadly, just think what it can do for Pu) and (2) fear of nuclear proliferation if the “plutonium economy” expands. There is also (3) the economics will never be attractive with a steam turbine and all the heat exchangers that entails, but a power set like
Why do you speak on topics you obviously know so little about? Where did you get this nonsense?
Fast neutron designs aren't without their challenges, but causing an atomic explosion is not on that list. Hydrogen explosions? Possible. Steam explosions? Possible.
Atomic explosions? Not even theoretically can you get enough U-235 to clump together to do that without cancelling known basic laws of physics.
To build a bomb, you need a purity of 90%+ U-235. Nuclear power plants have what? 2%? 3%? Might even go as high as 5%? Might as well expect a pack of bubble gum to spontaneously explode.
The more detailed simulations have gotten the less bad a meltdown looks in a fast reactors. Usually some of the molten core flows away and no more critical mass. If it goes over critical there can be some energy release but over time it looks less and less and not a problem to contain.
Sodium has its problems (burns in carbon dioxide!) but the chemistry is favorable for a meltdown because the most dangerous fission products are iodine and cesium. The former reacts with the sodium to make a salt that dissolves in the sodium, the second alloys with the sodium. Either way they stay put and don’t go into the environment.
The problem is you need to ensure it's not bad in any possible configuration from an accident. This is hard to do. Will the energy release at criticality drive the material into an even more critical configuration? Such "autocatalytic" systems were considered for bomb design, but weren't chosen because of the large amounts of plutonium needed. But a fast reactor might have the plutonium of hundreds of atomic bombs.
Edward Teller famously warned about this is a nuclear industry trade publication in 1967.
The only fast reactors I'd trust would be ones with fuel dissolved in molten salt; it's hard to see how that could become concentrated in an accident that doesn't boil the salt. But such reactors have their own problems, in particular exposure of reactor structures to intense fast neutron fluxes (not as bad as in fusion reactors, but worse than LWRs.)
Increasing the heat past a certain threshold reduces the nuclear reactivity. Read up on "passive safety".
Teller may have warned about this in 1967, but nuclear technology hasn't been stagnant since 1967. Folks read his stuff and designed systems specifically to fail safe, not run away. Stop fear mongering based upon a 60-year-old supposition. Stop assuming everyone working in the nuclear industry is an idiot that hasn't thought about safety.
> Increasing the heat past a certain threshold reduces the nuclear reactivity. Read up on "passive safety".
The safety arguments for fast reactors are typically that a serious scenario will not occur, for example that fuel won't melt, not that if it does occur the results won't be bad. Do you trust that sort of argument? I don't.
Those are NOT the safety arguments used within the industry. For example in a molten salt reactor, the fuel is already melted! If it gets too hot, thermal expansion moves the radioactive isotopes further away from one another, reducing reactivity. If heat increases past a certain point, plugs at the bottom of the tanks will melt, allowing gravity to dump the fuel into multiple separated storage vessels sized to prevent further activity.
You do not know what you're talking about. You've read a bunch of fear mongering, and bought it. Do you really believe the entire industry of nuclear engineers and support staff are just blindly YOLOing their way through their jobs, damn the consequences?
I swear, you sound like the power production equivalent of antivaxers convinced the medical industry is trying to poison all of us.
"Passive safety" doesn't mean "stuff shouldn't go wrong."
It means "we're actively exploring everything that could go wrong and having the worst case scenarios fail to a safe state without requiring human intervention."
So, how exactly do you claim conclusively that molten fuel (in a fast reactor with sold fuel elements) will not flow into a bad configuration? I don't see how one can possibly do that analysis. Teller didn't see how either.
I already said MSRs would be the one kind of fast reactor I could see the analysis work, so thank you for agreeing with me on that.
As a charitable act toward you I will ignore the rest of your comment.
All the analyses I've seen for fast reactor safety are about avoiding fuel melting, not what happens if the fuel does melt. The variability in this latter scenario is so great that conclusive analysis ruling out disaster doesn't seem possible. Maybe you could explain the unexpected principle that enables one to do that? Or, lacking that, point me to a paper where such analysis has been performed.
That report you say has 1 hour of storage has four hours of battery in all the systems it compares.
It's a bit of a weird measure anyway, since it's just the ratio of storage to inverter, so it's the time it could run for when working flat out.
For your wider point, if anyone, anywhere was really contemplating a near full nuclear grid they'd have the exact same issues. Do you overbuild and curtail? Export? Store in batteries? The problems and solutions are incredibly similar now batteries have basically solved the daily variation for solar.
The fact that no one is even bothering to think that far ahead for nuclear is a recognition of how totally out of the race it is.
Cryptocurrency is mostly bullshit I think, but for whatever reason people keep buying it. That could be a nice endlessly-dispatchable economically rewarded (despite all reason) workload.
Renewables are only easy if you ignore regulations. For whatever stupid reason local busybodies lose their shit about windmills regularly and they are frustratingly hard to ignore.
For the farmer that owns the land the windmill got built on it's great. The handful of houses in the area get fuck all though and actually have to deal with the externalities.
Usually what happens is they buy out one local government, pay them, and usually fuck up the neighbors as the local government being paid not only has the incentive of money but can say put that hazardous facility just at the circumvention to their neighboring places, which get 0.
> given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity
The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will have too much when the weather is optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.
This reminded me of how France had to limit nuclear outputs because of the heatwave. New designs can probably mitigate the risk but it will inevitably add to the operational and construction costs.
Its not about "new" vs "old" designs. Cooling towers have been a feature for decades, which those french nuclear power plants just didn't have before, because it wasn't necessary yet. Thanks to climate change it now is.
Also it isn't as bad as it sounds. They had to throttle some nuclear power plants slightly. This lead to a loss of less than 0.2% of the total 2022 nuclear generation in france.
Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity.
Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days.
That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build western nuclear power is.
That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem
which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?"
If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1]
So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is
Throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm.
Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply.
When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed.
Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today.
Yes we already have a solution for all those industries which require stable power: buy an electricity future.
But somehow we need to treat the grid differently and handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry.
We have research on when we achieve learning effects.
> If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements:
> - It has to be the same site
> - It has to be the same constructor
> - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next
> - It has to be constant labor laws
> - It has to be a constant regulatory regime
> When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world.
From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today.
China is not succeeding? They have been averaging 4-5 construction starts per year since 2020 which tracks to a 2-3% nuclear power in their electricity mix.
From their 2011 target of building 300 GW nuclear power in the next 10-20 years they have so far managed to complete 46 GW. But surely those final 254 GW will show up before 2031.
> The world’s coal use is expected to reach a fresh high of 8.7bn tonnes this year, and remain at near-record levels for years as a result of a global gas crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Not sure that counts as "just about hit peak coal".
We’re not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap. Not if the data centers consume all this new energy of course which seems to be what’s happening. Maybe after everyone has turned their own portrait into a studio ghibli picture we can go back and use that new, clean energy to solve the climate crisis.
The deployment of solar is growing exponentially, with its total capacity doubling roughly every three years. Wind is growing at a similar rate. Renewables currently already account for 30% of the global electricity production, and we're seeing projections of over 45% in 2030.
Assuming the projected 2025-2030 installation speed is realistic and flattens out - bit "if", but not completely unrealistic - that means we'd be looking at 75% renewables in 2040 and 90% renewables in 2045.
Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity. If we go all-out on nuclear now, that means significant nuclear power starts coming online in 20-25 years - so 2045-2050. At that point there is no more renewables gap left to bridge. There might be a small niche left for it if there is going to be essentially zero innovation in storage and short-term peaker plants, but who's going to bet billions on that?
Nuclear would've been nice if we built massive amounts of it 30 years ago, but we didn't. But starting a large-scale nuclear rollout in 2025? It just doesn't make sense.
At this point optimising their electricity cost by load balancing their compute to where electricity is cheap, free or negative on a minute by minute basis would be a sizeable cost saving. Savings that would possibly offset the hardware overprovisioning that they would need.
Yeah, I would say of the organizations in the world that care about power outages, Google would rank among those most prepared to deal with them and the least flustered when they happen. If it has been too long between power outages Google will cause one intentionally, as an exercise.
The last time France had a blackout on the scale of Spain and Portugal was 1978. France has been and remains one of the top electricity exporters for Western Europe.
Because of nuclear.
By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression.
Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France.
Germany does not receive Russian pipeline gas and has banned Russian LNG from its ports. It receives a tiny share of Russian gas from Dutch and Belgian ports, but to my knowledge Germany has no control over this. France on the other hand is the top destination for Russian LNG in the EU, sharing the lead only with countries that refuse to support Ukraine.
Germany became a net importer of electricity in 2023, but it took the vast majority of its nuclear power plants offline long before that, when Germany still was a net exporter of electricity. Even in 2022, during the gas crisis with barely any nuclear power left, Germany net exported records amounts of electricity to other European countries, with France at the top of the receiving end because half of their nuclear reactor fleet was offline.
Lastly, Germany has one of the most stable grids in the world, while France does issue blackout warnings when demand peaks.
You do know that the French grid would crash during every cold spell without 30 GW of fossil fueled power production? With the majority coming from their neighbors, reversing said flow?
What they have done is outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors fossil fuel power plants, and then only when they truly have to they reduce the output of their nuclear power.
Stick two French next to each other and they would in short order crash.
Like harnessing the atom for enormous amounts of 24/7 power per unit volume of fuel and not emitting CO2 while we do it? Yes! Let's do that! And work on making reprocessing more affordable, so we don't even have to mine any more fuel (at least for the next 150 years).
I don't get it. Training giant LLMs can easily be task managed to line up with solar and wind availability. Shut off half the DC at night, go full power when it's sunny and windy. If they integrate the powerplant, they can easily manage this.
Is avoiding HW underutilization really worth going nuclear? The most expensive energy source of all?
I guess I'm sufficiently divorced from ops as to not know what the relationship of these costs is. I had assumed that power & cooling is a notable factor, but it sounds like the silicon itself is a majority of the cost?
Never understood the "I'm solar" or "I'm nuclear" crowd.
The issue is an engineering problem, not a baseball match.
As an system-oriented person, give me a healthy combination of available, battle tested, new and promising solutions, fine-tuning weaknesses with strengths.
Go to the stadium to solve your local team/visiting team issues. You are all falling to Big Fossil antics.
The nuclear boosters are particularly odd. I can engage in solar boosterism with my own money: I have 3.7kW on my house. I'm not going to have a backyard reactor, this isn't the Jetsons.
If it's monetary gain then thats a political not one in residence.
If not producing enough power then that's a people's problem. Being greedy taking more than what they need and for not enough resources on building efficiency.
Overall solar works. It's just gate-kept tightly by evil organisations who are scared to lose their dirty cash for such technology to evolve.
And why would a landlord sink $10,000+ in to a property for no return.
Roof top solar only works for the user who has the roof top solar.
For everyone else it makes electricity more expensive.
Happy to be proven wrong. Show me a majority of places with high roof top solar penetration where per kWh electricity rates have fallen.
And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India have that covered - I don’t need to worry about producing more or less CO2 emissions because it won’t make any difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic climate change.
That's an interesting point, but a much less costly option is to change policies to incentivize landlords, not build multi-billion dollar nuclear plants.
> And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India have that covered - I don’t need to worry about producing more or less CO2 emissions because it won’t make any difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic climate change.
That doesn't change the US's contribution, the ability of the US to form successful international agreements, and the influence of the US pulling its weight as a much wealthier country than China or India.
Blaming your neighbor for your bad behavior - I sell drugs off my porch because my neighbor does - doesn't make you less criminal. Also unacceptable, from moral and practical perspectives, is saying 'there's nothing I can do'. It's time we stop letting that pass.
In most places home rooftop solar systems are heavily subsidized by everyone else. 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 rooftop residential solar.
As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour.
We're weird because we want a proven power supply to be built and used? Are the French really that much more capable than the USA that we can't replicate or surpass what they've done in their country with nuclear?
Because, for now, those non-nuclear-capable states weren't interested in becoming nuclear-capable. On a standard PWR (the most common type of civilian industrial reactor) cooking military-grade plutonium is easy: charge it, let it start ('diverge') and then run, all as usual, then shut it down early.
Solar and wind are being deployed in enormous quantities. The technology is mature and marching up the exponential portion of the adoption S-curve. Nuclear isn’t. This isn’t even a value judgement: it’s just a statement on the incredible advantages of a technology that can be produced in factories, vs one that currently can’t.
> Solar and wind are being deployed in enormous quantities.
Yes, but that's not what's concerning the skeptics anymore, especially for solar (thankfully - the cost reductions and efficiency gains have been great). Aside from the well known geographical variance, I think the biggest legitimate concern is intermittence.
Let me try to turn that into a decent question: What variable other than energy output is most useful in order to compare energy sources? For context, all I've seen when it comes to intermittence is flame war with weak arguments thrown from both sides of the debate, i.e. "intermittence is not a problem at all, we just need batteries" to "intermittent sources are worth a fraction of an equivalent baseload source".
Honestly, I've not been convinced of either side, and (if I'm not alone in that sentiment), it may be a problem of education and communication.
Intermittence is a solved problem with storage, and storage is being deployed at an absolutely massive scale on grids that are market-driven for profits, namely Texas.
This seems to be revisionist history trying to position nuclear power as some underdog?!?!?
We threw absolutely massive handouts at the nuclear industry 20 years ago.
Only look to Vogtle, Virgin C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3 and all other projects. Moorside, Oldbury, Wylfa and countless in the US.
Had new built nuclear power delivered on budget and on time nuclear power would definitely have been part of the solution.
Instead Vogtle provides electricity costing 19 cents/kWh. Virgil C. Summer is a $10B hole in the ground and Flamanville 3, which is not finished yet, is 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
The true underdog from that time, renewables (and storage) deliver energy cheaper than even fossil fuels.
Yes? That was half a century ago. The equivalent choice in 2025 is renewables with storage.
Today they are wholly unable to build new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
Their EPR2 program is also in absolute shambles continually being pushed into the future while revising up the costs.
Now hopefully targeting investment decision in mid 2026 and the first new reactor online by 2038.
Until 2038 we should of course stop decarbonizing. No point reducing the area under the curve.
It is not like it is going better for the AP1000 or NuScale. Including financing for the APR1400 bid in Czechia again leads to similar equivalent costs.
> This set us back greatly in the struggle to reduce greenhouse emissions.
What set us back was and is resistance to action on climate change, led by fossil fuel corporations and US conservatives, which has continued for decades. It's a fundamental policy of the Republican Party. Trump is already taking drastic action in that regard; it was one of his higher priorities. To try to blame someone else is absurd, and probably a talking point from their playbook.
Many of us who care about the environment have hated the widely-held anti-nuclear stances. It's a very clean source of energy. Renewables ended up being the focus because they had to be. There was no chance of pushing nuclear forward when the general sentiment was that we needed to regress on nuclear.
>Many of us who care about the environment have hated the widely-held anti-nuclear stances
Don't try to position yourself as the majority voice. Nuclear energy is all but clean and I don't understand the odd push in the last few years to go all in on nuclear even though there was a common understanding that it should not be the future.
20 years ago nuclear was the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushed solar & wind as a distraction.
Today solar & wind are the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushes nuclear as a distraction.
Profit is tied to the subsidies, so that statement by the CEO is meaningless.
When you say nuclear was never cheap, what are you comparing it to? The impossible to compete with subsidization of coal plants? How can you compete with plants that are allowed to dump toxic radioactive waste into the atmosphere that kills hundreds of thousands annually, but your plants have to go through regulatory hell to prove they're 99.99999999% safe before even being approved?
>20 years ago nuclear was the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushed solar & wind as a distraction.
The histories of pretty much every green party in the western world and their anti-nuclear activism suggests otherwise.
Gas and oil based power generation is far simpler than nuclear. Regulatory barriers against nuclear power are far more detrimental to nuclear as a result because the issues compound.
E.g. for Germany - the most high profile nuclear exits:
- nuclear and fossile energy producers were the exact same companies - why would they fund activists to campaign against their own assets?
- coal mining and plant employees were (around the first exit) part of a significant worker voter population, especially for the social democrats but to a lesser degree for the conservatives, too. The largest state was heavily dependent on the coal industry and SPD/CDU politicians regularly moved to/from leadership positions in coal-dependent energy producers. No party except possibly the Greens would have remotely touched a coal exit and discussions around that only seriously started after the second (conservative reversal reversal) nuclear exit.
- gas and nuclear fuel in major quantities came from Russia, from different Russian state companies - why would they cut into each other's business by funding activists? They were happy for Germany to depend on them in any and all ways.
- the second nuclear exit was a political play for voter sentiment by conservatives after Fukushima - they didn't even try to explain why nuclear should be kept for all the reasons they reversed the previous exit and still killed of the nascent booming solar/wind industry - they certainly were not renewables activists.
Just recently the reverse happened as part of conservatives pre-election promises to rebuild nuclear as a play for voter sentiment due to temporarily high (war-dependent, already normalized) energy prices. It wasn't important enough for them to include in the government coalition plans in any way whatsoever - the main conservative agitator for nuclear has now had to agree that nuclear is economically dead.
The reality is that nuclear in Germany was already dead when the first exit was voted on - nobody had built plants in a long time, nobody had any plans to build them. If not for the exit plans to start a renewables transition, fossil usage would be far higher today and because of the exit reversal and delay in coal exit due to the conservatives it is much higher today than it needed to be and we're much more dependent on Chinese manufacturers, too.
At most activists were somewhat involved in voter sentiment at some points, but it wasn't particularly crucial versus the actual economic and political realities.
In the US it serves as a spoiler for republican interests because they tend to take many more votes away from democrats than republicans. So they are useful for at least one party.
Right-wing parties and the center-left have been highly effective allies in getting people to demonize and ridicule the progressive left.
The reason is, I think, that the progressives have rationally better policies - ones that become mainstream decades later, including much of what is mainstream now - so by demonizing the progressives the center and right prevent people from actually considering the policies.
> More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried and the results are pretty clear they lead to increased crime.
Crime increases were across the country, regardless of the politics of the prosecutor. They are believed to be tied to the pandemic. In places where progressive DAs remain, crime has subsequently decreased to historic lows - just like the rest of the country.
First, the crime increase was indeed nationwide, including urban and rural, according to FBI statistics.
Second, this one study says only that property crimes seemed to increase 7% and that there is no other increase, including violent crimes.
Third, it omits the massive benefits of progressive prosecutors, including following the law (and not persecuting disliked people or groups; not manipulating trials with false evidence, etc.; making police and other goverment accountable), actual justice, and reducing jail and prison populations - which saves tax dollars and save enormous damage to communities as people who now can't get jobs become unproductive and as their families are left destitute.
That doesn't match the anti-progressive propaganda, which we should know by now is motivated not by truth or concern for the public, but self-centered political gain.
Reminder that anti-nuclear activism started against nuclear weapons and nuclear dumping, and then after Chernobyl the realization that it was possible to mess up agriculture across a continent from the failure of a single plant. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-36112372
Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at sea.
In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after decades of subsidized development and incremental improvement by Chinese wafer factories.
Replacement isn't remotely close to good enough. We need a massive increase in the supply of energy. Nuclear is the only viable path for that. We can do more than one thing at a time, we have the resources.
This seems to be working backward from having decided that we must handout untold trillions to the comparatively insignificant nuclear industry.
In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new built nuclear.
Let’s compare to renewables:
- 600 GW solar PV added [1]
- 117 GW wind power [2]
- ~100 GW battery storage
Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely enormous. We’re talking a ~50x differences and it is only getting larger as renewables continue to scale.
But somehow the only technology which is ”scalable” is new built nuclear power.
Yes, we need a massive increase in the supply of energy. Solar is the only way we're going to get it. We're adding solar at a 1TW / year rate. We're adding nuclear at a rate of ~30 GW / year.
and that's just the first three hits, there are so many more. TMI won't come online for years, it's planned for 2028, but we will have to see. It was shut down in 2019 because it couldn't compete with gas prices. Microsoft is buying at inflated prices to subsidize clean energy, but solar is also clean energy and when backed by batteries it is price competitive with gas.
The news was because "whoa Microsoft is paying for nuclear" not because "whoa nuclear makes a lot of sense."
There's only so many uneconomic nuclear reactors to start back up.
I'm honestly baffled by the persistent irrationality of nuclear supporters.
This is a solved problem. The investment required to build grid storage for renewables, the TCO, the scalability, the capacity, and the build time, are all objectively better than nuclear.
So what's the real story? What is this obsession with an outdated last-century technology really about?
Any large group is composed of different motives; here are a couple of possible ones:
- Renewables are not, or not nearly as much, big profits for big business. They don't require the capital investment of fossil fuels or nuclear, and therefore they don't have the large moats of those businesses.
- Anti-liberalism (or reactionaryism): Destroying liberalism is an openly stated goal for which many will sacrifice singificant wealth and cause significant harm. Nuclear is counter to anti-nuclear liberal campaigners of yesteryear (I think conservatives often have little idea of changes since the Cold War era; they still talk about 'Communists', etc.)
Which was followed by climate change denying conservatives who found their position untenable embracing nuclear power being able to create a culture war issue in debates about climate change.
All in the name of preventing the disruption of their fossil assets by stymying renewables.
Peter Dutton in Australia which now lost is the perfect example of this with his ”coal to nuclear” plan leading to massively increased emissions for decades to come.
State capacity is a real problem. Often struggling to do even one thing. There's many places where companies are ready to go on renewables but the grid approval isn't.
People overlook how long nuclear takes to build. Hinkley Point C is approaching a decade.
But, in all seriousness, this could realistically be saving lives if you go with the assumption that Google was going to use this energy either way, and it otherwise would be coming from anything other than solar.
Every other source causes more deaths per energy produced. Coal is by far the worst, but natural gas, and even hydroelectric cost more lives than nuclear.
It took about 1GW to train Chat-GPT4. If you look at the locations in the United States (>70% of all AI is in the US), there are only ~63 geographic regions you could put a 1GW data center. As AI models are growing at ~5x per year, it seems like the infrastructure is no in place to keep the AI models growing at that rate.
As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power (it has the highest up time of any power source), I'm wondering how localities are going to react. Are people who are local to nuclear plants just going to be OK with these gigantic corporations consuming all this power in their backyard with no benefit to them while they take all the risk and impact of that power generation? I'm also wondering how these companies are going to deal with the excess nuclear waste. Ultimately it won't be Google or Meta dealing with the waste. How do we ensure that all the nuclear waste from AI is dealt with responsibly?
An average US home uses ~10,000 KWh over a year, resulting in about 1 kilowatt average power use.
Figures I can find suggest that a 737 uses approximately 7MW to stay aloft.
So a couple things I learned -- I think it's still a notable amount of power, enough to power ~6,000 homes for a year just to train a single model. But also, I learned that planes use a whole lot more power than I thought!
Training a single model is essentially consuming one plane-year's worth of power, or 3-4 flights continuously while it trains. I had no idea planes used so much energy.
But also, I bet most of these companies aren't training one model and calling it done. There's probably 1s or 10s of models being trained per year per company. That's a material amount of energy use. If we could power tens or hundreds of thousands of homes, that isn't 'trivial' energy input.
I think it's useful to put it into context next to other things we take for granted, but I don't think it's fair to diminish it as nothing either.
It is not trivial at all, it's the same energy used as about 9,000 homes and roughly 50-100 L/s of water wasted to evaporative cooling of said hardware.
"The Dongfang Electric Corporation's 26 MW offshore wind turbine is the largest in the world, surpassing previous models like the Mingyang 20 MW turbine. This turbine's larger size and capacity enable it to generate about 100 GWh of electricity annually, potentially powering 55,000 Chinese homes or 9,200 American homes."
What is the alternative though? I think it’s fair to question a decision but if people put their foot down when they don’t see the answer as good or clear enough then you end up with the status quo. This is the same thing that happened with housing (and building projects in general) in many larger cities. If all the housing projects are squashed for some decent alternative reason, you end up with the alternate reality which is potentially worse. City’s that have massive sprawl, people relying on cars for travel, unaffordable housing, etc.
In the energy case, we will be more reliant on non nuclear power: coal, fossil fuel, etc. I’m not sure you can scale “clean energy” at the rate we are moving.
Clean energy is scaling far faster than gas. Coal is dead. Nuclear takes 10+ years, and the US industry is so small that it can not scale to meet future needs.
but note that gas produces at a capacity factor of ~50%, and solar at 25%, so scale solar down by half to better compare gas to solar.
Batteries are also here in great force. The average cost of battery-backed solar is cheaper is comparable to gas, and cheaper than new nuclear.
The main barrier to new solar and batteries are grid expansion to ship the electricity places. Putting a datacenter next to a proposed site for building solar + batteries that's waiting for its turn to get connected to the grid would probably be the fastest way to scale, if fiber can go there.
The main problem with renewables is their capacity factor (amount of time they can produce their max capacity). In the US this is ~24%, in Germany I think it's ~12% (can be wrong here). The reason for nuclear here is that it has the highest capacity factor of any form of energy (see EIA.gov).
Those numbers sound about right, but the real problem for solar in Germany is how it inflates the cost, and the intermittency. The capacity factor is just a readout of those problems.
Germany is one of the major economies with the very worst solar resources in the world. So it might actually make a lot of sense for them to build a bit of nuclear instead of stringing HVDC from Spain or Italy or wherever is sunnier. Or not, it's a very tricky projection! These costs are changing quickly, and any nuclear build is a bet not only on the current costs of technologies, but a bet on the future 30-60 years of costs.
The world added 600GW of solar last year, and is adding at a 1TW annualized rate. We do not have the capacity to add any other power source at that rate.
I think you missed the forest for the trees. I did incorrectly cite GPT-4 as I was going from memory and that's suspect sometimes. I also didn't elaborate and maybe I should have given the snarky comments I'm seeing.
Actually the amount of power available matters because you are consuming energy in time. If I have a 1MW plant and a battery, I can generate 1GWh in about 3 weeks. This seems a little silly though. A Hyperscale DC campus is ~150MW to 200MW. If you plot the larger ones, they are almost all near power stations with >1GW capacity (not all).
The industry trend is towards building 1GW datacenters. Last I checked these would consume ~8.7TWh (assuming PUE of 1). However, the 8.7TWh while relevant is meaningless unless the power to the DC can be 1GW. Since the plant itself has to generate more than 1GW (the plant has a cap ratio so more than this, plus other demand, etc..) for such a site, then it follows that there are limited number of sites in the US (this is public info see EIA.gov or Wikipedia).
Grok3 is already at 140MW (100 days of training ==> 336GWh) at ~10^26 FLOP. Model FLOP is increasing at ~5x per year so by 2030, we are expecting to be ~10^28 and that would take ~10GW (24PWh). If I am optimistic and say that the efficiency can improve by 1.3x per year, then we still need a very large generating station to meet the demand or we need to distribute among many smaller sites.
You can push the numbers around however you like but the conclusion is the same, the timing may be different.
There's a reason why all the hyperscalers are investing in nuclear, large generating capacity and the highest cap factor of any form of energy.
My 2nd comment still stands, and you left unaddressed (remember the forest?)..
- You get free cooling, but if you use too much you melt the permafrost, which has huge environmental cost.
- Building in remote locations is enormously expensive, especially with the requirements of a nuclear generating station.
- Now you have to run a city for the operators to live in and ship in everything they need (not to mention hardware to the DC.
- Denmark (and so presumably Greenland) has a law against building nuclear generating stations.
Besides, building nuclear power stations with the concept that we accept an accident will happen is crazy. Better to invest in preventing them than mitigating them.
Here's a better article:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_...
> "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
> "The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer," signaling it does not back any specific reactor design."
> "This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."
> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.
Corporate equivalent of using a larger font and/or double spacing your term papers.
Corporate equivalent of acting like a douchebag who constantly makes up imaginary stories about how cool they are to distract from them being a complete loser.
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
It’s not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example, the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they’re working for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if corporate speakified.
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective.
The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?
>> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." > I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild
I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing benefit".
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when they've done the research."
It's better that they say these things than that they don't say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.
"We will appear to meet standards while extracting maximum profit"
'We at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and NIKIET feel that the RBMK reactor design meets our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit.'
Oh, it's the NuScale guy again.
NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it.
The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons."
There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety if something goes badly wrong that's a problem.
History:
- Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major disaster.
- Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster.
- Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel, plant lost but no disaster.
Alternative reactor history:
- Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant converted to natural gas.
- AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam, had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission.
- Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3]
- Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant that reprocesses radioactive molten salt.
Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a century or so without maintenance. That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried has not worked well.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
[3] https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/techn...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
- "That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid"
Distilled water is pretty corrosive at high temperatures, isn't it? I'm no engineer but I've read that the water-chemistry management of nuclear reactors is a highly finicky topic.
Here's a crazy fact I can't get out of my head: the PWR types of reactors rely on lithium hydroxide in their nuclear water pipes, as a critical corrosion inhibitor. But the US can't make this (meaning, the isotopically enriched lithium of the correct flavor for nuclear reactors); it imports 100% of this key ingredient from foreign countries— currently, exclusively, China and Russia. Our top geopolitical adversaries could kneecap most of our nuclear power fleet, if they wanted, because of the difficult engineering minutae of "water is corrosive".
True story. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716
> But they never got enough funding to build it.
It's worth examining why they never went forward with builds. In 2023 their cost estimates for power went from a manageable $55/MWh to a barely-managable $93/MWh. And that was before all the additional cost increases that are typical for first projects.
They were unable to paint a story that was financially compelling.
Nuclear's problems are not TMI, it's Summer, and other failed builds. The government will insure catastrophic damages. It will not insure against construction cost overruns, and those may not kill people but they kill companies dead.
The vallecitos reactor site is still there to look for anyone in the bay area, at least for the next few years. It's along the 680 corridor just south of Pleasanton and it's been quietly producing medical isotopes since the 70s. They shut down the power factors after they discovered that the entire Pleasanton valley is a gigantic active fault zone called the calaveras fault, and the site itself is in a rift from from another, smaller fault called the positas fault.
Probably not the greatest placement in hindsight.
The long de-fueled reactor vessel was removed just last year.[1] Sent to Texas as a final resting place. The containment dome was still in place then. The next step is to restore the Vallecitos complex to "conditions suitable for productive reuse for other commercial or industrial purposes."[2]
So that's the aftermath of the first commercial small nuclear power reactor.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Vallecitos-react...
[2] https://www.northstar.com/northstar-closes-ge-hitachi-vallec...
Where did you see that the containment at Fukushima was too small? I thought that most of the release was done because there was not enough storage of contaminated water.
Fukishima containment.[1] The top of the containment vessel is shown in yellow, just above the red cylinder containing the reactor. The containment vessel was a heavy shell, but not much larger than the reactor. It had to contain any steam overpressure resulting from an accident, and didn't have enough volume that the steam pressure would decrease, and maybe condense. The surrounding building wasn't a pressure vessel and couldn't contain anything. Building panels blew out, leaving visible holes in the walls.
Three Mile Island containment.[2] The entire huge concrete and steel building around the reactor and support equipment is the containment vessel. When the reactor failed, radioactive steam escaped into the large containment vessel, where it was contained.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/appendices/fuk...
[2] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3916/the-three-mile-island-...
Thanks!
> Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster.
Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the scale of global power production.
You wouldn’t call Fukushima a large disaster?
The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.
Nobody knows for sure, but the sole nuclear accident cleanup operations may cost $470 to $660 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan , Japan had about 300 TWh of nuclear for a year at the time of the accident. So $180 billion amount to $0.6/kWh over a year if I'm not mistaken. Not cheap. But if you spread over a few decades then that's reasonable.
> $0.6/kWh
I must be messing something up, as that’s about 3-4x what I pay for electricity and seems a lot?
Sadly I don't have time to go into it now, but they're massively overpaying due to miscallibrated risk tolerance. (Paying tens of millions per QALY is not a good use of money, 1 milliSv per year is an utterly insane goal)
The actual disaster had noticably bad short term effects on only a small area and long term effects on a tiny area.
I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of estimates.
The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through.
South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.
There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.
It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing, nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc.
But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are.
"Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer"
"They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs"
"Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like"
"...."
There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.
I don't think that's an accurate depiction of NRC for builds like at Georgia's Vogtle. Even in California, entire reactors have been installed backwards and the regulatory problems were not the big problem.
Given that France's builds in both Finland and France itself have been similarly disastrous as the US builds, I don't think the NRC seems to be the likely cause. And France is much better at building big things than the US is, their infrastructure costs are a fraction of US costs. IMHO there's something deeper to the lack of success of nuclear as a technology. It's a mainframe trying to compete in the cloud era.
There is an official report detailing why the project in France (the Flamanville-3 EPR) failed, published at (French ahead!) https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville , and regulations aren't a major cause (translating the summary offers a good overview).
Do you have a source?
I work for a company that provides electronics that end up in nuclear reactors. We don't do batteries, the story is just an example of the kind of headache it is.
Maybe it's true for the actual reactor control system I dunno. Our industrial phones ended up at a nuclear plant once (that we know of) and we only learned about it because the engineer called us for firmware reset procedure. The product doesn't have any nuclear energy certifications (although it is tested for rail and maritime use).
> I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades.
I think it's less an issue of anything to do with nuclear in particular, and more that we're just living in an absolute golden age of charlatans. It's like the 1980's all over again except instead of fraud being doable because of a lack of information, fraud is doable because everyone for whatever reason you'd like to describe is thoroughly committed to pretending it's the 1980's.
The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal is another case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
Yes, even in South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
It's not necessarily malice, it's very easy to underestimate the difficulty building and running a real nuclear reactor. The 1953 'Paper Reactor' memo still applies fully today: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
> South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.
That's why :)
Russia is also fairly successful at building reactors. Although, somehow their orders pipeline has been getting shorter and shorter (wonder why...).
>Elementl
Missing vowels + no plan + a leadership team stacked with MBAs, investment bankers, and FAMILY MEMBERS?!?= bullshit private equity "play".
Let me predict what is going to happen: a team of connected "playaz" are going to get real companies with cash and the government to give them money to shake up the nuclear market.
Then the leadership team is going to hire a token staff of scientists, engineers, and public policy folks.
They are going to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a facility (not a reactor, like an R&D facility or "rapid innovation incubator" or something) that is highly publicized and subsidized by state and local business development grants and credits but will either never be finished or never fully staffed.
Nothing will happen for four years until they either fade out of existence or declare defeat due to "regulatory and market conditions" with nothing to show but some powerpoints and press releases.
The hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into the organization is never spoken of or seen again.
Then a couple of years later they'll register another .io domain with missing vowels and start all over again.
this sounds like one of those Google PR moments where they desperately try to paint themselves as the good guys. Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes?
Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's going around these days?
> Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes?
For anyone curious about what happened with that: https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.veri...
> Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
It seems like these news articles about XYZ superscaler announce agreement to purchase power from nuclear startup come up every few months. My assumption is that there's very little needed from Google et al to sign these agreements, and the upside is very cheap power if the startup miraculously pulls it off, so they might as well.
You don't think Google is interested in getting more energy for less money?
You mean White Washing? How dare to think Google would think of such a thing. They're not evil after-all.
I suppose like anything there are multiple reasons, but what are the top 3 why California electric rates are so high (compared to the rest of the U.S.)?
https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/
Why doesn't the state encourage more capacity to bring costs down? (to encourage electrification/EVs, etc.) Is it because they are phasing out natural gas? Is it to encourage roof top solar? Or trying to reduce consumption by having high prices? Or environmental permitting? "Lobbying" by entrenched incumbents? Or maybe the high price is due to taxes and not the price of generation?
california electric rates are so high because the state board keeps raising them
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/statement/2025/02/pge-reco...
PR staff will talk about the insurance liability and mandated action to improve infrastructure (wildfires keep starting on power lines and then burning down cities) but it's hard to look away from the record profits
My impression was that the California utilities were being operated in revenue extraction mode for decades and prioritized paying shareholders over infrastructure maintenance leading to the crisis situation we are in today. The enormous costs today are due to the need to keep paying owners as well as catching up on the deferred maintenance, and in classic fashion the owners are still gobbling up most of the money and starving the operations budgets.
PG&E is guaranteed a rate of return, meaning its profit margin is basically state-guaranteed. A large share of blame falls on CPUC and the structuring of the utilities. CPUC must decide whether they approve of rate before pge implements them, and I think it almost always does.
I'm by no means excusing pge, they were pretty clearly negligent and failed to meet their obligations. But it's a state-backed operation, which pretty much always means less punishment for failure to operate effectively.
The dividends were probably ok until they went bankrupt, which resulted in not so great a deal for shareholders after all.
Where did the money go? Paying for wildfire damage.
Spending more money on infrastructure means profits will increase.
There's not really any way around that. Capital expenditures are profit.
Well, no, capital expenditures can create future profit. Emphasis on _can_ and _future_.
No. Capital expenditures are profit (or really, count towards earnings).
They're long-term investments in fixed assets, not expenses that get subtracted out when calculating net income. You're just swapping cash with assets of equivalent value, so profits don't change.
I'm not sure how PG&E would possibly not increase their profits if they got a rate increase meant to cover infrastructure investments. If they spend 100% of that increased revenue on infrastructure, then 100% of that counts towards profit - not in the future - immediately.
The average wholesale prices in California is nothing special.
The costs come from the wildfires and a derelict grid requiring large infrastructure upgrades.
I can see a derelict grid and wildfires increasing power outages but how does it increase the cost of electricity itself?
Those costs include grid fees?
Grid fees pay for damage caused by wildfires.
That's all? California has the economic might to not have that problem.
I'm not sure excatly what you mean by "that problem," but economic might means having the ability to maintain massive infrastructure in sparsely populated, difficult terrain. It means paying massive amounts of money to inspect, clear brush, and replace 100 year old equipment piecemeal.
Additionally, that economic might means that we have very high labor costs, and the ways of fixing things that are cheapest may be different for California than other parts of the country. But the utility is incentivized to spend as much as possible on these efforts (they take a fixed percentage of costs as profit), and the regulators have no clue what's going on. So proposing a method that's the cheapest elsewhere will get a rubber stamp.
It's largely forest fires and regulation. Electricity prices are regulated by the state, and at the same time they mandate certain green energy goals. To hit these goals, electric companies have to ignore infrastructure to build renewable energy sources. If the infrastructure gets too old, it risks starting a fire, which could cost the company billions. When the state sees them lose money after a fire, the state lets them raise prices.
It is a very silly cycle which could be ended by either removing green energy goals so they could improve infrastructure, and to not hold electric companies directly liable for all damage from a fire.
> It's largely forest fires and regulation
It’s PG&E and regulatory capture. Santa Clara County is off PG&E and has normal energy tariffs.
It's because the California government doesn't believe in markets, prices as incentives or anything like that. California govt believes in state mandates
California famously deregulated its electricity market at the end of the 20th century, becoming the first state to do so. https://paylesspower.com/blog/deregulated-energy-states/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_e...
You understand there are multiple types of regulation, right? The deregulation you're referring to was with respect to generators being able to sell into the grid.
The relevant regulation here is the state-backed guarantees on returns for pge under authority of CPUC. CPUC approves basically any rate increases pge approves. It doesn't need to do this. It could hold pge accountable based on what they determine qualifies as operating expenses vs. infrastructure improvements. PGE wants everything to count as infrastructure improvement because they're guaranteed a rate of return on infrastructure projects.
Obviously it's difficult to determine what "infrastructure improvements" were actually due to poor management and maintenance vs. what infrastructure improvements are required purely to meet demand (for example) or from "normal wear and tear".
It's hard to reconcile 1) the fact that there's pretty broad consensus that PGE fucked up and didn't fulfill its obligations, especially maintenance and 2) reporting record profits. Clearly there's something wrong with the system, particularly the CPUC-utility relationship. AKA, regulation.
I understand that. I'm simply stating that GGP's assertion that California "doesn't believe in markets" is at odds with the reality that Pete Wilson signed a law that made California the very first state with an electricity market.
I see, apologies if I was too aggressive in my reply.
Wow no regulations in California. First I’m hearing of this
Can we get an updated opinion in light of the facts being the exact reverse opposite of the initial hypothesis?
on the Internet? never!
Wow no regulations in California. First I’m hearing of this
Not believing in "free" markets but in state mandates would lead to stable prices.
And there’s no richer state in the union.
If anything the renewable sources are keeping rates in check.
California is raising rates to build out infrastructure for electrification and mitigation of the dangers that now exist due to climate change.
While I was going to community college in the late 90's, I had an IT consulting biz where I serviced mechanical engineers and folks in the US nuclear industry who were ex-General Electric (GE NE). I learned nuclear was heavily-regulated (rightfully so) and costly but the main barriers to new sites were insurance, the huge capital investment, and the very long project cycles. As such, these are just too risky for most business people and investors. Nowadays, even with SMRs, the ROI still doesn't make sense given the massive, massive advances in renewables and regional grid storage. Very few Americans want an unproven, fly-by-night startup SMR in their neighborhood or in their county. I'd be okay with just a few mega reactors in fixed sites in very remote areas that would be heavily defended with perimeter security and anti-aircraft/-drone emplacements. I'm not okay with SMRs on flatbed trailers with minimal security in urban areas.
Every compute company knows that power shortage is a looming crisis. They don't have nuclear expertise in-house and are desperately looking for somewhere to put their money that seems to have experience and capability
This is a good thing, but will be fruitless unless the US NRC modernizes in parallel with the industry to actually approve a new reactor in less than geologic time.
The NRC isn't the bottleneck. For the recently completed Vogtle Unit 3 reactor, construction work and permitting work ran in tandem. Early construction work started in 2009 and all NRC approvals were completed by 2012. Neither NRC regulations nor lawsuits ever halted construction. Vogtle 3 was originally supposed to be ready in 2016. It suffered enormous cost overruns and delays due to the companies actually building it before finally entering service in 2023.
https://www.powermag.com/vogtle-3-reaches-initial-criticalit...
The identical AP1000 reactors under construction at VC Summer in South Carolina also suffered enormous cost overruns and delays, again not caused by the NRC or lawsuits. The construction problems were so severe at the VC Summer project that the project halted after spending over $9 billion, it led to the largest business failure in the history of South Carolina, and a couple of company executives went to prison for securities fraud:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
NRC is holding back new designs, not existing ones.
The AP1000 was a new design when Vogtle 3 and 4 were planned. It was certified by the NRC in 2005. NuScale had its small modular reactor design certified by the NRC just a couple of years ago:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-sm...
If you mean that the NRC holds back designs that are more exotic than plain old light water reactors, maybe so, but that isn't relevant to the "looming power crisis" mentioned by bpodgursky up-thread. Light water reactors are the most affordable and fastest to build everywhere in the world. Pressurized heavy water reactors (like CANDU) are also mature designs. Everything else is slower and more expensive to build, with very limited operational history compared to the dominant water based reactor designs.
Ignoring AI (don't @ me) what are we doing with all that compute? Google (the search engine) hasn't meaningfully changed. Shopping is still largely the same as when Amazon first started out. Websites are pretty much the same. I don't understand what we're doing with all those operations.
I guess VOD is new, but does that really demand that amount of compute?
More people and more companies engaging in digital services which are backed by Google cloud or another cloud?
Ludicrous. You can't build a reactor in the US for less than $10 billion. Combine that with natural gas at prices five times less than Europe and that means that no-one will loan money for a project. If they do, it is usually subsidized by naive taxpayers. Meanwhile a windmill can transported on the Interstate in Kansas unattended and installed in two days.
I view nuclear as a prudent diversification of energy sources: What happens if some supervolcano erupts, and because of the ashes significantly less sunlight reaches the surface of the earth. Presumably, there will also be less wind then.
If that is your concern, then the thing to worry about is dramatic loss in food production before energy becomes an issue.
Plats survive some time (days) without light. If there is not enough backup power source (peaker gas plats, not nuclear though) the grid could quickly collapse causing a continent-wide blackout from what it would be really hard and it would take a long time to bring the grid up. Cities would be uninhabitable within a few days (no water, not sewage processing, no heating).
Not to be too simple about it, but this does happen every night. We already require (and achieve) sufficient grid diversification, without batteries and all the cool stuff coming in future.
I am not against nuclear, but I do believe we would be fine without it too.
we can make food from oil, gas and other hydrocarbons.
I think we would have a harder time finding food and clean water in this scenario
Even on a dead earth the AI must consume and indescribable amount of power.
Shades of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question.
Plot twist: the computer's last act at the end of The Last Question was just an LLM's hallucination.
If your worry is volcanoes, geothermal power can remove energy from them before they explode. On a sufficient scale they could even prevent them.
Are we playing What-if?
What if hackers/terrorist attack the power plants?
What if the operating companies values profit over security?
What if an earthquake or Tsunami hits nuclear power plant?
Am I stupid or naive to ask:
Are most power plants in 2025 air-gapped? I assume yes.And hackers can’t beat air gaps
https://www.missionsecure.com/blog/cyber-attack-india-larges...
The Iranian nuclear program was also air gapped.
Didn’t stop Stuxnet.
It’s interesting what you can do with USB drives.
And more power plants means more possibilities for human errors.
Even without I think wind will become too expensive eventually to make it worth while. Especially when solar gets more efficient and cheaper.
Wind has down sides like moving parts and requiring giant concrete poors. Birds strikes, noise as well as ground vibration are also issues.
> Wind has down sides like ...Birds strikes
Many birds die as a result of human activity. In the US, the leading cause of these deaths is cats [1]. Cats cause four times more bird deaths than the next anthropogenic cause of death, flying into windows.
Cats cause ~1000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...
By sheer numbers, yes, but the kinds of birds killed are different. Larger, slower reproducing birds such as eagles, condors, etc. are more at risk being killed by wind turbines because deaths in those groups have a much larger effect whereas cats kill a much larger number of birds but they tend to be smaller, faster reproducing species and as such their numbers overall aren't as much at risk.
Cats are one of five categories with >100x the rate of wind turbine bird deaths [1].
If your position is that all five of these factors don't impact larger birds, the onus is on you to back that claim up.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...
I think his point was that birds much too large for a cat to take down are taken down by wind turbines, also some birds are much more rare than others, and many large species are relatively slow to reproduce as well.
I’m not saying they don’t but I am saying looking at sheer numbers of deaths as a comparison is misleading because it’s the details of what kinds of deaths that make the difference. Your linked article even mentions this: “ While the relationship between wind turbines and different types of bird populations, particularly apex birds, is understudied, there is some evidence that turbines can hurt those populations.”
> Cats cause ~1000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.
Edit: this should be Cats cause ~10,000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.
>Birds strikes...are also issues.
Unless you're vegetarian, or vegan, how so?
There’s plenty meat eaters that care of birds for multiple reasons and perceive their diminution as an issue. One of them might be other animal (that they care less) regulation, like mosquitos and mouses. Another one is the delight to see them flying and singing around. And another one: seeds dispersions that contribute to the flora health.
You can add (no) recycling of huge composite balades.
That just isn't a real problem. A single large American landfill could take 100 years worth of wind turbine blades and not even be 25% full. If we were so inclined, we could also shred them and add them to concrete for sidewalks or the like.
Recyclable blades are gaining traction: RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...
There even are efforts to recycle existing ones: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...
In most advanced nations landfilling them is prohibited, and many are now burnt in cement kilns.
So what? Even if every wind turbine blade were landfilled it would add only slightly to waste streams already in existence.
The US produces hundreds of millions of tons of construction and demolition waste per year.
That's fair. Most demolition waste can be crushed and used as stabilisation for new constructions instead of mined rocks, and that's also often cheaper. However you are right to point out the quantity which is small, for now because we didn't really scale yet.
It will be comparatively small even when scaled out. PV waste too.
My biggest concern with wind is not the blades, it's concrete foundations and perhaps steel. Concrete inherently releases CO2 when produced (from calcining of limestone), even if the energy source is non-fossil. Nuclear also faces this issue, of course. PV doesn't typically use concrete footers these days, instead using steel anchors that go directly into the ground.
There are plans to make lime from silicates, but this is not a mature technology.
It's not even a what-if, it's just cheaper than solar for what you get. Especially compared to residential solar, which is also quite dangerous.
How is residential solar dangerous?
Mostly people falling of roofs I think. When you have lowest bid contractors going up and down millions roofs each for a measly 10kw of power. The aggregate deaths per kw are worse for residential than other power sources.
That's the reason. Overall, family homes don't make for very safe or efficient power plants.
Very efficient for distribution though which is expensive (check your utility bill).
Don't need to run power lines for hundreds of miles if you have a generator on your roof.
> Don't need to run power lines for hundreds of miles if you have a generator on your roof.
To remove the need for power lines, you also need batteries, and enough solar to make it through winter.
Even if the power lines are already a given and you're just looking at the operational cost, home solar still uses them a lot to send power back. Peak usage hours are in the evening when the sun is already down.
Also, home solar is still subsidized, even in Arizona where it makes the most natural sense. I doubt it'd be a thing otherwise, even if the only alternative were utility solar. But I understand the argument that pollution is an overdue emergency and any clean energy is better than nothing.
I believe the opposite is true. You still need these hundreds of miles of power line to get you the power during the night or cloudy days. And it is actually more expensive to handle such network because the power distribution is unpredictable and one need to size the network for the worst case.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927371
> Ontario set to begin construction of Canada's first mini nuclear power plant
4x300 MWe for 20.9B CAD for this vs Vogtle 3 and 4 are 2x 1117 MWe for 36.8B USD.
So the starting stated price is only 20% cheaper than that train wreck. Will love to see how high this number gets given it's a first of its kind.
It will likely be more expensive than Vogtle, smaller reactors are just more expensive and they go big because it's more cost effective.
What's slightly different is the financial risk profile. Failing on a 1x 300WM $5B project is slightly easier than a $18B 1GW project.
My personal hypothesis is that nuclear decisions are made almost entirely along financial lines, instead of the safety concerns that dominate most debate about nuclear.
I think this is actually backwards. The reactors are build big to get economies of scale. Building 4 small ones, each of which will also go over budget, only to produce a more expensive product out of each (electricity) puts your economics backwards.
It's about the amount of capital at risk, not the per kWh unit economics. The risk is of complete failure of build and getting $0.
I don’t know of that many plants that failed to finishing building after construction started.
Unit economics are important. Managing to build doesn’t mean much if you can’t turn a profit.
This list has 43 reactors that started construction in the US but never finished:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_nuclear_react...
That's a lot considering that the US currently has 94 operating power reactors:
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
$20B for 300MW, and that's before the inevitable massive cost overruns. Continuing the Ontario provincial government's history of lighting taxpayer money on fire for electricity.
> $20B for 300MW
Estimated 20B CAD for 4 x 300MW power stations.
Is that competitive compared to solar/wind + battery? I doubt it.
The press release claims it is. But other jurisdictions can build 1GW of solar + battery for $2B.
Keep in mind that 1 GW solar does not equate to 1 GW firm production.
In the US, the equivalent to 1GW nuclear would be something like 4GW solar + 18GWh storage. Though it's not fully equivalent because solar + storage is far more flexible and would make a lot more money on the grid, since it can shift power to when it's needed rather than being a constant base of power.
At old NREL prices that would be $4.3B for the solar, and $7.4B for the storage, but the lifetimes don't match up with nuclear either. You'd need to replace the storage after 15-20 years, and the solar after 30 years, if the nuclear plant is going to get a lifetime extension to 50 or 60 years. But 15 years from now, prices for batteries and solar will be far far far lower, we just have no clue how much.
In addition to this, the nuclear plant also needs both major component replacements and refurbishments over it's life, and then decommissioning at end of life, neither of which are cheap or accounted for in the sticker price.
Do you know if there's enough of a market yet for battery recycling at utility scale, and if they pay you to get the old battery?
I know that there are several battery recycling startups, and their biggest hurdle is lack of batteries to recycle. Also that the amount recovered is high enough, and manufacturing progress a fast enough, that a recycled battery will have greater capacity than the original battery.
Then build 10x for the same sticker price as these 4 SMRs. You'll have it done in less time, and likely even cheaper than the final cost of these 4.
How much solar does Ontario get during the heating season?
As much as you care to build for.
How much solar does it get at night?
Not much, but thankfully we've invented wind turbine, batteries, hydro, and a sleep cycle that means our overnight energy usage is much lower than when the sun and us are up.
It isn't even competitive with other nuclear reactors.
Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of). Fear of nuclear waste isn't irrational, but highly overblown because catastrophic events are more emotionally compelling than the slow degradation of either living standards and/or environment caused by competing technology.
30 years ago, I would have said the same thing. But right now solar is seeing technological advances at an exponential rate, such that by the time we build a nuclear power plant, get it approved, and get it running, solar will be both cheaper and safer while using less space.
Solar isn’t dispatchable and adding 24 hour storage doubles the cost. Adding seasonal storage increases the cost by 150x.
So you claim that and that one "paper" from 2019 calculating worst case and with 2019 battery prices. Bad thing is battery prices are falling through the floor and 6 years make all the difference.
Please get your prices to 2025.
> Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of).
This is simply false. At this point, its falsity has been sufficiently well demonstrated and communicated that you should have known it was false. If you are not deliberately lying, it's only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
I think you probably just disagree with OP about the levels of our energy needs in the future.
If we just sustain human life and pleasure then yeah renewables are probably fine. If we want to pursue highly energy intensive applications and then further if we want to pursue those applications with mobility then we need nuclear.
We can pursue high energy intensive activities with renewables, higher than if we use fusion.
On Earth, solar allows high energy use before we run into limits from direct thermal pollution, since it uses energy already hitting the planet rather than introducing new energy.
In space, the energy available from sunlight vastly exceeds any available from fusion, and the feasibility difference tilts even more toward solar.
For mobility in space, beamed power will be best, and solar works with that just fine, even out to interstellar distances.
I think there are a lot of in-depth trades that can be done to show specifically when nuclear is appropriate vs solar, and I'm sure solar will win a lot of those, but I'm just going to reach for the easy ones here.
Radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, using solar would require long transmission lines. Autonomous vehicles on Mars (already use nuclear energy via RTGs). Any deep space mission where building a nuclear reactor and launching it is lower effort than complex energy beaming.
I don't think a radio telescope uses much power at all. And beamed power should work fine on the night side of the moon, beaming power via laser from collectors in space. The apertures on either end would just be a few meters.
I have to question the moon as a location for such telescopes vs. positioning them in space. We've built (small) space radio telescopes already, but none have been placed on the moon.
Solar and wind aren’t reliable energy sources. They’re not dispatchable 24x7 and fluctuate along various timescales. Storing renewable energy for 24 hours doubles the cost. Storing it seasonally increases the cost 150x. Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.
At this point, that’s sufficiently well known that you should have known it. If you’re not deliberately lying, it’s only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
Life spans of reactors can cause instability. Nuclear requires unstable mines for unstable materials which are unstably finite. Controlled by unstable governments and where by a nuclear explosion causes a very unstable aftermath. I see nothing stable about nuclear.
Unless, you mean renewable being "unstable" in the sense of no wind, no sun equates to no power. Then yes, but only until the fuel is spent.
However, renewables are stable when resources are available, stable in providing consistent clean fuel and stable in cost on upkeep than say one of a nuclear reactor.
Which is why you combine all three.
> Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.
El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, holds a unique distinction as the only island to operate solely on wind and waterpower for 28 consecutive days.
The facility ingeniously combines wind generation with pumped storage hydroelectric generation. Now that's cool.
https://www.renewableinstitute.org/el-hierro-a-renewable-ene...
I do know it. And I know that the intermittency can be dealt with at finite and tolerable cost, and the resulting solutions are likely to be cheaper than those using nuclear power.
Those seemingly stuck on advocating nuclear power do not seem to understand the advances made both in storage technology and in system design to deal with intermittency.
What happens in such case were a reactor was to blow. What then? Or are you saying we just deal with it when it occurs?
I am not fully detesting nuclear, but I do disagree it a cure to the environment crisis as Solar is plenty and free; as are Wind and Water too.
The risks of what if; and that now we live in such a volatile world. How are you going to convince me it's safe?
How do I know a drone won't strike it in the next war? Some sponsored hack?
Stuxnet was an organised hack that was created to aid destruction to nuclear hardware.
Chernobyl is still unsafe and that's many years ago and was recently damaged again by a drone.
To be fair, Chernobyl was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today.
Anecdotally, I live near the Palo Verde nuclear powerplant in Arizona, we receive all of our electricity through a combination of solar (clouds are very rare here) and nuclear. These 2 factors mean energy is abundant in the state, and necessary in the summer for survival; air conditioning is a necessity due to the extreme temperatures in the summer.
The Palo Verde plant was commissioned in the 1980, and provides more power than any other reactor in the US. Since its not located near a body of water, it uses treated wastewater for cooling. It is a Pressurized water reactor design similar to the ones used on Naval vessels, a much safer design than the one used in Chernobyl, and none of which have ever experienced a meltdown or critical failure. Overall, I've never experienced any anxiety regarding the reactor not too far from where I live, it is the least of my concerns.
I believe the future will need to be a combination of renewables, to put all our eggs in one basket in foolish. Smaller and safer self contained nuclear reactors (like the ones used on Submarines) seem very promising for data centers. AI is on the rise, for better or worse, and it's power demands are constantly growing.
> To be fair, Chernobyl was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today.
That's not fair.
Chernobyl was a reactor that failed to pass safety tests being put into production. Any failure should be considered expected.
On the other hand, assuming the industry doesn't completely stagnate, "X was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today" will always be true.
I'm not worried about another Chernobyl. We've had one already, all reactor designs have been tested over and over again to avoid a repeat. The real risk is in all the small and seemingly insignificant things working together in unexpected ways. There will always be a nonzero chance of an incident, and due to the nature of nuclear reactors the impact of an incident is essentially unlimited.
Think of it like commercial airliners. Are they safe? Yes, absolutely. They are the safest method of travel available. I have zero worry about my safety when stepping on an airplane. But despite the tiny odds airplanes do crash from time to time, simply because there are so many of them.
An airplane crash has a smouldering crater and a few hundred dead as its result. Not great, but not terrible either: as a society we build a monument and move on. Would we still be flying airplanes if - no matter how unlikely - a crash meant that an entire city would become uninhabitable?
Good hypothesis, I would like to believe the general census would be no. Just because the impact of thought of it occurring is more devastating than the pro of flying to destination in one. I wouldn't want to fly even if there was a .1% of failure whereby it could catastrophically destroy many lives.
I don't refute that we couldn't move on. as we can take the result, analyse and not repeat. Learn from it and move on. Next plane crash causes less crater.
However a nuclear implosion you can't move on and nor is it over once it's occurred. How do you move on from a nuclear imposition? Japan and Hiroshima? They're still fighting the aftermath today and that was a nuclear bomb the same significant difference.
But if the reactor is a protected to 99.9% efficiency and that 1% could cause a aftermath that lasts forever, sure you can take the data like the plane crash and ensure it doesn't make the same sized crater but the results of the first are still devastating. Unlike the plane which is now old news.
If nuclear was a requirement and that other sources of energy were a scarcity then it would be different. But where by we have acres of desert we are not researching enough in to how to harness the energy, have oceans where winds blow, water is nearly endless, do we research that on a large scale for data centres?
It doesn't make sense for nuclear. Technically yes, you are making clean energy but at what expense and on a very dirty political basis.
Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.
The Gen 4 designs, which they also have, are physics safe: literally drop bombs on them and they still won't fail (bombing a nuclear plant in general is an over stated risk for other reasons too). They're building those now too.
> Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.
The same was said of Fukushima. And it was - until a tsunami fried all the backup local power keeping the control systems alive. Turns out the "passive cooling" still requires some valves to be controllable...
Fukushima was not the same type of design as the new Chinese reactors.
For one thing, no reactor is classed as "passively safe" if it needs active cooling for decay heat.
Hacks, cyber espionage?
So it sounds like the view point of "deal with it when it happens then" and that's what puts me off nuclear.
Nuclear is too unstable when something does occur to be contained and as to when dismantled.
Ignoring what Elementl is developing as their material is confusing, what would be some of the practical energy sources for power hungry AI workloads other than nuclear?
Personally I’m skeptical of nuclear power given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity (sure, intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer).
But anyway, if anybody (other than the government, which gave up long ago) can pay the upfront costs of nuclear, it is the big tech companies like Google.
> […] Google has set 2030 goals to reach net zero emissions across its operations and value chain, […]
Man, I remember when 2030 seemed like the future. But now it seems downright aggressive. Good luck Google.
You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have.
If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes.
You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume.
But instead we have expensive electricity (at least here in Australia), where your mind is constantly loaded wit being aware of your energy consumption.
You do know that nuclear power has experienced negative learning by doing throughout its entire life?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
You don’t get ”free electricity” with absolutely massive handouts to the nuclear industry.
Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the ”too cheap to meter” promise.
It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen. Instead we had yesterday in Sweden news the opening of a freshly new built natural gas power plant as the solution to that intermittence problem. Of course, those natural gas power plants are paid through subsidizes as grid stability is the government responsibility, and thus the bill for that natural gas is put on taxes and connection fees.
I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
Love how the goalposts magically shifted to ”green hydrogen deployed today!!” even though many grids still don’t even reach saturation from renewables. Storage or green hydrogen is an enormous waste of money in Poland given their grid composition.
That renewable buildout leads to larger fossil emissions being wrong is trivial to verify. The UK as one example of many:
- Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero. - Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh. - Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.
Massively decreasing all fossil fueled electricity production of course "extends the life" of these plants. All those plants that were shut down had their "life extended".
You can do the same for Denmark, Portugal, California, South Australia and everywhere else. First renewables offset coal followed by cutting into gas usage.
After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California:
- Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24
- Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24
https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs...
Storage is exploding globally. China installed 74 GW comprising 134 GWh of storage in 2024. Increasing their yearly installation rate by 250%. The US is looking at installing 18 GW in 2025 making up 30% of all grid additions. Well, before Trump came with a sledgehammer of insanity.
Storage delivers. For the last bit of "emergency reserves" we can run some gas turbines. First our existing fleet and then when it becomes the most pressing issue to decarbonize we can utilize the solution aviation and shipping settled on.
Or just run the gas turbines on biofuels, green hydrogen or whatever. Start collecting food waste and create biogas from it.
Doesn't really matter, we're talking single percent of total energy demand.
I love how completely insignificant issues becomes blown up to enormous proportions try to force nuclear power into the conversation.
Lets then have a ban on all new natural gas power plants until its down to a single percent. That should not be a problem if that is all that is needed.
Using UK as an example, the majority of energy is not renewables. Why should they build new natural gas power plants? Natural gas produce more energy than any other source in the UK. They are not going from 98% renewables, 2% natural gas. (https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uks-electricity-was-cle...)
UK should increase the production of renewables energy, but they should also decommission their fossil fuel plants. If they want to use non-fossil fuel solutions, then they should do so and compete fairly and without subsidizes. Same goes for nuclear.
The cost of intermittence should not be paid by the environment or subsidizes, otherwise they are just hiding the true cost that society have to pay.
You seem to advocate for some holier than thou perfect path rather than the messy reality that is a transition of the entire energy system to a new cheaper source while upholding our modern society.
Let’s look at the area under the curve?
You know, we need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, transportation etc. as well.
Let look at what the UK has done:
- Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero.
- Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh.
- Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.
Would you say this reduction in fossil fuel usage is insignificant because they obviously aren’t done yet?
If we want to talk messy reality, then the only realistic way to prevent critical point in global warming is to build everything that is non-fossil fuel, that being renewables, nuclear, experimental storage and so on, while at the same time utilizing market forces and use risk-benefit analysis for each government intervention in order to spend government subsidies as cost effective as possible. Everything is needed in order to do as much as possible to reduce emissions.
For EU regulation that requires lower emissions and environmental issues with hydro power, the messy reality is also that the cost of breaking the law and paying the fines are currently cheaper than the economical and political costs of complying with the law. So that is what the Swedish government are doing. The Paris Agreement is just a goal and clearly there is a lot of voters who see it as incompatible with modern society.
It is also the messy reality that many current governments in EU got their votes in the last election because they bailed out the citizens when the power crisis happened and paid the power bills through taxes, causing major harm in the market and further inflated prices. Building out more natural gas power plants will reduce the cost of the next crisis, which is also the stated goal of the new one that got built in Sweden.
You still haven’t been able to answer why we should waste money on new built nuclear power.
It costs 5-10x as much, does not integrate well with renewables due to the capital structure and takes 15-20 years to build from political decision to operational plant.
We need to decarbonize now. Not extend the life of fossil assets for decades waiting for nuclear power to come online. With this nuclear power producing a fraction of the TWh compared to if the same money went into renewables and storage.
Wasting money on enormous handouts to the nuclear industry is not ”doing as much as possible to reduce emissions”. It is a dogwhistle from climate change deniers to extend the life of fossil assets to stymie their disruption by renewables.
I don’t think you’ve kept up with the renewable industry. The absolute explosion we are seeing is because renewables and storage today are cheaper than fossil fuels.
It started as feelgood moonshot decades ago. Today companies and countries are at a competitive advantage if they can retool their fossil dependent processes and systems to renewables.
> It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen
The only one promising that was the fossil industry, trying to stay relevant by pushing hydrogen as "green" and doing a switcheroo to "blue" fossil-derived hydrogen when green hydrogen inevitably turns out to be nonviable for silly things like mid-term energy storage.
> If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
No. Remember, the goal is to minimize the total greenhouse gas emissions! We're in a transition phase, if that means operating on 97.5% renewables and 2.5% natural gas until we figure out those last 2.5%, then that is totally fine. At the moment natural gas is excellent for peaker plants - especially if you implement carbon capture. Would you rather stay on the current ~50% fossil mix, solely because the transition mix isn't "green enough"? We're trying to save the environment, not trying to be holier than the pope.
If you want to present the plan as renewables and subsidized natural gas as being better than nuclear than be open about it and present it as that. It is not the same as a subsidize free renewables and storage solution.
Those 97.5% sounds very nice. Denmark has well over 100% renewables production from wind and solar, but in terms of consumption only get around 50%. The rest they need to import. 97.5 vs 50 means there is some work to be done.
I recently posted this link (https://svensksolenergi.se/statistik/elproduktion-fran-solen...) that illustrate how much energy that solar farms produce in Sweden. Getting 97.5% from that would be a nice challenge, especially around the winter months. December and January had around 3% production compared to the best previous month (which we could use as a stand-in for 100% capacity but that would be incorrect).
Natural gas is not fine. The geopolitical consequences are terrible, the environmental impact are not sustainable, and the cost are carried almost exclusively through subsidizes. Trying to sell natural gas as "saving the environment" is a political message that I do not agree with.
You're including a bunch of different generation technologies which have vastly different operating characteristics which means they are not substitutes for each other.
For example, nuclear takes days to start from cold and is really only economic if operating at a constant output. Thus you need complimentary sources to help meet changes in demand. These days, typically this means gas turbines.
Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.
> Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.
No, turbo-alternators 'burning' hydrogen do exist. And green hydrogen (produced by renewables) is cheaper than pink hydrogen (produced by a nuclear reactor) because the total cost of renewables' electricity is lower than nuclear's.
I don’t see the connection with my comment but hydrogen is irrelevant and contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation. The technical components for a hydrogen based energy market do exist but are simply unviable financially. Nuclear also struggles to compete on the basis of price in competitive markets but is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity. You could argue (I personally would not) that the higher cost of nuclear can be justified on this basis but the fact that hydrogen is an extremely potent greenhouse gas and is prone to leakage means it doesn’t even have that going for it.
The connection is that "it will also have natural gas capacity" seems false to me as backup turbo-alternators can 'burn' hydrogen ( => no natural gas capacity).
> hydrogen > contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation
True, however it doesn't imply that it will remain irrelevant.
> unviable financially
For the time being, and less and less. Bloomberg NEF predicts that green hydrogen will cost approximately 1.2€/kg in 2050. Carbon taxes or oil prices may also play a role as nearly all hydrogen is now produced thanks to some fossil fuel.
> nuclear > is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity
Green hydrogen could also be.
> prone to leakage
This is a major challenge for transportation-related usages, especially in small or not-intensively used vehicles. This isn't in the "gridpower backup" role, as mass and volume of storage isn't a major parameter.
I see what you meant now but still see little scope for hydrogen to have a role in the energy sector.
One reason for my skepticism is that I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen as an energy store for decades at this stage (I'm old) and for a long time believed them but here we are, with little to show for it. In fact, at historical scales, hydrogen's significance as an energy store today is less than it was in the 19th century. As a result, I've adopted "I'll believe it when I see it" approach so I just ignore hydrogen predictions - particularly ones 25 years into the future.
But the main reason is simple physics. It simply has NONE of the physical attributes you'd want in a gas to be used to store energy. It's like if you picked all the attributes you WOULDN'T want in such a gas.
Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult. Everything it comes into contact with needs special materials to avoid embrittlement. It's prone to leakage.
It has dreadful energy density. The worst.
It has potent green house gas effects when leaked into the atmosphere.
It's dangerous and highly explosive and burns with such high intensity (and invisibly) that it requires specialist fire-fighting equipment.
Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal - a fraction of that of batteries.
In summary, hydrogen as energy store makes no sense to me. And it's completely hypothetical. If we are going to talk about hypothetical approaches to storing energy in the form of a gas, then green methane makes a lot more sense. Not that I'd advocate for either but I see some potential for green methane but none for hydrogen given its physical attributes.
> I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen
Fair point, same here (I was born in 1967), however fossil fuels are so effective and adequate as energy sources, as long as we ignored/neglected their dubious effect on the climate, that there was no real attempt to explore other ways.
> Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult
For the "gridpower backup" application there is no transport needed, and storage doesn't have to be compact nor mobile (those are a major challenge for hydrogen in transportation).
> dreadful energy density
This is not a show-stopper for the "gridpower backup" application. For huge volumes or very long-term (not sure this will be necessary) it may be stored in salt caverns ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Underground_h... )
> potent green house gas effects > dangerous
Granted, however we are used to store huge volumes of dangerous materials, some gaseous at ambiant pressure/temp (methane...), even into salt caverns, albeit when we began to do so (in the 1950's) it was quite a challenge.
> Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal
Various new ways to obtain H2 from electricity offer impressive yield in realistic conditions (check SOECs), and other advances are promising ( https://liten.cea.fr/cea-tech/liten/english/Pages/Strategic-... ).
> green methane makes a lot more sense
As does ammonia, in some contexts. There is no one-size-fits-all here!
Renewable power is cheap because it also receives massive government handouts in the form of tax credits.
Still built at absolutely massive scale around the world without subsidies. With many countries phasing out their renewable subsidies because they aren’t needed anymore.
Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the world cheaper than coal and fossil gas.
The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
What storage? Where? At what price?
Where are all these 14 day full load capable storage plants being built?
I’m not saying they aren’t, I am saying I don’t see the data.
Never, because we don't need 14 days of full load capable storage. Most models say we need about 3 days to get 99.99% coverage with a reasonable amount of overbuild & interconnect.
why not make it a lifetime of storage if we are here just spouting nonsense numbers.
storage for 12 hours and we are 80% there. If you don't like 80% solutions then please don't participate in society as it's only working on those.
We are at the point in the S-curve where storage goes from nowhere to everywhere in the blink of an eye.
Here BESS for $63/kWh installed and serviced for 20 years.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-bids...
China installed 74 GW comprising 168 GWh in 2024. In increase of 250% compared to 2023.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...
After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California:
- Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24
- Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24
https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs...
In the US in 2025 storage was expected to make up 30% of all grid additions. Before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
No one generally expects more than a couple of hours of storage to be needed. But for the fun exercise let’s calculate what spending Vogtles $36.8B on equivalent renewables, as in TWh delivered, and the storage gives.
That makes the renewables come out to about $9B.
With storage costing $0.063B GWh and having $28B to spend we can build 444 GWh storage.
That is the equivalent to running Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days straight.
In this calculation we don’t even bother with Vogtles O&M costs compared to near zero for renewables and storage.
Do you now understand how incredibly expensive new built western nuclear power is?
Renewable suffers a little bit from having renewable infrastructure costs considered a new subsidy, while fossil fuel costs are just kind of baked in.
If we included the cost of cleaning up fossil fuel byproducts… well, we don’t even know how much it will cost to clean up all that carbon.
Then we will have to work out how we bill the international relations cost of having to deal with petrochemical producers…
that used to be true, but it's not really true any longer; they could even do well without subsidies, but no industry will ever give up free money.
Are you really denying the learning curve based on one paper about France? You don't think maybe there's other confounding factors*? A single survey of a single country isn't counterfactual. Are you really certain that with a relatively fixed design the learning curve wouldn't apply at sufficient scale, all else being equal. The learning curve is one of the most time-tested laws in construction.
*Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear.
In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.)
-Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design
-Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires.
- regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal".
-while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out
For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.
It also includes the US seeing the same negative learning by doing.
We have research on when we have achieved learning effects.
> If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements:
> - It has to be the same site
> - It has to be the same constructor
> - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next
> - It has to be constant labor laws
> - It has to be a constant regulatory regime
> When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world.
From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k
In the meantime renewables and storage have gone from nascent industries to today be the vast majority of all new energy production in TWh and while costing a fraction of new built nuclear power.
Again, I'd say based on the conditions for the theory to hold, the US couldn't prove or disprove the theory either way. I guess to summarize my stance: we don't know what the learning curve for nuclear is because data that is too messy. That being the case, my prior would weight the theory holding, maybe weakly, given the evidence for it elsewhere. Maybe in a few years we can infer some honest data from China.
Yeah, if we went back in time and built nuclear then we'd have nuclear today, and the fixed costs would have been paid by a previous generation. Is that surprising?
But that doesn't inform us on what the optimal policy decision is in the current year of 2025 given 2025 prices and time-to-build of the various options.
In Australia renewables have the perfect confluence of multiple factors:
- low seasonable variability of insolation in the north
- high wind speeds in the south
- land availability for solar
- high statistical diversification of renewables due to size
- higher than normal costs of nuclear due to first-of-a-kind costs dominating the total build-out costs due to the small energy needs of the country, and higher labor costs
The CSIRO studied this for Australia and released a report about it. Even when you factor in storage and transmission costs, renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear.
The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming there’s no point thinking about deploying nor researching & developing solar / wind because we don’t have the expertise nor technology.
We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either.
Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base.
And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper.
AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear.
CSIRO perfidy.
How did nuclear slip into your list of power sources that dominate the Chinese grid? You skipped over two other sources that generate double what nuclear does and are growing faster:
Coal 58.2%
Hydro 13%
Wind 9.8%
Solar 8.3%
Nuclear 4.4%
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
I can't speak for the prior poster, but I am highly skeptical that the current business ecosystem in the United States is capable of effectively and safely building new nuclear power infrastructure, particularly if and when the ever-popular but, to the best of my knowledge, never-completed Small Modular Reactor pitch gets involved.
Conversely China has built a lot of new nuclear capacity, and has projects for SMRs in the works too.
The problem as you allude to isn't the technology.
Yeah, we have political issues around infrastructure in the US, but those probably aren’t going away. If we can do nuclear with just technology (no politics), then it might be viable. So, as I said, good luck Google!
I wouldn't call it "a lot" when you put it into perspective.
China has about 60GW of nuclear generation capacity - this is after 70 years of building their first nuclear plant. It has about 1600GW of wind and solar after about 10 years.
In 2024, China added 80GW of wind capacity and 277GW of solar. In the first 3 months of 2025 alone, 60GW of new solar capacity and 15GW of new wind capacity were added. In 2024, 4.3GW of nuclear was added.
> the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle
What exactly are you talking about? It does not sound like it describes the way nuclear power, uranium mining, and nuclear waste storage works.
Explaine how nuclear waste is dealt with.
Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value.
Hint: it isn’t.
There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants.
Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very reactive at all. Vitrified it’s chemically non-reactive.
Nuclear waste is essentially a non-issue today. Even if there was a way to magically make spent nuclear fuel disappear it would not materially change the prospects for nuclear energy. And if all other issues with nuclear were resolved (the primary one being cost), storage of spent fuel in dry casks for several centuries is a fine and economical solution.
The only scenario in which waste processing becomes an issue is if nuclear is so wildly successful we start running out of cheap uranium and need to do reprocessing and breeding. That is not the world we live in (this is also why thorium is a non-solution.)
The comment they were replying to went out of its way to say “completely closed” which is, of course, not correct.
If we want to say nuclear generates not much in terms of byproducts, that seems like a potentially viable argument. But then, renewables don’t consume any fuel (but the installations are a lot less durable). We’re rapidly approaching the point where we might have to admit that sweeping dramatic statements about either one being universally superior are hard to justify and the differences are complicated…
> proven technology with excellent safety record
The real long-term effect of past nuclear accidents is a subject of debate, and the potential worst case a concern for all.
> the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle
Not at industrial-scale.
> and believe in a technology we don’t have.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
It's proven to not be competitive.
All these nuclear announcements are smoke screens to cover construction of large amounts of gas fired capacity. Anyone expecting dramatic near term increases in electricity demand will need to go with gas (or renewables, but tariffs make that less competitive); nuclear, especially new designs, cannot be rolled out quickly.
> a proven technology with excellent safety record
Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more.
Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all. It is the only power source which has made entire cities impossible to live in.
I personally don't believe this is necessarily a dealbreaker with modern nuclear plants in rich countries, but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.
> a completely closed fuel life cycle
Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.
Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem. We've been operating nuclear reactors for 80 years now, but permanent waste disposal and reactor decommissioning is still in its infancy. The current state-of-the-art is essentially "let it rot in place and hope nothing goes wrong while we figure out a way to deal with it". I think it can be solved, but unless we've done so you probably shouldn't make it part of your argument.
> If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs
We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example. 9% of global power is supplied by nuclear plants. There are over 400 plants currently operational, and 700 have been decommissioned. We aren't on "baby's first nuclear reactor" anymore.
> implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved
We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.
> You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume.
Not a chance. Although fuel would indeed be quite cheap, power still isn't going to be free: someone has to pay off the massive construction loans.
Consumer power consumption is also a lot more flexible than something like internet. People don't suddenly start to consume a lot more data when their internet gets faster - a single person is still only going to watch one Netflix stream at a time, and that'll work just as fine on a 100Mbps connection as on a 8Gbps one. And all the equipment is already prepared for the faster connection, so it's not like they are saving any money by keeping it slow.
But if your power is free, why bother with gas heating? Why go for a heat pump when resistive heating has cheaper equipment? Why bother isolating your home? Why shut off your lights when you leave your home? Making electricity free means we'll be using a lot more of it, which means having to build significantly more expensive nuclear power plants.
If this was an option, countries with abundant hydro would be providing free power. And they aren't.
> But instead we have expensive electricity
Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity. While building additional nuclear could get us (mostly) off fossil fuel, it is definitely not going to make your power bill any cheaper. Nuclear power is only viable with hefty subsidies - which in practice means turning off dirt-cheap solar and wind to run expensive nuclear plants.
> Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more.
no, these are included in the calculations of "deaths per kilowatt-hour"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
> the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem
No it's not unsolved. There are burial sites. The spent fuel is kept on the power plant for years so it cools down.
Also even without nuclear power, there would still be nuclear waste to take care of because of the medical, defence, research, and other industries.
> Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, [...]
Nope, it's all included, how could it not be?
> Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up
Yep, yet it's still the safest, which means your argument has to be wrong.
Just to show you the magnitude of your error, the Fukushima accident was directly caused by a tsunami which killed 20,000 people. But your main concern from that event is the cost of cleanup of radioactive material.
More people die from falling off roofs while installing solar panels than from nuclear accidents.
> but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.
Well you're not technically wrong. As you've inadvertently demonstrated with your irrational arguments, since people didn't use reason to arrive at their conclusions, they would not be likely to be persuaded by it.
> Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.
Do you mean to say the waste is significantly worse than for solar panels, wind turbines, etc.?
> Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem.
Inert solid waste sitting in a barrel somewhere is not a problem that is worth talking about.
Again, the magnitude of your error is outstanding. We've been simply releasing all the, radioactive mind you, products of burning coal into the atmosphere for the past few hundreds of years but you're concerned about a tiny amount of solid waste.
> > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs
>
> We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example.
You cherry-picked the single country with the biggest share of nuclear by far.
> > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved
>
> We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.
Ironically, that's because the standards for nuclear plant safety are determined by the sort of irrational thinking you're presenting here.
> Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity.
And that's where the issue is buried, I don't believe you're taking all costs into account.
Is coal really cheaper when you include the health and environmental damage it creates? It literally can't be, the costs of human created climate change will be eye-watering.
Are renewables really cheaper once you consider the end goal of a 90%+ renewable grid? The costs of accounting for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind go up exponentially as you increase the share of renewables in the grid.
Adding the first 10% of renewables is trivial, you need no extra storage since the grid itself will simply absorb the difference.
Adding the last 10% is horribly expensive and I don't believe you're accounting for that at all.
Due to political issues, the US doesn’t have the capacity to engage in infrastructure projects that take more than ~2 years to complete, unfortunately.
You mean like France?
> intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer
Solar power is great but intermittence is the main issue with it. If you look at 30 year historical weather data, many highly populated regions have two week periods with almost complete cloud cover. Storage and intercontinental power transmission are usually listed as the solutions to this, but the costs of these solutions are rarely included.
Solar can still generate up to 25% of their peak power with full cloud cover.
The issue is renewables are not a complete solution no matter how good it feelz
I was just injecting facts into the discussion without taking a side. I know that's confusing behavior.
people really take offense in how energy gets produced even...
> the costs of these solutions are rarely included.
Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized cost reports, like from the NREL.
Not in any realistic sense. This report
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night.
So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously.
The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather.
I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?")
With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)
A case study for Denmark. Not even using the latest plummet in price of BESS.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Generally: Renewables and storage solve somewhere high in the 90s percent.
Then throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm.
Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply.
When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed.
Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today.
I love how green hydrogen is assumed to become abundant and trivially easy to retrofit into existing infrastructure but fast neutron reactors are automatically considered infeasible by comparison.
Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.
> Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.
No, that isn't the easiest way.
The easiest — not best, easiest — way to produce massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river.
If you want the cheapest, well, in most cases PV is the cheapest source of electricity — there's variance, sometimes it's wind.
Nuclear is so expensive that it's the same range of prices as PV plus batteries. And when you're using the electricity to make hydrogen, with the hydrogen as the storage system, batteries are redundant.
Since PV needs batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve and all that), it's perfectly reasonable to have both.
And no, hydrogen as the storage system doesn't make batteries redundant. Law of conservation of energy. You are talking about using electricity to split water molecules, presumably more electricity to compress and store the collected hydrogen, and then you have the losses associated with converting back to electricity in a fuel cell or conversion to mechanical energy through combustion.
A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight. Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels. Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.
I have PV panels on my home. I love the idea of decentralized power. But the hydrogen economy is pretty theoretical at this point. Hard to store for any length of time, comparatively low combustion energy, low energy density overall, etc. It may happen, but "may" is a bad bet for long term national policy. I'd rather push more toward electrified high speed trains than hydrogen.
> Since PV needs batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve and all that), it's perfectly reasonable to have both.
Needs storage*, what that storage is depends on other factors.
(* there's a "well technically" for just a grid, in that China makes enough aluminium they could build an actually useful global power grid with negligible resistance, but it doesn't matter in practice)
As it happens, I agree with one crucial part of your final paragraph — hydrogen is hard to store for any length of time (not sure you're right about comparatively low combustion energy but that doesn't matter, low energy density overall is accurate but I don't think matters).
I favour batteries for that because battery cars beat hydrogen cars, and the storage requirements for a power grid are smaller than the requirements for transport, so we can just use the big (and expanding) pile of existing factories to do this.
But hydrogen has other uses than power, and where it's an emergency extra storage system you don't necessarily need a huge efficiency. That said, because one of the main other uses of hydrogen is to make ammonia, I expect emergency backup power to be something which burns ammonia rather than hydrogen gas — not only is it much more stable and much easier to store, it's something you'd be stockpiling anyway because fertiliser isn't applied all year around anyway.
But you could do hydrogen, if you wanted. And some people probably will, because of this sort of thing.
> A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
This is completely irrelevant for countries that aren't tiny islands or independent cities.
Even then, and even with lower 20% efficient cells, and also adding in the capacity factor of 10% that's slightly worse than the current global average, Vatican City* has the capacity for 11.1 kW/capita: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.5km%5E2+*+1kW%2Fm%5E2...
They are of course not going to tile their architecture in PV — there's a reason I wrote "that aren't … independent cities" — but this is a sense of scale.
(* Number 7 on the Wikipedia "List of countries and dependencies by population density": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...)
> Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight.
That's what the storage is for
> Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels.
Panels are as strong as you want them to be for the weather you get locally. If you need bullet-proof (FSVO), you can put them behind a bullet-proof screen.
> Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
The grid isn't the source; if you want to cripple a grid, doesn't matter if the source is nuclear, PV, coal, or hamster wheels.
> Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.
Really isn't 24/7, it's 70-80%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Worldwide_Nuclear_Power_C...
And mis-estimating the environmental risks is exactly what went wrong with Fukushima.
> And mis-estimating the environmental risks is exactly what went wrong with Fukushima.
It took a massive earthquake and tsunami to cause this, and the number of deaths/injuries due to the power plant is a rounding error compared to the earthquake and tsunami. Fukushima actually did most things right with the notable exception of not putting the backup generators on the roof. Had they put the generators on the roof, neither of us would have ever known the name "Fukushima".
When evaluating the Fukushima exclusion zone, compare it to the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. In that case, we still haven't cleaned up all the oil, and up to 450 miles from the initial spill. By comparison you want to transition to ammonia as a fuel source, which you correctly note is easier to store long term than molecular hydrogen and far more energy dense. Sounds like a good deal since molecular nitrogen is incredibly abundant as well.
Now I want you to imagine there's an ammonia spill in the magnitude of Exxon Valdez. Long term, the ammonia would almost certainly dissipate faster than crude oil, but the immediate acute toxicity would be far worse. You're killing basically all sea life in the area, the fumes would take out most birds and even quite a few people. If the spill were on land, it could severely compromise the ability to grow crops in the region for a long time. And that's not in the face of a massive earthquake and tsunami, but inattentiveness on the part of a single ship's crew.
The point being that large scale energy production and storage will NEVER be fuzzy and completely safe. The most common metric is deaths per unit of electricity. If a power source is small, even one death can be unforgivable. For massive amounts of power, statistics matter.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Note that the nuclear stats include both Chernobyl and Fukushima. This is notable since Chernobyl was a worst case scenario with a flawed design that has never existed in Western commercial reactors precisely because it was so unacceptably dangerous: no containment vessel, graphite moderation, graphite fuel rod tips, lack of education for its staff, a culture of secrecy, etc.
In the meantime, nuclear has provided obscenely large amounts of electricity since its inception. I'm all for expanding solar and wind, but folks really need to understand the real enemy is fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas, etc. The single largest threat to our survival as a species isn't a multi-kilometer exclusion zone but a CO2-laden atmosphere that makes the entire equatorial zone uninhabitable, and that's precisely what we're looking at within a century.
The faster we can move off carbon-based fuels by any means necessary, the better. That includes nuclear. Excluding nuclear from the conversation out of hand is lunacy.
Hydrogen is already used in many industrial processes (~1e8 metric tons/year), including turbo-alternators, while there is not a single ready-to-be-built model of industrial breeder reactor.
Not only was a design ready to be built, it was built. Went online 39 years ago. Produced 1.2GWe at peak. Not only produced power on its own but reprocessed spent fuel from other nuclear reactors.
Decommissioned 28 years ago. Because it didn't work? No. Because it wasn't safe? No. Because it wasn't reliable? No, it had a 95% availability rate.
It was taken out of service due to political pressure and legal maneuvering, not technical reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
Facts: Superphénix was a prototype. It didn't reach its goal (reaching the industrial stage). Not a single model of breeder reactor reached it. Mentioning its high availability rate neglects planned shutdowns (planning enough of them improves it). Its load factor in 1996 (just before its shutdown), more relevant, was 0.31, thus well below the minimum viable for an industrial reactor. Some people consider the project to be a success, but no expert or its operator has ever said so (they proclaimed their confidence in their ability to achieve industrial operation by an unspecified date), and its successor, named "ASTRID", launched 12 years later, which was supposed to design and build a reactor for €5 billion, spent more than €700 million on studies alone before being put on hold, so "it worked, but everything has to be redesigned...".
Yes, hydrogen is clearly a much easier technology to make work than fast reactors. Why is this even a question? For example, fast reactors have the issue that in an accident, if fuel melts and rearranges, one can have potentially have a configuration that is prompt supercritical on fast neutrons. This is functionally an atomic bomb.
Also, even in a Fallout Future where everything is nuclear powered, hydrogen is still needed! Some 6% of today's global natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen, and a good chunk of that is for ammonia synthesis, which is necessary to feed eight billion people.
The main hang ups for fast reactors in the US are: (1) our regulators are less sanguine about occupational safety for plutonium workers then the French and Russians (carcinogenic Pu nanoparticles —- the high energy ball mill can make sand deadly, just think what it can do for Pu) and (2) fear of nuclear proliferation if the “plutonium economy” expands. There is also (3) the economics will never be attractive with a steam turbine and all the heat exchangers that entails, but a power set like
https://www.swri.org/markets/energy-environment/power-genera...
could fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR and could make it competitive. It’s a big if though.
"Functionally an atomic bomb"?
Why do you speak on topics you obviously know so little about? Where did you get this nonsense?
Fast neutron designs aren't without their challenges, but causing an atomic explosion is not on that list. Hydrogen explosions? Possible. Steam explosions? Possible.
Atomic explosions? Not even theoretically can you get enough U-235 to clump together to do that without cancelling known basic laws of physics.
To build a bomb, you need a purity of 90%+ U-235. Nuclear power plants have what? 2%? 3%? Might even go as high as 5%? Might as well expect a pack of bubble gum to spontaneously explode.
The more detailed simulations have gotten the less bad a meltdown looks in a fast reactors. Usually some of the molten core flows away and no more critical mass. If it goes over critical there can be some energy release but over time it looks less and less and not a problem to contain.
Sodium has its problems (burns in carbon dioxide!) but the chemistry is favorable for a meltdown because the most dangerous fission products are iodine and cesium. The former reacts with the sodium to make a salt that dissolves in the sodium, the second alloys with the sodium. Either way they stay put and don’t go into the environment.
The problem is you need to ensure it's not bad in any possible configuration from an accident. This is hard to do. Will the energy release at criticality drive the material into an even more critical configuration? Such "autocatalytic" systems were considered for bomb design, but weren't chosen because of the large amounts of plutonium needed. But a fast reactor might have the plutonium of hundreds of atomic bombs.
Edward Teller famously warned about this is a nuclear industry trade publication in 1967.
The only fast reactors I'd trust would be ones with fuel dissolved in molten salt; it's hard to see how that could become concentrated in an accident that doesn't boil the salt. But such reactors have their own problems, in particular exposure of reactor structures to intense fast neutron fluxes (not as bad as in fusion reactors, but worse than LWRs.)
Increasing the heat past a certain threshold reduces the nuclear reactivity. Read up on "passive safety".
Teller may have warned about this in 1967, but nuclear technology hasn't been stagnant since 1967. Folks read his stuff and designed systems specifically to fail safe, not run away. Stop fear mongering based upon a 60-year-old supposition. Stop assuming everyone working in the nuclear industry is an idiot that hasn't thought about safety.
> Increasing the heat past a certain threshold reduces the nuclear reactivity. Read up on "passive safety".
The safety arguments for fast reactors are typically that a serious scenario will not occur, for example that fuel won't melt, not that if it does occur the results won't be bad. Do you trust that sort of argument? I don't.
Nice straw man you've constructed and burnt down.
Those are NOT the safety arguments used within the industry. For example in a molten salt reactor, the fuel is already melted! If it gets too hot, thermal expansion moves the radioactive isotopes further away from one another, reducing reactivity. If heat increases past a certain point, plugs at the bottom of the tanks will melt, allowing gravity to dump the fuel into multiple separated storage vessels sized to prevent further activity.
You do not know what you're talking about. You've read a bunch of fear mongering, and bought it. Do you really believe the entire industry of nuclear engineers and support staff are just blindly YOLOing their way through their jobs, damn the consequences?
I swear, you sound like the power production equivalent of antivaxers convinced the medical industry is trying to poison all of us.
"Passive safety" doesn't mean "stuff shouldn't go wrong."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
It means "we're actively exploring everything that could go wrong and having the worst case scenarios fail to a safe state without requiring human intervention."
Those two positions couldn't be further apart.
So, how exactly do you claim conclusively that molten fuel (in a fast reactor with sold fuel elements) will not flow into a bad configuration? I don't see how one can possibly do that analysis. Teller didn't see how either.
I already said MSRs would be the one kind of fast reactor I could see the analysis work, so thank you for agreeing with me on that.
As a charitable act toward you I will ignore the rest of your comment.
> I don't see how one can possibly do that analysis.
Classic argument from ignorance fallacy. Because YOU cannot see how it could be done, no one has ever figured out how it could be done.
You didn't answer the question.
All the analyses I've seen for fast reactor safety are about avoiding fuel melting, not what happens if the fuel does melt. The variability in this latter scenario is so great that conclusive analysis ruling out disaster doesn't seem possible. Maybe you could explain the unexpected principle that enables one to do that? Or, lacking that, point me to a paper where such analysis has been performed.
That report you say has 1 hour of storage has four hours of battery in all the systems it compares.
It's a bit of a weird measure anyway, since it's just the ratio of storage to inverter, so it's the time it could run for when working flat out.
For your wider point, if anyone, anywhere was really contemplating a near full nuclear grid they'd have the exact same issues. Do you overbuild and curtail? Export? Store in batteries? The problems and solutions are incredibly similar now batteries have basically solved the daily variation for solar.
The fact that no one is even bothering to think that far ahead for nuclear is a recognition of how totally out of the race it is.
Cryptocurrency is mostly bullshit I think, but for whatever reason people keep buying it. That could be a nice endlessly-dispatchable economically rewarded (despite all reason) workload.
Yes, and people have been as clever as possible dealing with this issue. There is just no good way to solve it.
Renewables are only easy if you ignore regulations. For whatever stupid reason local busybodies lose their shit about windmills regularly and they are frustratingly hard to ignore.
Nuclear has an even worse local credibility problem, but I suppose you need fewer plants.
Doesn't revenue sharing often turn those frowns upside down? More inclusive business models might help?
For the farmer that owns the land the windmill got built on it's great. The handful of houses in the area get fuck all though and actually have to deal with the externalities.
Usually what happens is they buy out one local government, pay them, and usually fuck up the neighbors as the local government being paid not only has the incentive of money but can say put that hazardous facility just at the circumvention to their neighboring places, which get 0.
[dead]
> given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity
The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will have too much when the weather is optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.
This reminded me of how France had to limit nuclear outputs because of the heatwave. New designs can probably mitigate the risk but it will inevitably add to the operational and construction costs.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threa...
Its not about "new" vs "old" designs. Cooling towers have been a feature for decades, which those french nuclear power plants just didn't have before, because it wasn't necessary yet. Thanks to climate change it now is.
Also it isn't as bad as it sounds. They had to throttle some nuclear power plants slightly. This lead to a loss of less than 0.2% of the total 2022 nuclear generation in france.
Skill issue, there’s no such thing as too much energy, we need to get better at steering the stuff.
Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity.
Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days.
That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build western nuclear power is.
[1]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...
[2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
[3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?"
If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1]
So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably.
[1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME
Throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm.
Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply.
When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed.
Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today.
Yes we already have a solution for all those industries which require stable power: buy an electricity future.
But somehow we need to treat the grid differently and handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry.
We have research on when we achieve learning effects.
> If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements:
> - It has to be the same site
> - It has to be the same constructor
> - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next
> - It has to be constant labor laws
> - It has to be a constant regulatory regime
> When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world.
From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k
China is not succeeding? They have been averaging 4-5 construction starts per year since 2020 which tracks to a 2-3% nuclear power in their electricity mix.
From their 2011 target of building 300 GW nuclear power in the next 10-20 years they have so far managed to complete 46 GW. But surely those final 254 GW will show up before 2031.
US Net Zero is 2050. With 25 years remaining, I think shooting for 2030 seems reasonable.
We’ve just about hit peak coal.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...
> The world’s coal use is expected to reach a fresh high of 8.7bn tonnes this year, and remain at near-record levels for years as a result of a global gas crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Not sure that counts as "just about hit peak coal".
We’re not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap. Not if the data centers consume all this new energy of course which seems to be what’s happening. Maybe after everyone has turned their own portrait into a studio ghibli picture we can go back and use that new, clean energy to solve the climate crisis.
The deployment of solar is growing exponentially, with its total capacity doubling roughly every three years. Wind is growing at a similar rate. Renewables currently already account for 30% of the global electricity production, and we're seeing projections of over 45% in 2030.
Assuming the projected 2025-2030 installation speed is realistic and flattens out - bit "if", but not completely unrealistic - that means we'd be looking at 75% renewables in 2040 and 90% renewables in 2045.
Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity. If we go all-out on nuclear now, that means significant nuclear power starts coming online in 20-25 years - so 2045-2050. At that point there is no more renewables gap left to bridge. There might be a small niche left for it if there is going to be essentially zero innovation in storage and short-term peaker plants, but who's going to bet billions on that?
Nuclear would've been nice if we built massive amounts of it 30 years ago, but we didn't. But starting a large-scale nuclear rollout in 2025? It just doesn't make sense.
> Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity.
I just don't know if that assumption is true.
Looking at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/small-modular-reactor...
> The timeline is to finish construction of the first reactor by the end of 2029, and connect it to the grid in 2030.
Sure, let's add 100% buffer because it's a major project, that's between 8-10 years from now. Not bad.
Are we talking about different kinds of reactors maybe?
I'm also building a nuclear power plant within the next 5 years. You can get 100% share for a mere 20.9 billion - trust me bro.
That is what I read in this announcement. History will not be kind on taxpayer money > /dev/null
> We’re not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap.
Will it be built before we have sufficient renewable capacity?
Google can’t have blackouts. So helps to have some nuclear in the energy mix.
Why not?
At this point optimising their electricity cost by load balancing their compute to where electricity is cheap, free or negative on a minute by minute basis would be a sizeable cost saving. Savings that would possibly offset the hardware overprovisioning that they would need.
Yeah, I would say of the organizations in the world that care about power outages, Google would rank among those most prepared to deal with them and the least flustered when they happen. If it has been too long between power outages Google will cause one intentionally, as an exercise.
France has nuclear and had a blackout.
The last time France had a blackout on the scale of Spain and Portugal was 1978. France has been and remains one of the top electricity exporters for Western Europe.
Because of nuclear.
By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression.
Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France.
Because of nuclear.
Germany is a net importer since 2023, what was also 2023 in France?
>2023 when several reactors were switched off for longer unexpected maintenance periods.
Who exploited Niger for four decades for its Uranium?
France
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...
Who is the main buyer in the EU of Russian Uranium?
France
https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-re...
If they aren’t dependent on Russian fossile fuels why do they still buy from Russia?
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250414-greenpeace-report-reve...
Germany does not receive Russian pipeline gas and has banned Russian LNG from its ports. It receives a tiny share of Russian gas from Dutch and Belgian ports, but to my knowledge Germany has no control over this. France on the other hand is the top destination for Russian LNG in the EU, sharing the lead only with countries that refuse to support Ukraine.
Germany became a net importer of electricity in 2023, but it took the vast majority of its nuclear power plants offline long before that, when Germany still was a net exporter of electricity. Even in 2022, during the gas crisis with barely any nuclear power left, Germany net exported records amounts of electricity to other European countries, with France at the top of the receiving end because half of their nuclear reactor fleet was offline.
Lastly, Germany has one of the most stable grids in the world, while France does issue blackout warnings when demand peaks.
You do know that the French grid would crash during every cold spell without 30 GW of fossil fueled power production? With the majority coming from their neighbors, reversing said flow?
What they have done is outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors fossil fuel power plants, and then only when they truly have to they reduce the output of their nuclear power.
Stick two French next to each other and they would in short order crash.
Misleading I’d say
> Residents of Andorra and parts of France bordering Spain were also reporting being hit by the blackout.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
My point is blackouts habe more to do with net stability then with the power source.
A sudden rise in demand would have the same effect because nuclear power plants can’t react that quickly.
"…by being cleverer."
Like harnessing the atom for enormous amounts of 24/7 power per unit volume of fuel and not emitting CO2 while we do it? Yes! Let's do that! And work on making reprocessing more affordable, so we don't even have to mine any more fuel (at least for the next 150 years).
I don't get it. Training giant LLMs can easily be task managed to line up with solar and wind availability. Shut off half the DC at night, go full power when it's sunny and windy. If they integrate the powerplant, they can easily manage this.
Is avoiding HW underutilization really worth going nuclear? The most expensive energy source of all?
Well then you only get 50% of your compute, hence your compute is twice as expensive (ignoring power costs.)
I guess I'm sufficiently divorced from ops as to not know what the relationship of these costs is. I had assumed that power & cooling is a notable factor, but it sounds like the silicon itself is a majority of the cost?
Think 20% power cost, 80% infrastructure where most are fixed cost.
Do the “no nuclear, renewables are the future” people have any comments?
We burned a few decades saying solar and wind are the solution. This set us back greatly in the struggle to reduce greenhouse emissions.
Never understood the "I'm solar" or "I'm nuclear" crowd. The issue is an engineering problem, not a baseball match.
As an system-oriented person, give me a healthy combination of available, battle tested, new and promising solutions, fine-tuning weaknesses with strengths.
Go to the stadium to solve your local team/visiting team issues. You are all falling to Big Fossil antics.
The nuclear boosters are particularly odd. I can engage in solar boosterism with my own money: I have 3.7kW on my house. I'm not going to have a backyard reactor, this isn't the Jetsons.
Roof top solar doesn’t work in apartments, and it also doesn’t work for renters.
Roof top solar is great for people with spare cash to optimise heir future cash flow.
I advocate for nuclear because it guarantees the poor won’t freeze in the dark.
> Roof top solar doesn’t work in apartments, and it also doesn’t work for renters.
So it doesn't go on the roof.
Doesn't mean you can't get PV, in an apartment, as a renter:
https://www.kaufland.de/product/502008893/
These are specifically intended for apartments, and Germany has a low home ownership rate.
It may only be 800W, but it's also only €239, not $10,000 like you suggest in the other reply.
Doesn't work how?
If it's monetary gain then thats a political not one in residence.
If not producing enough power then that's a people's problem. Being greedy taking more than what they need and for not enough resources on building efficiency.
Overall solar works. It's just gate-kept tightly by evil organisations who are scared to lose their dirty cash for such technology to evolve.
Because apartments don’t have roof tops.
And why would a landlord sink $10,000+ in to a property for no return.
Roof top solar only works for the user who has the roof top solar.
For everyone else it makes electricity more expensive.
Happy to be proven wrong. Show me a majority of places with high roof top solar penetration where per kWh electricity rates have fallen.
And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India have that covered - I don’t need to worry about producing more or less CO2 emissions because it won’t make any difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic climate change.
That's an interesting point, but a much less costly option is to change policies to incentivize landlords, not build multi-billion dollar nuclear plants.
> And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India have that covered - I don’t need to worry about producing more or less CO2 emissions because it won’t make any difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic climate change.
That doesn't change the US's contribution, the ability of the US to form successful international agreements, and the influence of the US pulling its weight as a much wealthier country than China or India.
Blaming your neighbor for your bad behavior - I sell drugs off my porch because my neighbor does - doesn't make you less criminal. Also unacceptable, from moral and practical perspectives, is saying 'there's nothing I can do'. It's time we stop letting that pass.
In most places home rooftop solar systems are heavily subsidized by everyone else. 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 rooftop residential solar.
As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
We're weird because we want a proven power supply to be built and used? Are the French really that much more capable than the USA that we can't replicate or surpass what they've done in their country with nuclear?
Does the engineering problem have any time constraints? I suppose my sense of urgency comes from stated climate goals.
An extra 50 years to solve the problem changes everything.
Lets face it deploying nuclear around the world will add other mayor headaches like nuclear profileration.
What nuclear proliferation?
How many nuclear electricity states are there? 30
How many nuclear weapons states are there? 9
What headaches are those nine nuclear capable states providing, exactly?
How has the world been made worse by having nine nuclear capable states? Practically, not just hypothetical anxieties about an unrealised future.
> hypothetical anxieties about an unrealised future.
Preventing nuclear war is just 'hypothetical anxieties'? We should wait for a war to happen and then do something? That's not persuasive.
Because, for now, those non-nuclear-capable states weren't interested in becoming nuclear-capable. On a standard PWR (the most common type of civilian industrial reactor) cooking military-grade plutonium is easy: charge it, let it start ('diverge') and then run, all as usual, then shut it down early.
Right now two of them are ready to go to war, and potentially nuclear war if one starts losing over a relatively small strip of land.
Ok, how many are democracies of those 21 without nukes or have or had a defense alliance with a country with nukes?
Let's ask people what the correct number of nuclear plants that should be built to decarbonize Iran is.
That's happening anyway.
Solar and wind are being deployed in enormous quantities. The technology is mature and marching up the exponential portion of the adoption S-curve. Nuclear isn’t. This isn’t even a value judgement: it’s just a statement on the incredible advantages of a technology that can be produced in factories, vs one that currently can’t.
> Solar and wind are being deployed in enormous quantities.
Yes, but that's not what's concerning the skeptics anymore, especially for solar (thankfully - the cost reductions and efficiency gains have been great). Aside from the well known geographical variance, I think the biggest legitimate concern is intermittence.
Let me try to turn that into a decent question: What variable other than energy output is most useful in order to compare energy sources? For context, all I've seen when it comes to intermittence is flame war with weak arguments thrown from both sides of the debate, i.e. "intermittence is not a problem at all, we just need batteries" to "intermittent sources are worth a fraction of an equivalent baseload source".
Honestly, I've not been convinced of either side, and (if I'm not alone in that sentiment), it may be a problem of education and communication.
Intermittence is a solved problem with storage, and storage is being deployed at an absolutely massive scale on grids that are market-driven for profits, namely Texas.
This seems to be revisionist history trying to position nuclear power as some underdog?!?!?
We threw absolutely massive handouts at the nuclear industry 20 years ago.
Only look to Vogtle, Virgin C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3 and all other projects. Moorside, Oldbury, Wylfa and countless in the US.
Had new built nuclear power delivered on budget and on time nuclear power would definitely have been part of the solution.
Instead Vogtle provides electricity costing 19 cents/kWh. Virgil C. Summer is a $10B hole in the ground and Flamanville 3, which is not finished yet, is 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
The true underdog from that time, renewables (and storage) deliver energy cheaper than even fossil fuels.
Remember that time France went from 7% to 70% nuclear energy?
https://youtu.be/1WNjyxeBsWc?si=kVa2qf0uBeFrAyYB
Yes? That was half a century ago. The equivalent choice in 2025 is renewables with storage.
Today they are wholly unable to build new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
Their EPR2 program is also in absolute shambles continually being pushed into the future while revising up the costs.
Now hopefully targeting investment decision in mid 2026 and the first new reactor online by 2038.
Until 2038 we should of course stop decarbonizing. No point reducing the area under the curve.
EPR was so unbuildable that it could have been designed by Amory Lovins to eliminate nuclear power.
It is not like it is going better for the AP1000 or NuScale. Including financing for the APR1400 bid in Czechia again leads to similar equivalent costs.
Many countries are rolling out TWhs per capita of renewable generation faster than France did at its peak of nuclear rollout.
It was impressive, but it's been overshadowed by modern renewables.
Nuclear ELECTRICITY, not 'energy'!
In France about 60% of final energy is produced thanks to fossil fuel.
Moreover the cost of this 'nuclearization' was huge (France debt is abyssal, and taxes are very high)
Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
I'll consider apologizing when one of the Google plants comes on line, whenever that is.
> This set us back greatly in the struggle to reduce greenhouse emissions.
What set us back was and is resistance to action on climate change, led by fossil fuel corporations and US conservatives, which has continued for decades. It's a fundamental policy of the Republican Party. Trump is already taking drastic action in that regard; it was one of his higher priorities. To try to blame someone else is absurd, and probably a talking point from their playbook.
Many of us who care about the environment have hated the widely-held anti-nuclear stances. It's a very clean source of energy. Renewables ended up being the focus because they had to be. There was no chance of pushing nuclear forward when the general sentiment was that we needed to regress on nuclear.
>Many of us who care about the environment have hated the widely-held anti-nuclear stances
Don't try to position yourself as the majority voice. Nuclear energy is all but clean and I don't understand the odd push in the last few years to go all in on nuclear even though there was a common understanding that it should not be the future.
20 years ago nuclear was the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushed solar & wind as a distraction.
Today solar & wind are the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushes nuclear as a distraction.
Nuclear energy was never cheap, it was always heavily subsidized. Just ask Joe Kaeser the former CEO of Siemens.
He said no nuclear power plant was ever profitable
Profit is tied to the subsidies, so that statement by the CEO is meaningless.
When you say nuclear was never cheap, what are you comparing it to? The impossible to compete with subsidization of coal plants? How can you compete with plants that are allowed to dump toxic radioactive waste into the atmosphere that kills hundreds of thousands annually, but your plants have to go through regulatory hell to prove they're 99.99999999% safe before even being approved?
Cheap isn’t a comparison. If you include the negative side effects coal isn’t cheap either.
>20 years ago nuclear was the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushed solar & wind as a distraction.
The histories of pretty much every green party in the western world and their anti-nuclear activism suggests otherwise.
You ever notice how "green parties" are somehow so incredibly effective against nuclear and not effective against fossil fuels?
Why do you think that is? Somehow I'm not convinced its the activism holding nuclear back.
Gas and oil based power generation is far simpler than nuclear. Regulatory barriers against nuclear power are far more detrimental to nuclear as a result because the issues compound.
Because fossil fuel interests have 1000x the resources, capital, and influence of either green parties or nuclear proponents?
Correct, it basically never was.
E.g. for Germany - the most high profile nuclear exits: - nuclear and fossile energy producers were the exact same companies - why would they fund activists to campaign against their own assets? - coal mining and plant employees were (around the first exit) part of a significant worker voter population, especially for the social democrats but to a lesser degree for the conservatives, too. The largest state was heavily dependent on the coal industry and SPD/CDU politicians regularly moved to/from leadership positions in coal-dependent energy producers. No party except possibly the Greens would have remotely touched a coal exit and discussions around that only seriously started after the second (conservative reversal reversal) nuclear exit. - gas and nuclear fuel in major quantities came from Russia, from different Russian state companies - why would they cut into each other's business by funding activists? They were happy for Germany to depend on them in any and all ways. - the second nuclear exit was a political play for voter sentiment by conservatives after Fukushima - they didn't even try to explain why nuclear should be kept for all the reasons they reversed the previous exit and still killed of the nascent booming solar/wind industry - they certainly were not renewables activists. Just recently the reverse happened as part of conservatives pre-election promises to rebuild nuclear as a play for voter sentiment due to temporarily high (war-dependent, already normalized) energy prices. It wasn't important enough for them to include in the government coalition plans in any way whatsoever - the main conservative agitator for nuclear has now had to agree that nuclear is economically dead.
The reality is that nuclear in Germany was already dead when the first exit was voted on - nobody had built plants in a long time, nobody had any plans to build them. If not for the exit plans to start a renewables transition, fossil usage would be far higher today and because of the exit reversal and delay in coal exit due to the conservatives it is much higher today than it needed to be and we're much more dependent on Chinese manufacturers, too.
At most activists were somewhat involved in voter sentiment at some points, but it wasn't particularly crucial versus the actual economic and political realities.
Green Parties are such a farce for the most part. They serve other purposes, not aligned with what you really want or defend ;)
In the US it serves as a spoiler for republican interests because they tend to take many more votes away from democrats than republicans. So they are useful for at least one party.
Right-wing parties and the center-left have been highly effective allies in getting people to demonize and ridicule the progressive left.
The reason is, I think, that the progressives have rationally better policies - ones that become mainstream decades later, including much of what is mainstream now - so by demonizing the progressives the center and right prevent people from actually considering the policies.
Coercive eugenics used to be a progressive platform.
More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried and the results are pretty clear they lead to increased crime.
Consider perhaps the progressive policies have been considered and rejected for good reasons.
> More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried and the results are pretty clear they lead to increased crime.
Crime increases were across the country, regardless of the politics of the prosecutor. They are believed to be tied to the pandemic. In places where progressive DAs remain, crime has subsequently decreased to historic lows - just like the rest of the country.
Wrong.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/VBQCPEMU5RZVASBS93WP?t...
First, the crime increase was indeed nationwide, including urban and rural, according to FBI statistics.
Second, this one study says only that property crimes seemed to increase 7% and that there is no other increase, including violent crimes.
Third, it omits the massive benefits of progressive prosecutors, including following the law (and not persecuting disliked people or groups; not manipulating trials with false evidence, etc.; making police and other goverment accountable), actual justice, and reducing jail and prison populations - which saves tax dollars and save enormous damage to communities as people who now can't get jobs become unproductive and as their families are left destitute.
That doesn't match the anti-progressive propaganda, which we should know by now is motivated not by truth or concern for the public, but self-centered political gain.
Reminder that anti-nuclear activism started against nuclear weapons and nuclear dumping, and then after Chernobyl the realization that it was possible to mess up agriculture across a continent from the failure of a single plant. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-36112372
Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at sea.
In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after decades of subsidized development and incremental improvement by Chinese wafer factories.
In the United States, anti-nuclear activism predates both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamshell_Alliance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_Alliance for two examples.
Indeed, however it was deemed way more convincing by more and more people after each nuclear accident.
Anti-nuclear power activism started before Chernobyl, see New Zealand banning nuclear powered ships at their ports in 1984 for one of many examples.
Replacement isn't remotely close to good enough. We need a massive increase in the supply of energy. Nuclear is the only viable path for that. We can do more than one thing at a time, we have the resources.
This seems to be working backward from having decided that we must handout untold trillions to the comparatively insignificant nuclear industry.
In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new built nuclear.
Let’s compare to renewables:
- 600 GW solar PV added [1]
- 117 GW wind power [2]
- ~100 GW battery storage
Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely enormous. We’re talking a ~50x differences and it is only getting larger as renewables continue to scale.
But somehow the only technology which is ”scalable” is new built nuclear power.
[1]: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-w...
[2]: https://www.gwec.net/gwec-news/wind-industry-installs-record...
When it comes to building nuclear plants China is, by far, the pack leader.
However its results are dwarfed by the results of its renewables projects: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
Yes, we need a massive increase in the supply of energy. Solar is the only way we're going to get it. We're adding solar at a 1TW / year rate. We're adding nuclear at a rate of ~30 GW / year.
So why is Microsoft spending billions to restart three mile island rather than just installing some solar panels?
Isn't Microsoft also buying an awful lot of solar and wind and storage?
From a single web search just now:
- 400MW of solar in Illinois and Texas, Feb 10 2025 Reuters https://archive.is/5x9VA - 20MW of Wisconsin solar, October 2024 https://nationalgridrenewables.com/press-release/national-gr... - 400MW of Texas solar, Apr 8 2024 https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/04/08/microsoft-signs-two-l...
and that's just the first three hits, there are so many more. TMI won't come online for years, it's planned for 2028, but we will have to see. It was shut down in 2019 because it couldn't compete with gas prices. Microsoft is buying at inflated prices to subsidize clean energy, but solar is also clean energy and when backed by batteries it is price competitive with gas.
The news was because "whoa Microsoft is paying for nuclear" not because "whoa nuclear makes a lot of sense."
There's only so many uneconomic nuclear reactors to start back up.
Is TMI up and running?
On the other side: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/micros...
Because with IRA massively lowering the costs restarting a plant might actually be feasible.
The problem is that new built nuclear power costs tens of billions.
I'm honestly baffled by the persistent irrationality of nuclear supporters.
This is a solved problem. The investment required to build grid storage for renewables, the TCO, the scalability, the capacity, and the build time, are all objectively better than nuclear.
So what's the real story? What is this obsession with an outdated last-century technology really about?
Any large group is composed of different motives; here are a couple of possible ones:
- Renewables are not, or not nearly as much, big profits for big business. They don't require the capital investment of fossil fuels or nuclear, and therefore they don't have the large moats of those businesses.
- Anti-liberalism (or reactionaryism): Destroying liberalism is an openly stated goal for which many will sacrifice singificant wealth and cause significant harm. Nuclear is counter to anti-nuclear liberal campaigners of yesteryear (I think conservatives often have little idea of changes since the Cold War era; they still talk about 'Communists', etc.)
People think it is cool. Spicy rocks make heat.
Which was followed by climate change denying conservatives who found their position untenable embracing nuclear power being able to create a culture war issue in debates about climate change.
All in the name of preventing the disruption of their fossil assets by stymying renewables.
Peter Dutton in Australia which now lost is the perfect example of this with his ”coal to nuclear” plan leading to massively increased emissions for decades to come.
State capacity is a real problem. Often struggling to do even one thing. There's many places where companies are ready to go on renewables but the grid approval isn't.
People overlook how long nuclear takes to build. Hinkley Point C is approaching a decade.
Woooah! Times are changing.
The AI arms race really is literally heating up...I nuit.
This is about to give "Killed by Google" a whole new meaning.
Hah!
But, in all seriousness, this could realistically be saving lives if you go with the assumption that Google was going to use this energy either way, and it otherwise would be coming from anything other than solar.
Every other source causes more deaths per energy produced. Coal is by far the worst, but natural gas, and even hydroelectric cost more lives than nuclear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42938125
It took about 1GW to train Chat-GPT4. If you look at the locations in the United States (>70% of all AI is in the US), there are only ~63 geographic regions you could put a 1GW data center. As AI models are growing at ~5x per year, it seems like the infrastructure is no in place to keep the AI models growing at that rate.
As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power (it has the highest up time of any power source), I'm wondering how localities are going to react. Are people who are local to nuclear plants just going to be OK with these gigantic corporations consuming all this power in their backyard with no benefit to them while they take all the risk and impact of that power generation? I'm also wondering how these companies are going to deal with the excess nuclear waste. Ultimately it won't be Google or Meta dealing with the waste. How do we ensure that all the nuclear waste from AI is dealt with responsibly?
Training GPT-4 used (claimed) 62GW-h over 100 days, for an average of 26MW. Rest of your comment follows from this error.
26MW is a fraction of the primary power consumed by a single passenger aircraft, by the way. It is an absolutely trivial energy input.
An average US home uses ~10,000 KWh over a year, resulting in about 1 kilowatt average power use.
Figures I can find suggest that a 737 uses approximately 7MW to stay aloft.
So a couple things I learned -- I think it's still a notable amount of power, enough to power ~6,000 homes for a year just to train a single model. But also, I learned that planes use a whole lot more power than I thought!
Training a single model is essentially consuming one plane-year's worth of power, or 3-4 flights continuously while it trains. I had no idea planes used so much energy.
But also, I bet most of these companies aren't training one model and calling it done. There's probably 1s or 10s of models being trained per year per company. That's a material amount of energy use. If we could power tens or hundreds of thousands of homes, that isn't 'trivial' energy input.
I think it's useful to put it into context next to other things we take for granted, but I don't think it's fair to diminish it as nothing either.
It is not trivial at all, it's the same energy used as about 9,000 homes and roughly 50-100 L/s of water wasted to evaporative cooling of said hardware.
"The Dongfang Electric Corporation's 26 MW offshore wind turbine is the largest in the world, surpassing previous models like the Mingyang 20 MW turbine. This turbine's larger size and capacity enable it to generate about 100 GWh of electricity annually, potentially powering 55,000 Chinese homes or 9,200 American homes."
Edit: more info here, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
Your water use estimate is high by a large factor. Order of magnitude.
Your claim: 50-100 liters per second to cool a 26MW workload.
Actual water consumption, according to Google annual report: 730 liters per second, globally, for an average 3GW load.
GW is a unit of power, not a unit of energy.
The best estimate I can find is 7.2GWh.
Which would be...7 hours of output from a 1GW powerplant.
What is the alternative though? I think it’s fair to question a decision but if people put their foot down when they don’t see the answer as good or clear enough then you end up with the status quo. This is the same thing that happened with housing (and building projects in general) in many larger cities. If all the housing projects are squashed for some decent alternative reason, you end up with the alternate reality which is potentially worse. City’s that have massive sprawl, people relying on cars for travel, unaffordable housing, etc.
In the energy case, we will be more reliant on non nuclear power: coal, fossil fuel, etc. I’m not sure you can scale “clean energy” at the rate we are moving.
Clean energy is scaling far faster than gas. Coal is dead. Nuclear takes 10+ years, and the US industry is so small that it can not scale to meet future needs.
Look at what was deployed last year, in GW terms:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586#:~:tex...
but note that gas produces at a capacity factor of ~50%, and solar at 25%, so scale solar down by half to better compare gas to solar.
Batteries are also here in great force. The average cost of battery-backed solar is cheaper is comparable to gas, and cheaper than new nuclear.
The main barrier to new solar and batteries are grid expansion to ship the electricity places. Putting a datacenter next to a proposed site for building solar + batteries that's waiting for its turn to get connected to the grid would probably be the fastest way to scale, if fiber can go there.
The main problem with renewables is their capacity factor (amount of time they can produce their max capacity). In the US this is ~24%, in Germany I think it's ~12% (can be wrong here). The reason for nuclear here is that it has the highest capacity factor of any form of energy (see EIA.gov).
Those numbers sound about right, but the real problem for solar in Germany is how it inflates the cost, and the intermittency. The capacity factor is just a readout of those problems.
Germany is one of the major economies with the very worst solar resources in the world. So it might actually make a lot of sense for them to build a bit of nuclear instead of stringing HVDC from Spain or Italy or wherever is sunnier. Or not, it's a very tricky projection! These costs are changing quickly, and any nuclear build is a bet not only on the current costs of technologies, but a bet on the future 30-60 years of costs.
The world added 600GW of solar last year, and is adding at a 1TW annualized rate. We do not have the capacity to add any other power source at that rate.
GW is power. Gwh is energy.
Energy is what matters when training a model.
Please get your units right. In the meantime, down voted.
> Please get your units right. In the meantime, down voted.
I don’t think a reply like this is in the spirit of this site.
But very in line with their bio...
> Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform.
Upvoted for dimensional analysis pedantry.
I think you missed the forest for the trees. I did incorrectly cite GPT-4 as I was going from memory and that's suspect sometimes. I also didn't elaborate and maybe I should have given the snarky comments I'm seeing.
Actually the amount of power available matters because you are consuming energy in time. If I have a 1MW plant and a battery, I can generate 1GWh in about 3 weeks. This seems a little silly though. A Hyperscale DC campus is ~150MW to 200MW. If you plot the larger ones, they are almost all near power stations with >1GW capacity (not all).
The industry trend is towards building 1GW datacenters. Last I checked these would consume ~8.7TWh (assuming PUE of 1). However, the 8.7TWh while relevant is meaningless unless the power to the DC can be 1GW. Since the plant itself has to generate more than 1GW (the plant has a cap ratio so more than this, plus other demand, etc..) for such a site, then it follows that there are limited number of sites in the US (this is public info see EIA.gov or Wikipedia).
Grok3 is already at 140MW (100 days of training ==> 336GWh) at ~10^26 FLOP. Model FLOP is increasing at ~5x per year so by 2030, we are expecting to be ~10^28 and that would take ~10GW (24PWh). If I am optimistic and say that the efficiency can improve by 1.3x per year, then we still need a very large generating station to meet the demand or we need to distribute among many smaller sites.
You can push the numbers around however you like but the conclusion is the same, the timing may be different.
There's a reason why all the hyperscalers are investing in nuclear, large generating capacity and the highest cap factor of any form of energy.
My 2nd comment still stands, and you left unaddressed (remember the forest?)..
Put all of it in the Greenland tundra. Free cooling. No humans to irradiate.
Some challenges:
- You get free cooling, but if you use too much you melt the permafrost, which has huge environmental cost.
- Building in remote locations is enormously expensive, especially with the requirements of a nuclear generating station.
- Now you have to run a city for the operators to live in and ship in everything they need (not to mention hardware to the DC.
- Denmark (and so presumably Greenland) has a law against building nuclear generating stations.
Besides, building nuclear power stations with the concept that we accept an accident will happen is crazy. Better to invest in preventing them than mitigating them.
The data centers too then? Because those need to be connected to the grid.
Bzzt, wrong units, this isn't Facebook. Go find some data to back up your obviously incorrect claim and fix your post.