> Samuel B. Morris, the general manager and chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power, traveled all the way to Geneva in 1955 to attend the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. There, he made a case for small reactors, arguing that because the “number of small units…is many times the number of large units,” there could be “economy in development and repetitive manufacture” of the small units.
> But nothing in the history of small nuclear reactors suggests that they would be more economical than full-size ones. In fact, the record is pretty clear: Without exception, small reactors cost too much for the little electricity they produced, the result of both their low output and their poor performance.
For me, SMRs don't pass the smell test. Buying one big plot of land for a reactor, building one power interconnect, having a localized water impact is way easier and cheaper than many. Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers. Costs that you can ignore while you're just building a prototype.
> Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers.
There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.
Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.
To a first approximation, China does not build nuclear power. Nuclear's share of power production in China is 4% and dropping. It seems to me that the main reason China keeps building a relatively tiny amount of nuclear is strategic. Reasons like ensuring they never forget how and ensuring they always have buildable designs so that if something changed they could ramp up the program. And probably even more likely: nuclear expertise is important to the country's military.
But coal is still 49%. The whole point of nuclear in a carbon-free, mostly-renewable grid is to avoid needing enormous amounts of storage and overproduction. That's a need that doesn't come up when you're still half fossil.
If you want to decarbonize as fast as possible, it makes sense to focus on rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible for now, but keep developing nuclear technology to cover the last bit where it starts getting especially expensive to replace fossil with renewables without losing reliable power. That's exactly what China appears to be doing. They're not just building a few reactors, they're also the world leaders in developing various GenIV designs, like molten salt reactors.
The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy) The remaining 2-10% is nat gas, if you have a piped source, or coal if you don't.
But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
It would also be better if you ate only vegetables and drove an ultralight (ebike) good luck. I personally like being able to turn on my lights 100% of the time
It's not about lights, it's about electricity always being available.
And well, always having power available (for domestic, but also for expensive production facilities that looses money while idle) using renewables is a lot more expensive than generating most of your power with renewables
Solar battery is not by any stretch of any possible definition the cheapest generation to deploy. Not even close. We do a disservice to the entire conversation saying easily falsifiable things like that. At 90% penetration solar + battery has a LFSCOE somewhere around $800/mwh depending on the study. Natural gas is something like 30-60. Solar panels are cheap. Building the required transmission and storage to service those panels is far more expensive than the panels themselves.
Increased renewable generation is an important goal, but we need to let the facts guide the path, not the other way around.
A) I am an electrical engineer who makes a living designing control systems for renewable generation. I know more about most of this than just about anyone in this conversation.
B) the post I am replying to is specifically calling for a 98% solar grid.
You replied to: "The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy)"
There's a big difference between "letting the facts guide the path" and tilting at strawmen built out of straw nobody else even brought into the discussion.
If you'd like to make the point that "cost of panels" can be misleading when supporting components and interconnects begin to take up the lion's share of costs then that sounds like a noble thing to remind folk of, but ideally not as a segway into shilling more fracking which includes untold environmental costs as externalities.
That's a fundamental problem with nuclear plants. Their classic "baseload" niche is gone. Like the intermittent sources, wind and solar, they need storage to hold what they overproduce during peak periods.
This is also true of geothermal, which, like nuclear, is almost all fixed capital cost.
It's only a problem because of capitalism. Every plant needs to independently make money, so nobody wants to be the ones spinning down because that's their profit margin dwindling.
But society would be better off with excess generation. So we either need a system where some are incentivized to spin down, perhaps by being paid a consistent amount regardless or something like that, or we need publicly owned power generation that doesn't care about profit.
This argument assumes we must build nuclear power.
The problem is that electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin. Now that we are moving beyond a purely centralized design.
Think about a homeowner or factory with their own renewables and storage.
They fundamentally operate on marginal price by choosing when they use their own system and when they buy from the grid.
If you add state owned reliable power to this mix they will cherry-pick. Their own cheap electricity when it delivers and the states subsidized reliable electricity when it doesn’t.
We can try add all manner of markets, fixed connection costs and what not to this but all it does is introduce strange arbitrage possibilities in the market.
Which is why we have settled on net energy markets and then the lowest possible amount of ancillary markets to shore up any gaps which would cause problems for the larger society.
We have needed to build nuclear power since the day it was invented. The amount of fossil fueled power generation is indisputable proof of that.
The only way we don't need nuclear power is if we have some other way of producing the energy we need without dooming the planet, and obviously we do not as we're still burning billions of tons of coal every year. Not to mention gas.
We could have made power generation fully fossil free many decades ago if we actually took climate change seriously. It would have been fine. Sure fossil fuels may have been cheaper, but if you include the damage they're already causing and will cause in the future you could multiply the cost of nuclear by orders of magnitude and it would still come out on top. Plus higher investment would lead to faster improvement in the technology, mass production of components and lower cost etc.
I agree that renewable with storage is cheaper of you price in destruction of habitable zones of the planet. Most people don't, and the dollar cost of the storage is a problem over fossil.
The coal argument about China doesn't hold water when you look at what they're actually building. Around 80% of their new power sources are renewable, and 10 to 15% is coal. They're aggressively focusing primarily on building renewable -- so to say that their coal is 49% is either misleading or entirely missing the point.
This assumes that the renewables built are actually contributing to the economy, which we don‘t actually know for sure. In fact there was an article stating that they discard a lot of the energy produced because the grid cannot deliver. [1]
> China, the world's top producer of solar power, rejected 360 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean power from January to June, up 49% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report this month by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
which is great, but as i understand it will still lead to an overall decline in share of nuclear power. The scale of their power production is unfathomable
No, almost every one is above 1GW - divide the net capacity by the number under construction to see the power [1]. They appear to be almost all CAP1400 (1.4GW), Hualong One (1.0GW), or CAP1000 (1.0GW). I see a single Linglong 1 (100MW) under construction. Proposed are all above 1GW.
You need to look at where those nuclear plants are being built, in the east, and where the new energy is out west that makes it appear that nuclear is falling behind. Having power generation that doesn’t need to be transported via UHV lines is useful, it also acts as a nice baseline that keeps the grid stable.
China is building more new nuclear power than the rest of the world combined. They’ll soon produce as much renewable electricity as the United States produces electricity
> There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now.
Not a particular fan of this paper, but it does illustrate a point ... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8867359 showed that for the UK to go 100% solar it would need an energy capacity of 1/3 of the total grid energy demand over the year. Figure 6 A shows the big trend of 6 1/2 months of discharge and 5 1/2 months of charge (i.e. cycle perhaps once a year). Seasonal variations do matter.
It also seems like they are constraining the system to have no overproduction.
It’s like assuming that a fossil based system has all its producers generating the expected capacity factor and then smoothing out the season and daily demand changes with storage. Due to the difference between summer and winter demand such a fossil system would also need to have months of storage to compensate.
Which of course is absolute stupidity. When you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve.
The underlying demand and production has not changed so much since then. The requirements for storage still exist, and strongly depend on when the power is delivered as well as needed.
> a fossil system would also need to have months of storage
Coal and gas also get produced in the winter at a relatively constant rate. Plus we know how to handle piles of coal, caverns full of gas, tanks full of LNG, and linepack for shorter duration gas storage.
> you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve
Sure, you then have an economic problem. The effective capacity factor of the intermittents get driven down. How are they going to be paid for, if much of the time the market is saturated?
I find it telling that you call it an ”economic problem” and ”intermittents”. It seems like you have an axe to grind, but not much backing your standpoint anymore. So you’ve fallen to using derogatory.
Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.
A single cycle gas turbine would love to get paid running at 100% all year around. It doesn’t because CCGT plants with higher efficiency undercut it.
Just like what happens in renewables. They start crowding out each other. Storage steps in and solves the peaks. More renewables come online until they ”crowd each other out” and around we go.
That’s called being a market. Which you nuke fans seems deathly afraid of given the economics of new built nuclear power.
It is interesting to see how large-scale nuclear is handled.
120% and 60% increase in cost for FOAK and NOAK (Table 2-1), plus no learning rate for nuclear construction beyond that (Table C.2).
Interest rates during construction unfairly penalise nuclear as "GenCost uses the simplest way which is to increase the capital cost by the assumed discount rate raised to the power of the construction time" (page 97)." This results in ~20% increase in capital costs against other simple scenarios like equal construction costs across each year.
30 year plant lifetime, rather than say 60 years. That results in ~10% increase in capital costs.
> Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.
That line of reasoning only works if there is something to make one plant more expensive to produce electricity than another. For natural gas the cost of fuel is far greater than the CAPEX. For intermittents only the variable OPEX can distinguish between generators, which is mostly for wind and I guess most severely for offshore wind. Cannibalisation is the big problem for intermittents. The notion of succession doesn't work for them.
Now you’re desperately trying to rationalize new built nuclear power.
GenCost has an amazing FAQ section you evidently either ignored, or did not peruse.
For example here they discuss economic life vs operational life, when you live in reality rather than grasping for straws:
> Why is the economic life used in LCOE calculations instead of the fulloperational life?
> The LCOE calculation converts all upfront and ongoing costs to annual costs which is then divided
by annual production. The capital cost component of a technology is converted to an annual
repayment to the debt and equity providers. The annual repayment amount is determined using
the economic life and the weighted average cost of capital. The economic life is shorter than the
asset life for some technologies such as coal, nuclear and hydro. Some stakeholders have queried
why this is so.
> Debt and equity providers require a shorter payback period than the total asset life for some
technologies to avoid the risk that part of the equipment might fail or might need new investment
(sometimes called refurbishment or extension costs) to keep operating safely and reliably. To
determine the economic life, debt and equity providers might look to the warranties provided
with the equipment. They might also look at the typical timing of refurbishments or life extensions
for that technology. The economic life is an input provided by the engineering firm that AEMO
commissions each year as an input to GenCost.
> Some stakeholders suggested that coal and nuclear could access special financing arrangements to
move the economic life closer to the asset life. However, our preference is not to introduce special
arrangements for technologies where there is limited Australian evidence. A common approach to
the LCOE calculation is important to maintain comparability. The 2024-25 report does explore the impact of longer capital recovery periods in Section 2. It finds there is no significant benefit from
the longer operational life of nuclear relative to shorter-lived technologies whose costs have been
falling over time.
Even looking at China and South Korea they see essentially zero learning effects across plants after the FOAK build. Small ones at the same plant.
Crying about FOAK vs NOAK is not even close to solving the absolutely stupidly large subsidies new built nuclear power needs.
Again with the loaded terms. Sad. The market is limited until for example Jevons paradox expands it. Which will never happen with new built nuclear power due to how expensive the electricity is, that leads to energy poverty for generations instead. But I digress.
Look at Texas or California. About all new renewable projects in those markets are coupled with storage.
What you call cannabilisation, and try to paint like the end of the world, is simply the market working. Now pure renewable projects aren’t enough, instead you need to sell the electricity when the consumers demand it.
In just a year or two storage has massively smoothed out the price swings in Texas.
But again, that would require curiosity rather than desperately trying to poke holes the study already answered.
>For example here they discuss economic life vs operational life, when you live in reality rather than grasping for straws:
It's essentially just saying the market can't think long term enough leading to drastic differences in your calculations. But hence it's typically governments pushing these projects forward.
>The market is limited until for example Jevons paradox expands it. Which will never happen with new built nuclear power due to how expensive the electricity is
But it did happen for nuclear power in the past.
Now you see essentially the opposite.
>Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
I'm not. I think it's a great set of technologies. But I think if one tries to get to 100% everywhere one's going to stub their toes on the scenarios where it's not all roses.
Why? Because the storage part is hard at scale in a lot of places and the intermitency more pronounced.
In Texas and Cali are incredibly sunny places in the south of the US.
Silicon valley where it's already an issue gets 3 times as much sunshine hours during winter as let's say berlin and those hours are far less usefull.
>Crying about FOAK vs NOAK is not even close to solving the absolutely stupidly large subsidies new built nuclear power needs.
Is this not intentionally sidestepping the ludicrous amount of subsidies that have been handed out to renewables in aggregate?
Berlin would need to overproduce insane amounts in summer to handle it's winters.
The flip side is that what you are saying is that nuclear power will be commercially viable into the 2100s. And betting the house on that. While knowing that the electricity they provide is expensive enough to lead to energy poverty for generations.
That seems absolutely insane.
Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.
Who cares if we get to 95%, 97, 99% or 100% carbon neutral electricity when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Transition that final firming to whatever carbon neutral sources we land on when their emissions matter in the late 2030s and 2040s.
We need to optimize decarbonization per dollar spent with the shortest time to market.
You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.
We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.
The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?
And that is certainly not new built nuclear power.
>While knowing that the electricity they provide is expensive enough to lead to energy poverty for generations.
What are you on about?
>Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.
And the opposite happened in the past whilst europe was building bunch more of them.
>Who cares if we get 95%, 97, 99% or 100% when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?
Funny you say that when some of those are significantly harder. Are you going to turn on steel plants only in summer? Do you think that might have some effect?
>You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.
You should tell my government and the neighbouring governments.
>We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.
It did exactly that?
>The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?
it has spent €700 billion to $1 trillion on the energywende (a metric which doesn't properly include a lot of private investment) and ends as one of the worst emitters in europe whilst deindustrialising due to high energy prices.
They jerk eachother off about how high their renewables share of the economy is every summer and then import and fire up the browncoal and gasplants again troughout the other seasons. When that solar panel is producing a 10th of it's average summer output (already below the capacity everyone loves to roll with for articles) in winter there's only one big winner possible.
People like to point out how france's electricity production is subsidised when they come out looking good even when the gov intentionally puts a stick in it's wheels by essentially forcing it to subsidise pricing to competition.
Namely, It's very easy to 'design to load' where you don't need to worry about the next shipment of Coal, or an extended weather event causing excessive cloud cover and depleting your reserves.
Heck, even as far as compared to LPG, you don't have to worry as much about disruptions or possible cost shifts around LPG supply.
Yes, I'm possibly tongue-in-cheek handwaving specific types of 'weather events' here and potential impacts, i.e. Tsunamis... OTOH it's a lot easier in current gen designs to make something that would have minimal risk for something, say, in the middle of nowhere Texas.
To be specific, solar with 4hr storage is price competitive with grid right now. Storage becomes expensive after that at 8hrs even with projected sodium or lithium prices. For a datacenter usage they probably need couple of days storage at 50hrs like the planned google datacenter. Only alternate chemistry batteries that could be scaled up easily like flow, iron air, zinc etc. could be competitive for multi day storage, though most of these are still at experimental or pilot stages.
> Google’s new Minnesota data center comes with the world’s largest battery—and won’t raise electric bills
> The tech giant says it will fund enough new wind, solar, and long-duration storage to cover the project’s power demand and avoid shifting costs to ratepayers.
It works better on a geographically spread-out grid, and the data centers are running into the same limit that renewable plants are, which is that the grid is struggling to keep up (in large part, in many places, due to a history of underinvestment).
Data centers with good load balancing between regions do not need exactly the same power 24/365 so the latest solar-wind-storage is already cheaper in theory. But it would take few years before production of sodium and other batteries will scale up and the mean time a turbine powered by natural gas wins.
> there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production.
If geothermal works economically (outside of volcanic zones where it already does) then it's game over for any other power source except existing dams though because it solves all problems at once.
That'd be a great thing for humanity but I don't think it's worth stopping pursuing alternatives already, because it's still a big "if".
Technically it would, but the same way an individual ant's breath contribute to global warming.
Note that the thermal energy contained in the inner earth isn't a fixed amount: the earth constantly generates new heat from friction and radioactivity, and that new heat is radiated away in space at night, alone the heat captured from the sun during the day. So technically geothermal will increase the efficiency of this heat transfer a tiny bit, but it's really a negligible amount. (In reality the ant's contribution to global warming is probably orders of magnitude than the phenomenon we're talking about here).
I'm not a geologist, but for comparison, the Siberian Traps[1] erupted for 2 million years, and there have been other large events on that scale. Any heat we release will be insignificant in comparison.
Nope. It is very far away from core. Core is very big. And energy is already flowing outwards. So just using it really have not any significant impact.
Real issue is that it is not actually usable everywhere. Again Earth is big and going deep in some places is very hard.
SMR is driven by funding, insurance, and regulation. China doesn't have these issues and builds conventional at a great price. China is building 37 reactors, only 4-5 are SMR-type units, and are larger at 600MW. The rest are standard PWR, and the 40+ in planning are dominating by standard PWR.
Regulatory risk is too high, building too infrequent to understand costs, funding for first-of-its-kind is too hard for nuclear in most countries. SMR makes it fundable. New designs give the hope that regulatory burdens can be lowered.
China's nuclear production is only growing in an absolute sense. As a share of production, it's dropping, from a very low level of 4%. China is building other power types far faster than nuclear.
This is an important point: in a lot of ways, SMRs are a strictly worse than 1000MW plant. The potential financial benefits come from all the other factors you mentioned. I would rather have a "worse" nuclear power plant that actually gets built.
The hope of SMR is that it can be cost-effective at the same level that other factory-produced power sources are. If that's not on the table, then large-scale nuclear deployment mostly isn't going to happen.
> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.
That is literally the plan with several designs like NuScale (and I think TerraPower). The plan with NuScale is to ship the reactors on rail or barge, and then truck it in the last few miles. So they cost savings is in not having to custom desgin the actual components for each site, and build them on site. Standard reactor, standard monitoring systems, standard control room able to monitor multiple reactors, etc.
Plus, when you have 12 of them onsite in one large area, you can take one offline for refueling, and still produce power with the rest of them.
NuScale infamously failed to get their reactor funded in Utah (UAMPS and the CFPP), it was just too expensive. Costs kept rising, large utilities declined to sign up, and in the end those utilities remaining were going to hit the contractual off ramp so it was just cancelled. I have some links to minutes of municipal utility meetings in Idaho Falls that showed the wheels coming off (even though there was great local support for the effort.)
Their design requires considerably more steel and concrete per MW(e) than a large conventional PWR power plant. You don't do civil construction in a factory, and that's where much of the cost is. Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost.
Your last point is entirely backwards and missed the scaling concept entirely. I suggest you watch a documentary on the Model T. The point being that these aren't civil projects once it's modular. The prices and material are what's being optimized. To compare to large RPVs and BWRs efficiency is idiotic as that's the only place they beat SMRs and the known downside to SMRs which is the point of scaling it.
It has always been a regulatoryu issue. As given by the fact Valar has a microreactor currently running just to disrpove your thesis.
> The point being that these aren't civil projects once it's modular.
But that's simply wrong. All the projects (except for silly microreactors which don't have a prayer of being competitive) involve substantial civil engineering.
Large scale civil engineering projects will always cost more than simply installing stuff that comes almost fully assembled from a factory (solar, wind, battery or small/medium gas turbines). Opex will always be much higher for a generation facility which requires 850 FTE specialist employees to operate (US average per plant) compared to the minimal requirements for on-site employees for utility scale solar or wind facilities. Generation tech which requires no fuel or hazardous waste handling and storage also has an obvious cost advantage. None of these factors have anything to do with “need to believe”.
I don't think I get your point. A project will not be approved and funded if the local population does not believe it is safe, so safety must be demonstrated through a variety of means, including some you mentioned. This is directly tied to the high costs involved.
> To sum up, since the early 1970s, the cost of constructing nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been steadily rising. This can be traced to a constantly shifting regulatory environment, which has continuously changed plant design requirements, and added more and more safety features, which often were required to be implemented on plants under construction. The regulatory environment is partially a reflection of the fact that nuclear power and the risks of radiation had become increasingly controversial, and that early understanding of the likelihood of a nuclear plant accident was often inadequate.
Nuclear in this millennium is not competing with nuclear or other tech from the 1970s - it’s competing with newer technologies (solar, wind, batteries and gas turbines) which do not require 5 to 10 year huge civil engineering works. All these alternative technologies benefit from mass production in factories. While civil engineering does not get cheaper over time - not just for nuclear plant but all large infrastructure construction.
And that’s just capex - even if a nuclear plant could be built for free, the cost of operation (huge head count, fuel and waste handling), means it cannot compete with newer technologies. Indian Point shutdown years before end-of-life because it was too expensive to operate.
Nuclear plants are large and complex and expensive to build and run. I’m not sure why it should be surprising that electricity generation technology has advanced sine the development of the PWR - it’s been more than half a century. The world has moved on from electricity generation using a huge steam engine attached to an alternator with a fiddly and complex firebox.
It’s economics and newer technologies that have made nuclear power obsolete - not public opinion.
Oh ok, yeah I think we agree. the original quote I was responding to was "the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost." I was simply trying to say that safety and cost are not independent. Safety is a massive reason why nuclear costs so much.
NuScale's putative safety improvement came from considerably larger cost. Safety and cost may not necessarily be related, but in NuScale's case they certainly were.
> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.
The biggest costs to nuclear are associated with each of them being unique snowflakes. They need to be standardized and mass produced to bring down costs.
So the dream is many big plants (eg starting 10+ per year), which is what France did and China does, but since we can’t seem to have that here, small reactors are an attempt to solve that.
The technology was given almost a century to prove itself cost-effective. It did not succeed in the market and only ever worked with truly massive amounts of government subsidies.
High fixed costs + more reactor sites -> more expensive, more nuclear waste sites for taxpayers to clean up
Each of those existing plants were competitive against coal at the time without having the negative externalities of widespread radiation exposure (uranium in coal just released to the atmosphere); mercury contamination in all our freshwater lakes and the ocean, leading to strict limits on consuming fish for children and pregnant women; and a half-century of CO2 emissions.
Orders of magnitude more people are killed by rooftop solar, but we haven't raised safety standards on all other sources of electricity to be the same level we require for nuclear.
NuScale is a terrible example. Their flagship project collapsed before it even started because of cost escalation and their other project was some sort of crypto scam.
> For me, SMRs don't pass the smell test. Buying one big plot of land for a reactor, building one power interconnect, having a localized water impact is way easier and cheaper than many.
Some things would depend on the specific location and the grid around it:
The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station in New Brunswick may be 'overkill' because when it goes down every few years for inspections/retooling, there's little other redundancy available. SMRs would be useful for that regional grid: install 3-4 and one can go down with less fuss.
In (e.g.) Poland there were small/medium coal-fired generation stations near coal mines. If the mines are now empty (or retired for climate change), then the grid connections could be reused for SMRs on an existing generation site: less need to find a new site and build new power pylons, etc.
Security costs are also an obstacle. Any nuclear reactor requires 24×7 armed security and that's largely a fixed cost regardless of power output. You need almost as many guards for a small reactor as a large one.
There's a political issue. Just look at how hard it's been to protest all the new gas plants that came up over the last ~20 years. The reason is that we built many small gas plants, instead of a handful of large ones. It divided up the protesters to the point where they couldn't work together.
When we built less, but larger, nuclear power plants, they're easier to protest. If we can make SMRs economical, it makes it significantly harder to protest.
The people protesting nuclear honestly shouldn't be allowed to vote if they claim they're clean energy due to the apparent lack of critical thought. Seriously, if you're an actual engineer or scientist, this statement is self evident.
It's really a pity that we missed the boat on large nuclear reactors. So much more power would enable so many use-cases and cheap electricity would have enabled us to have much less gas heating. Massive damage to the climate caused by misguided regulation. I tried to write to deregulation.gov on reducing the fund allocation required for fission reactor cleanup but c'est la vie. Death by a thousand cuts and then a few big rocks, I suppose. We lost half a century, but so it goes. Now we should be able to do large-scale solar and wind, and if it weren't for the Burning Man people we could have geothermal too, but we'll get there.
They blocked geothermal drilling in the desert. After multiple years of blocking it with use of environmental law they finally managed to preserve it as a conservation area for sustainable tourism:
> Organizers of the Burning Man festival in northwest Nevada have reached a settlement with a geothermal energy developer that cancels an exploratory drilling project that some feared would ruin the ambiance of the counter-culture event.
That's so weird. I have never seen more fossil fuels and wood burned just for art, than at burning man.
They should have had an artist work with them to make whatever the exploration gear was, look like a permanent installation. It might not have even required actual changes, just a label.
In addition to the sibling comment, I'll say that environmentalists have opposed nuclear energy for half a century, despite it being far better than coal or ng in terms of emissions. I'd say that the venn diagram intersection of burners and opposition to nuclear is significant.
Environmentalism comes in at least two forms. IMO they are entirely different things.
One form is science-based and concerned with finding out how to engineer our civilization to be more sustainable and compatible with the Earth's ecosystem. That faction has been mostly either pro-nuclear or at least open to it when renewables aren't enough or aren't ready.
The other form is a romantic back-to-the-land anti-industry or even anti-civilization movement. It's opposed to nuclear because it's a "techno-fix" when the real answer must be abandonment of high technology and advanced civilization and a return to pre-industrial (or even pre-civilization Paleolithic) ways of life. For this group that's the only acceptable answer. Finding a solution to climate change that didn't involve abandoning industry or growth would be bad, since it would allow "business as usual" to continue.
Returning to pre-industrial or pre-civ times would require the deaths of billions of people, since you can't support these populations without industry, but they don't mention that. That's the quiet part.
The second group is mostly the group that has opposed nuclear power. A few have even opposed wind and solar power, believe it or not. It sounds ridiculous but look it up. You can find cases, albeit more fringe than anti-nukes.
The second group also horseshoes around to the far right in some cases. Anti-vax and general anti-medicine ideology and the idea that we need to be "natural" in everything was originally something more associated with these types of greens, but today it's part of MAGA. There'a also an offshoot known as ecofascism. Look it up, it's also a thing. Also search up "Savitri Devi," a very odd crossover figure here.
The second type is also inherently misanthropic. Their ideal is some Eden without humans at all. _Any_ human impact is morally wrong to this type of environmentalist.
Contrast that with the conservationist hunters, sportsman, fisherman, etc. who wish to conserve natural environments with a keen eye towards sustainability and ecosystem health. Human intervention in culling herds can actually be a kindness to animals whose predators have been eliminated, yet some will oppose it regardless of what the Department of Fish and Game and other scientists suggest simply because it involves hunting and eating meat.
Cutting off the nose to spite the face... which rhymes with the nuclear debate here.
I'm pretty sure the actual second group is vanishingly small, it just seems larger because people in general don't know anything about anything so they will be vehemently against nuclear simply because they don't actually know that it's clean energy.
Similar to the "data centers use all the water" people. I saw a Facebook post with thousands of people raging against Nevada/Las Vegas data centers because they were being blamed for the region's dwindling water supplies - googled it and less than 1% of the water used in the area goes to the several dozen data centers. Seems to me like there's probably a lot of bigger fish to fry but I didn't look into it any further.
People are sheep. They jump on whatever bandwagon that happens to cross their path at the right moment. Almost everything people complain about they're just wrong about. It's actually insane scrolling on Facebook these days, it's just an endless stream of bullshit with hordes of NPCs raging about shit they know nothing about and every now and then there's a person with a functioning brain trying to spread some knowledge but it's obviously futile.
Most people can't tell you how taxes work even though they have been paying them their whole lives and complain about them constantly. They will happily tell you a bullshit story about "their friend" who passed on a pay bump because it would increase their taxes and reduce their after-tax income.
It's honestly so fucking frustrating. I mean nobody knows everything but as someone who has a decent overview of how the world works, who understands most important things at at least a basic level, it's just blisteringly obvious that the average person does not understand almost anything. They just got hooked into something at some point, somehow, and now that's their identity. Pretty much exactly like religion. Whatever cult they happened to be born into is obviously the only correct one, they'll ignore any and all evidence and arguments because it has nothing to do with reason. It's their identity and that's that.
Nuclear power has never been cheap and never will be. Every country that has tried has failed, and that included the Russians, the Chinese, South Koreans, French and the Japanese. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in Russia and China.
All the cost were hidden off the balance sheet 40 years ago. They can't build them cost effectively (or on schedule) now that there's more scrutiny on where the money comes from.
And the cost of fossil fuels is future (not to mention current and recent past, I believe Germany has had over 15k heatwave related deaths this summer) human lives, you wanna calculate those into your little napkin math there?
Unfortunately they have to shut down their nuclear reactors when it gets too warm in the summer, which is only going to get worse. Since nuclear isn't capable of generating baseload, we should instead invest into solar & batteries.
Except some of them are still building new plants today (large ones cause higher efficiency, unsurprisingly). For China and Russia those are entirely separate from the kind of reactors used for plutonium reprocessing or medical isotopes or whatever else, they only exist to boil water at the end of the day. The only incentive here is electricity, and both have plenty of other options available.
Bit of a paradox isn't it? They'd just burn coal or gas instead if that was much cheaper.
Hmmmnnnn. I remember getting excited reading a Wired article "Let a thousand reactors bloom" [0] - but that was back in 2004. I'm still waiting for a "pizza-safe" pebble-bed reactor.
This Nature article dubs TRISO fuel as "accident-tolerant", which is just as well given the lamentable history of it in actual use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor for instance, which suffered so many accidents that it was known as the "Shipwreck". It ended up with TRISO pebbles getting stuck in the reactor vessel, the primary circuit being hopelessly contaminated with fission products, and is now impossible to safely decommission using current technology.
It seems to me working SMRs really would be valuable, particularly for off-grid applications or where process heat is needed alongside electricity generation.
But as someone who was, like you, taken in by the pebble bed hype last time around, I've now learned to be much more sceptical about new nuclear technologies until they've actually been proven in practice.
TRISO is also more expensive, both in fabrication and disposal. It looks to me like another case of nuclear mis-optimizing for the wrong metric (safety vs. cost).
Not sure what you're referring to but in June they achieved criticality in a demo. While a good milestone that's not at all a functioning reactor connected to the grid. Let alone anything like a repeatable consistent production of said reactor.
I wish the article had more details on the cost to build these reactors, the cost to operate, refuel, dispose of fuel and then decommission. Details about how long they’re expected to operate, and how much power they will generate in their lifetime. Then we could get a projected cost per kWh for the power they will generate.
I ask because the last reactors the US brought online took so long to build and cost so much they caused the cost of power to go up.
This seems unworkable when solar is already causing power to be free (Australia), and gets cheaper by the day.
There's two reasons they take so long: large plants need to be redesigned as conditions on the site develop (soil type unexpectedly changes as excavation occurs) or regulations change during the process, and the second reason is that there's basically no nuclear construction industry.
The benefit of an SMR is that it can theoretically be built largely off-site without the same risk that larger plants have wrt needing to customize everything. That allows construction companies to centralize and reuse talent and suppliers rather than needing to drag them all over the country or subcontracting to people more accustomed to building offices.
In areas like where I live, there's weeks or more of time in winter where every day is overcast, short, and has little wind. To go completely renewable, we would need to pay southern regions to overproduce by triple digit percentages of their needs and then send the energy to us by HVDC that don't exist yet either.
A bad ice storm or tornado could leave millions without any power at all at the most dangerous time of the year to not have electricity.
It's doable, but we are a long way off and if SMR miraculously hits the right numbers, it'd be a better fit for us. Until then, we'll keep burning gas supplemented with solar.
A lot of people are betting serious money that they will cheaper, more flexible, faster to build, and safer. Including me - I'm working in the industry, and I think they might very well be future backbone of energy production.
But there's a real possibility when all this shakes out that SMR's only advantage will be their flexibility. And that might be enough. A major issue with gigawatt scale nuclear is that it's frankly too big for most markets. Only very large electric markets can can easily digest a new always-on 1000 megawatts of electricity, and you need to be building multiple plants at a time for this all to be economical. That's why the nuclear power rollout of the 60s through 80s worked, and why China and to a lesser extent India's nuclear industry is thriving presently.
With an SMRs smaller scale, there are just way more available projects where nuclear is feasible, and so a more consistent workload can keep everyone employed and subcontractor's backlogs filled. The flexibility in scaling lets you reclaim the benefits of having an experienced workforce and that knows how to build nuclear power plants, something we lost in the west when we stopped building them.
What % of global electricity production is in too small markets? Seems to be working well in EU at least, markets and grids being multinational.
I'd guess many places in Africa could be potential markets that have underdeveloped grids but growing economies and populations. Hence the SMR industry in South Africa since the 90s I guess.
We're looking specifically at new power plant builds. The majority of that is in Asia, with China and India being the bulk of it. But there is a lot of Asia outside of those two, and in particular Southeast Asia has a lot of potential. There is a lot of long distance transmission line connectivity already, and more planned, but you still want to product power close to where it's used so as to avoid losses in transmission. And the finances for a smaller country are just more straightforward if you're not spending multiple billions of dollars on one giant plant.
The next big market is actually replacement plants in the USA and Europe. Electricity generation may have peaked there, but much of the generating capacity is decades old and needs replacement. There are a lot of smaller facilities that are not gigawatt-scale that need to shut down, and it's easier to plug that gap with SMRs.
South and Central America are small markets, but they won't be ignored. There is a lot of complexity here with the inter-national hydro projects and broken up grids, so I'm sure some countries will look into SMRs.
Africa unfortunately just doesn't factor in except as a long-term possibility for growth. It's only 3% of electricity generation now, and its share will probably fall as Asia electrifies.
This is all worst-case scenario where SMRs are less financially competitive than current gigawatt-scale designs. If SMRs do actually succeed in being cheap assembly-line reactors, then all bets are off and the industry will experience explosive growth.
Even in Europe you can't necessarily bring online a 1200+ MW plant just anywhere, especially in the recent market where some PV production is curtailed in summer and brings the spot rates to zero.
In theory we should start investing in synthetic fuel production, but it's been mostly vaporware so far.
The problem is that you can’t assume ”always on” anymore.
Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
Baseload is simply the lowest wattage your grid demands in a time period. Solar and wind have not made it irrelevant at all. All of the demand from data centers very much assumes constant reliable power which is in fact a perfect match for nuclear.
What solar and wind have made irrelevant is the assumption that constant supply of the baseload is an addressable market for a power plant. That only works if the supply is the cheapest on the market (something nuclear has even historically struggled to achieve without big subsidies), and solar and wind will supply the baseload much cheaper than any other source when they're running, causing a lot of problems for any plant on the grid that wants to run at a constant output.
There needs to be a market mechanism to ensure there is enough dispatchable spare capacity to meet demand when solar and wind can't supply it. More reliable sources of power are inherently more valuable.
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely do the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
Data centers are only 5-10% of all US electric power demand. A significant fraction of that load is responsive to spot market price. DCs incorporate their own battery storage infrastructure for backup purposes and some even sell stored energy back to the grid during times of high demand.
it is not at all a perfect match for nuclear. Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing the nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
Thats what OP means by baseload generation being irrelevant.
Perfect reliability is not worth the squeeze. In Sweden, which is a very electrified country with harsh winters, the figure is that it is acceptable to have 1.52 hours per year of not matching demand with production. Paying for more reliability is simply not worth it.
The research has lately focused on system costs. Finding renewable systems vastly cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Big reactors also need a lot of cooling, and we've just had a very dry summer in Europe which forced some nuclear power stations to dial down or shut down entirely.
There are no working SMR's ready to be deployed in the West. The company (NuScale) that was furthest along had its flagship project die after cost estimates ballooned. Its other project was a crypto scam.
Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.
Although generally safe these reactors aren't totally safe.
I'm concerned lax physical security will allow miscreants to blow them up and spread nuclear materials over a wide area. The ensuing panic would totally destroy any goodwill nuclear power has gained over the last 20 years or so.
I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers playing the Good Samaritan with their claims of "Carbon Neutral Environmentally Friendly A.I."
People are far more terrified of flying, in general, than they are of driving. However, driving is far, far more dangerous -- with flying commercial being one of the safest modes of travel.
Depending on what kind of solar, it can have quite a high death/TWh ratio because people fall off roofs while installing them. As a ratio is far better now that so much new solar is ground level solar farms and not installed by amateurs or professionals who have a van, a ladder and watched a YouTube video that one time. Some older estimates based, I think, on generic roofing accident rates, were up to 0.44 deaths/TWh.
Wind is more dangerous than nuclear (0.04), I guess also from falls and accidents during construction and maintenance.
Edit: All are incredibly safe compared to the next worst, hydro (1.3, or 30 times worse than wind).
The differences in deaths from (non-accident) nuclear and wind/solar are very small compared to the amount of energy produced. The effect of the statistical value of lives lost is tiny compared to direct differences in energy cost, and so shouldn't have any effect on which is chosen.
This is not the case for coal, where the cost of lives can be substantial.
The cost for coal depends a lot on how the emissions are treated, and how deaths from CO2 are calculated. A general problem with the latter is these are global deaths, and foreign lives are valued far below domestic lives. Kind of horrible, but choices on spending illustrate this.
The scam here is presenting average occupational accident rates as a measure of "safety" when the obvious risk of nuclear power is the rare large-scale events which render large areas of land uninhabitable for generations while producing few directly-attributable deaths.
Are those large-scale events in the room with us? Or are you saying over the last, however many decades of all sorts of countries running nuclear plants, we've just been oh so lucky to have a negligible number of serious accidents? Luck is an interesting argument.
Also, you may want to fact-check your "large areas of land" because you're just making that up, if talking about accidents that have already happened, or going of by feels I guess if talking about hypothetical accidents that have by luck not happened all this time?
The real scam is bikeshedding about the safety of nuclear vs solar while happily burning coal. Take a deep breath, let your lungs taste the byproducts of burning coal. And now, I dare you, say something about the nuclear waste "problem". barf
Coal is particularly bad about large scale contamination. Nuclear has historically involved substantial contamination in processing plants (Hanford, Paducah, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats and so on).
Solar, wind, and battery do not have comparable large scale contamination risks.
The potential for widespread radiation leakage from nuclear doesn't exist with wind or solar. I would think a terrorist would hit a nuclear power plant over any wind or solar farms.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
If refugees were allowed to live there, I wonder how many people would choose radiation over their current worse situations?
The article mentions people moving from Donbas (perhaps less inhabitable): "Following the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, refugees from that conflict settled in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or nearby".
Terrorists are only one piece of the issue. Corporations and "Responsible Adults" have done more to harm nuclear power in this country than any terrorist act has.
ConEd and Three Mile Island meltdown brought out a mass of normal people to chant "Hell No! We won't Glow!"
Hanford in Washington State.
San Onofre in So Cal.
Santa Susana Meltdown.
The reality is that everyone wants nuclear, but no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant.
> Although generally safe these reactors aren't totally safe.
I have some seriously bad news about the safety of your totally-safe house against meteorites. Or for that matter, thermonuclear explosives detonated directly above its roof.
As a bonus, here's a channel with hundreds of commercial aircraft accidents in which thousands of people have died: https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot. Now enjoy traveling using the objectively safest mode of transport — commercial aviation.
I'm also a bit confused by that criticism. If Big Tech wants to use a portion of their ginormous profits to create a much larger market for the commercialization of small reactors, it sounds like a net positive to me. The data center construction spree is basically, in part, a giant private stimulus program for our energy supply. Yeah it's messy in the short run, but considering how much of Big Tech's profits are arguably undeserved, I'll take it over other options if regulatory & legislative actions lack feasibility.
that they get price competitive with low quality gas turbines run by state subventioniere natural gas...
or the government actual enforces proper environmental protections so that they can't continue running gas turbines without proper filters (and this isn't even (mostly) about climate change, but air pollution harming people)
and from how it currently looks both things seem unlikely :/
Regardless, better that they're the ones who spend the money for these reactors, and better that they use nuclear instead of coal or gas plants.
One option is to also mandatorily lock the powerplants to the municipal grid, and provide rebates to data center operators via net metering instead of simply giving them cash back.
But yes, the lax security and the laissez-faire don't give a shit attitude of the current admin far outweighs any of these benefits
Nuclear, while exorbitant, is necessary for security. See North Korea vs Iran/Venezuela. Nuclear scientists, supply chains, and a trained workforce takes decades to develop. Excess power production can be used to smelt aluminum. You can always have strategic excess supply of materials that can use flexible supply.
The problem with 100% solar+batteries is that you need to massively overbuild for the system to meet demand. It's far more cost-effective to have some portion of generation come from a firm, weather-independent source. The main options are fossil fuels, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Since fossil fuels emit carbon and hydro and geothermal are geographically limited, nuclear is the best option in a lot of places.
That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.
And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.
Natural gas and hydro are firm power. You're correct that nuclear is not a good backup power source, but that's not the suggestion. The question is whether adding high-capacity-factor firm generation reduces total system cost. In regions where hydro and geothermal are unavailable, nuclear is the next best low-carbon option. I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 100% renewables, especially transmission capacity between regions.
I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 99.99% renewables and/or using it as a straw man against the highly inexpensive and achievable 95% renewables.
You're also underestimating the costs of using nuclear to achieve 99.99% reliability on top of a grid with 95% renewables: in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power. In which case you might as well ditch the renewables. But the world does not have the quadrillions needed to go 100% nuclear. The world does have the 10s of trillions needed to go 95-99% renewable.
>in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power.
Where are you getting that from? Again, nuclear doesn't need to be a full backup, and nobody is suggesting we ditch renewables for nuclear. A perfectly viable solution would be a grid with a majority of power coming from renewables and storage, with enough nuclear generation to reduce the amount of overbuild necessary and to stop burning natural gas.
>Individually, each firm technology delivers substantial cost reductions relative to portfolios restricted to wind, solar, and energy storage alone. Additionally, because each technology occupies a distinctive functional niche in the electricity system, having all of these technologies available optimizes the utilization rate of each resource and reduces system costs by up to 10% relative to cases with just one class of firm resource.
If you're using nuclear as a backstop in that way, you're using the same statistical techniques that let you use cheaper, less reliable sources of power for backstop.
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
I am very dubious of any energy policy coming form Germany because they have managed to make their electricity among the most expensive in the world while STILL being high carbon.
> You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Just one word change needed:
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal or greater than your peak load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing any nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
base load demand does not mean it has to be met with a constant matched source, and in fact that no longer works economically.
Natrium has an interesting design for a 345MW reactor that has thermal storage that can boost output to 500MW for 5.5 hours. This lets it increase output during peak prices.
I mean, sounds kinda cool. But that 2023 idea is very clearly not going to happen in the current US political environment.
We’re in an era of brutal capitalism, and nothing else matters but price. Not even emissions sadly. Green compacts like this have no chance, and neither do nukes. Unless they pay the right bribes for some subsidies.
The Trump admin is actually very pro-nuclear power. They are ending the "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA) standard in favor of fixed limits which is actually a good idea, possibly the only one the Trump admin has ever had.
i know they are (or claim to be). Im extremely unconvinced that meaningfully changes the flawed economics of nuclear power. I would love to be proven wrong and a wave of innovative economically competitive nuclear technology emerges... possible, but seems vanishingly unlikely.
I think we'll see a few companies and projects connected to the administration get grants and tax breaks and favors, pull a few headlines, seem like there's movement. Maybe even build something! but ultimately be a meaningless footnote in the energy transition. Just another grift for the most corrupt admin in US history.
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely due to the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
thats, not true at all. Safety costs a little, but they are fundamentally massively complicated, huge, specialized, EXPENSIVE things to build. They require 100s of staff to run at all times. The insurance is so expensive only nation states can back them. The economics are flawed because on modern grids with cheap renewables, they will never pay back the ridiculous up front capex. Relaxing regulations changes very little about this situation.
China and Koreas are massively state subsidized (koreas 51%, chinas 100%). Which obscures the real cost, and these state enterprises dont have to pay insurance or decommissioning. Which is the only way you can make them work today - massive state subsidies.
if your argument is "well without regulations someone could build a reactor that somehow avoids all these economic constraints" . Maybe, but today thats a fantasy.
You can't compare wind and solar to nuclear you have to compare wind and solar with enormous amounte of battery storage which is extremely expensive and it would be hard to make enough storage
That is soft on timeline, skills and expertise, sourcing to make it happen, etc. All the things that caused the Australian scientific body's energy feasibility report to conclude that nuclear in Australia (no existing reactors, staff, etc) wasn't economic or rational given so much can be done with the upfront cost of nuclear that immediately begins with returning energy compared to an uncertain timeline and blowouts not returning energy for ???
> Australia is the best case scenario for solar power.
Yes. (and no - it's a big country)
The USofA is also a large country with the same land area (mainland USofA at least) and many places suitable for solar and wind.
The South Australian capital, Adelaide, is on the 35th parallel (South), what works there likely works in the US at or below the 35th parallel North.
The essential point is that nuclear isn't a flat parameter free answer to all that ails - some places it makes no economic sense, other places it makes good economic sense ... and there's a world in between.
You just keep moving the goalposts and not responding to arguments. Until you have some idea of how nuclear is ever going to be cost competitive on today’s grids, good day to you.
If solar becomes 2 times cheaper, it will be economical to capture nitrogen from atmosphere and produce ammonia and use that for long-term energy storage and fuel. And with that one does not need massive solar overbuild.
This does not require any magic technology, just scaling up what is available today is enough and will definitely happen within the next 20 years, before small nuclear will have any effect.
If I recall correctly solar panels are already so cheap that to halve the installed cost again will require most of the efficiencies to be found in other costs like manufacture of associated hardware and equipment and installation. I don't know if those costs will be so easy to reduce.
It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.
Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it require temperatures over 600 Celsius to get to 70% percent of efficiency and not exactly small, with cheap way to produce ammonia they would provide energy dense batteries that could run for months if necessary.
> Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it
OK, so it requires a plant of fuel cells. And the cost per kW (i.e. discharge capacity) is? And it requires some facility to produce the ammonia; what is the cost per kW of electricity consumed, and at what efficiency?
Numbers would help to assess the proposal, given the claim that a halving of the cost of electricity from solar would make all the economics for ammonia work.
Solar + battery is very land inefficient, that's basically the main argument.
Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.
Land is cheap. Even in Europe, the cost of land onto which renewables are put is small compared to the cost of the renewable energy equipment itself. Here in the US, it's common for the land to be just a few percent of the project cost.
But batteries can be very distributed and stabilize and prop up the grid in ways a huge plant can't without building out distribution. (Situation dependent of course.)
> In March 2025, the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced US $900 million in grants to support the deployment of SMRs. One year later, the European Commission said it would invest up to €200 million (US $228 million) in the construction of SMRs.
How many batteries do you need to power, say, entire Scandinavia during winter? That would be a lot of lithium, btw.
"Dunkelflaute" periods when it is dark and no wind to run the wind turbines are common in northern winters, IIRC the longest one a few years ago was 12 days long.
Which means that in order to have a reasonable buffer against it, you would need enough batteries to supply the entire region for three weeks. Not going to happen, unless we discover some much more efficient class of batteries.
Sodium batteries are cheaper for storage and does not require any rate/expensive minerals, just scaling up production. Then in Scandinavia the main problem in winter is heating and using heated water as a battery is already a thing. Then producing amonia or even carbon fuel from atmosphere for energy-dense storage will be viable option in 10-20 years. And of cause Norway and Sweden can have massive hydro for energy storage.
That 12 day event was a regional event in Germany, there was still lots of wind in the North Sea. And sun & wind didn't drop to 0, it dropped below 10%.
Dunkelflaute's are a German phenomenon: the standard pattern in most of the world is that the high pressure systems that suppress winds are generally sunny. And the high elevation areas in Germany are sunny during a dunkelflaute.
IOW, batteries aren't the only answer required to cover a dunkelflaute.
Hydrogen is one possibility for a 100% grid to cover Dunkelflauten and seasonal leveling (the former for wind, the latter for solar). To see the effects on overall cost per MWh, explore at https://model.energy/
Fission reactors in multiple European countries had to shut down due to heatwaves. And in Scandinavia (Sweden), they are "routinely" stopped for scheduled and most importantly unscheduled maintenance.
But those don't have scary sounding German names, I guess.
boy am i tired of hearing that Dunkelflaute word as if its some kind of gotcha. Even ignoring the fact that you can continue to source power from other geographies during a localized phenomenon..... Just burn gas in peaker plants for the few days a year that this happens. That small amount of emissions wont matter for the next 50 years of decarbonization, after which we'll likely have plenty of other options.
The absolutism in all these arguments is so tiring, as if its not 100% perfect solution for 100% of every imaginable scenario than its no good. 95% reduction over a year would be astounding, we would have won the climate battle.
That's fine, but you need to include the cost of having barely-used gas peaker plants when calculating the cost of "renewables+storage". Laymen keep using arbitrary "marginal cost of solar with sun shining" to say "solar is cheaper than everything!". If it's true that capex of 80% gas peaker (and LNG storage and employees on standby and so on) + solar + wind + batteries is cheaper, then people should make that argument and provide the data.
The latest figures from ember etc are not only “sun shining”, they’re talking about 24hr firmed solar-storage costs, and they’re still mostly cheaper than fossil in most geos. It is true that we will have to pay for having gas fill the gaps - how much exactly is a very complicated function of market economics and real time power auctions. Depends on so many variables, how big is the shortfall, how long, what competition does the gas have locally and extra-geographically, many other things. For connected countries in Europe you are never going to get to a situation where you need an 80% sized backup to your production, there will always be varied other sources. And perhaps you just choose to load shed in truly black swan scenarios, rather than paying for enough backup for every possible rare scenario. Life does go on.
Though I confess predicting it is beyond me and I’m not sure how you would model it to achieve conclusions generally applicable to every country / market .
The future will be solar. Especially in underdeveloped regions without a centralized power grid, solar makes the most sense. And even in developed countries having solar panels on your roof and a battery in your cellar is the most cost effective way of getting all your electricity needs.
> Hermes 1, by contrast, is fuelled by tristructural isotopic (TRISO) pebbles — poppy-seed-sized particles of uranium, encased in a carbon-ceramic shell.
I wish this subduction zone idea would just die. It's dumb. Things move so slowly it wouldn't help, and subduction zones have large amounts of volatiles coming back up via mud volcanoes and, later, actual molten rock volcanoes.
If you want to dispose of waste deep in the sea floor do it far away from subduction zones. Or just store it cheaply in dry casks and minimize the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste.
Short-term, subduction zones are deep, maximizing the difficulty for malicious actors trying to get their hands on the waste. The subduction itself is more a marketing feature, for folks who oppose putting the waste anywhere on the surface of the Earth.
Longer-term - it's mid-ocean ridges, not subduction zones, where you find all the volatiles and volcanoes. Yes, millions of years in the future, some micro-percentage of the subducted material will re-emerge, hundreds of miles away, via volcanoes. So will vastly more natural radioactivity, whether or not we dispose of nuclear waste in the subduction zone.
"There are 10 active mud volcanoes in the Izu–Bonin–Mariana Arc which can be found along a north to south trend, parallel to the Mariana trench.[43] The material erupted at these mud volcanoes consists primarily of blue and green serpentinite mud which contains fresh and serpentinized peridotite material from the subduction channel. Fluid from the descending Pacific Plate is released by dehydration and alteration of rocks and sediment."
(for description of how subduction zones create magmatic volcanoes)
Subducted material is very wet, and as it descends the volatiles ascend to melt the rock above, creating magma (water reduces the melting point of rocks just like it reduces the melting point of sugar.)
Just worth remembering that the cost/W of steam generators decrease quickly (almost linearly) with size up to ~1GW. What in reverse also means it increases quickly with reduced size, down to the point you can order them 3D printed on the internet (what is around a couple of kW).
And also that steam generators alone have a really hard time competing with solar nowadays.
How are the fusion startups coming along? There are at least 21 of them.[1]
The top 3, by funding. These all have more than a billion dollars.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The MIT people. This is a tokamak with better magnets. The magnet insight is that if you put a superconductor and a regular conductor in parallel, all the current flows through the superconductor. So you can plate a superconducting material on stainless steel tape, using stainless steel as an insulator. Winding a magnet out of stainless steel tape works fine. They demoed that back in 2021. But no fusion yet. Well funded, big operation, around 1000 people.
Helion Energy. This is a strange magneto-inertial fusion system. It's vaguely like a free-piston internal combustion engine generator, except that the piston is a plasma. After seven rounds of increasingly large prototypes, they can get D-T fusion, but it's not self-sustaining, nor do they get power out. Prototypes have thus far underperformed claims.
Around 500 people.
TAE. Recently merged with Trump Media. Really.
There are quite a few others. Many are working on some kind of pulsed fusion, like the Livermore National Ignition Facility. This is known to create fusion, but is hard to turn into a useful power source. They can get to a non-useful fusion demo by pumping a lot of energy into a small space, so it looks like progress.
On the continuous fusion front, several startups are trying to revive 1950s Stellarator technology.
For a few years back then, fusion energy looked close.
Anyone have expertise in this area? Are any of these going to work? Or is the product the stock?
Helion most likely would not work. Even their own optimistic modeling gives very thin margins and even they completely ignore radiation damage to equipment.
Commonwealth and other tokamak designs are too optimistic as well. We do not know how instability in plasma will behave in production volumes.
Stellarator-based designs at least do not have big ifs, but they are way further and even they assume that radiation damage from neutrons will be manageable.
And all of this is ignoring costs. Outside of niche applications it is very hard to sea how fusion even if it works can compete with solar plus storage.
Nuclear power's biggest problem is that it attracted, even back in the 1940's, a figurative army of techno-utopians - whose pie-in-the-sky promises of electric power too cheap meter, flying cars, and better-than-Santa's-sleigh safety were not quickly and loudly contradicted by people who knew better.
Probably didn't help that many of those keeping quiet had obvious short-term interests in promoting "nuclear everything". Even as various accidents, leaking waste dumps, and regular warnings of deadly communist mushroom clouds made it damned obvious to the general public that they were being systematically lied to.
Sadly, the pro-nuclear camp is still far too influenced by utopian and partisan considerations.
Yes, it'd be nice to see competently-done SMR's in regular use, for the use cases where they make sense. But if I was a policy maker with finite political capital and resources, I'd probably be winding down nuclear power - both to show the public that I wasn't too gullible to trust, and to show advocates for other technologies that lies and delusions would be carry harsh penalties.
The general public doesn't care about utopian-measuring contests between different groups of zealots. They want cheap electricity on demand, safety, and a sense of control. Solar does a pretty good job of offering that. Nuclear? Nope.
Donald Trump does a lot of stupid evil stuff to further fossil fuels but getting all the tech nerds excited about even more expensive nuclear power is actually evil genius.
They're all ridiculously fuel inefficient and we're going to have to figure out how to dispose of thousands or tens of thousands of these reactors. Aside from that one that starts pre buried, where the plan is to just leave a spent nuclear reactor buried in a hole. A cost that will almost certainly be externalized to the taxpayers.
The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen.
Getting downvoted wicked hard super fast. But how else are we supposed to see this? How else do we citizens of the world interpret this? The fuel efficiency is a fact. The nuclear clean up has been a problem every single time.
'Fuel efficiency' is not the bottle neck to getting more clean energy on the grid, scale is. Waste? grind it up, vitrify it, bury it in an abandoned coal mine or something. People get more radioactivity from a coal power plant than they will ever get from properly handled nuclear waste.
It sure is. If the world were nuclear powered (all energy, not just grid) with burner reactors, estimates of uranium resources (not reserves) at up to 3x the current price would last about five years.
A fully nuclear world needs to use nuclear fuel efficiently, which means breeder reactors.
...and that's not a scenario that anyone is talking about employing with nuclear. We need enough for baseline load. Being able to build small modular reactors would give us scale that would help cut through the regulatory cost. By the time this crop of current reactors need to be decommissioned, we'd probably have dirt cheap grid storage figured out and could move away from them, but in the mean time, we need all the zero carbon energy we can get.
A world that gets 10% of its energy from nuclear and 90% from renewables is not substantially easier than one that gets 100% from renewables. The intermittency/seasonality issues are not solved by that relatively light sprinkling of nuclear on top. So the objections nuclear advocates use to justify nuclear over cheaper renewables are vitiated. Those problems have to be solved anyway, so why the 10% nuclear?
Nuclear really either goes big or it goes home. And you're saying it won't go big.
It's easy when you just ignore all the externalities! I'll be paying for the decommissioned nuclear plant near us for the next 20+ years through my electric rates. The plant is closed and no longer operational but still has to be staffed and guarded for decades during the decommission process. Imagine this issue scaled up across thousands of SMRs.
Nuclear regulation could genuinely do with a lot of reforms that would streamline the process without appreciably impacting safety. Everyone would benefit. And that's the huge problem with the administration's breaking of trust and naked corruption: we as a lay people, what should we think if they come out with a bunch of proposals eliminate a bunch of commercial licensing requirement and lowering radiation safety standards? Is that because the old rules are genuinely archaic and not serving their purpose... or because Trump's family and donors are personally financially invested in the very companies mentioned in this article.
This is a great temporary solution to continue developing AI up to a reliable state, then the ownership can be transferred to a particular state that is major global presence in cybersecurity, semiconductor design, and tech innovation, who is already well positioned with key stakeholders in most if not all American tech companies with strong grantees in government support.
Major technology companies have signed strategic agreements for SMR development, but regulatory approvals and supply-chain scaling place widespread commercial deployment in the late 2020s through the 2030s. Now that we are in astronomical debt, it's our responsibility to turn our nation into a wasteland in order to provide this particular nation a scalable, full spectrum and robust AI defense solution that will allow them to achieve their geopolitical goals safely without fear of reprisal while they continue to expand their influence in tech and the global economy, hopefully culminating in extracting taxes on ships going through key trade canals near their borders and beyond.
And a contrasting article from IEEE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
> Samuel B. Morris, the general manager and chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power, traveled all the way to Geneva in 1955 to attend the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. There, he made a case for small reactors, arguing that because the “number of small units…is many times the number of large units,” there could be “economy in development and repetitive manufacture” of the small units.
> But nothing in the history of small nuclear reactors suggests that they would be more economical than full-size ones. In fact, the record is pretty clear: Without exception, small reactors cost too much for the little electricity they produced, the result of both their low output and their poor performance.
For me, SMRs don't pass the smell test. Buying one big plot of land for a reactor, building one power interconnect, having a localized water impact is way easier and cheaper than many. Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers. Costs that you can ignore while you're just building a prototype.
If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors. Thing is the nuclear reactor part is only 10-15% of the plants full cost: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
> Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers.
There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.
Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.
To a first approximation, China does not build nuclear power. Nuclear's share of power production in China is 4% and dropping. It seems to me that the main reason China keeps building a relatively tiny amount of nuclear is strategic. Reasons like ensuring they never forget how and ensuring they always have buildable designs so that if something changed they could ramp up the program. And probably even more likely: nuclear expertise is important to the country's military.
But coal is still 49%. The whole point of nuclear in a carbon-free, mostly-renewable grid is to avoid needing enormous amounts of storage and overproduction. That's a need that doesn't come up when you're still half fossil.
If you want to decarbonize as fast as possible, it makes sense to focus on rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible for now, but keep developing nuclear technology to cover the last bit where it starts getting especially expensive to replace fossil with renewables without losing reliable power. That's exactly what China appears to be doing. They're not just building a few reactors, they're also the world leaders in developing various GenIV designs, like molten salt reactors.
The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy) The remaining 2-10% is nat gas, if you have a piped source, or coal if you don't.
But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
> supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time
Or you design the majority of loads so they can be turned off for 2% of the time.
Load shedding is a better solution than running peakers for [heated] towel rails.
If you do that, you'd then need to find a way to supply 98% of the power 2% of the time. It helps, but not much.
It would also be better if you ate only vegetables and drove an ultralight (ebike) good luck. I personally like being able to turn on my lights 100% of the time
The heck kind of lights are you running that won't go all night on a battery that fits in your palm?
The one in my oven.
It's not about lights, it's about electricity always being available. And well, always having power available (for domestic, but also for expensive production facilities that looses money while idle) using renewables is a lot more expensive than generating most of your power with renewables
Solar battery is not by any stretch of any possible definition the cheapest generation to deploy. Not even close. We do a disservice to the entire conversation saying easily falsifiable things like that. At 90% penetration solar + battery has a LFSCOE somewhere around $800/mwh depending on the study. Natural gas is something like 30-60. Solar panels are cheap. Building the required transmission and storage to service those panels is far more expensive than the panels themselves.
Increased renewable generation is an important goal, but we need to let the facts guide the path, not the other way around.
Please, don’t cite the LFSCOE paper again. Citing it shows you have a beef against renewables.
That paper uses one renewable source, like only solar, and 2018-19 cost data for storage.
A real grid is made up of a mix of sources, which is why the research lately has focused on system costs.
All those analyses find that renewable grids are far cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
A) I am an electrical engineer who makes a living designing control systems for renewable generation. I know more about most of this than just about anyone in this conversation.
B) the post I am replying to is specifically calling for a 98% solar grid.
You replied to: "The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477559#49481711
There's a big difference between "letting the facts guide the path" and tilting at strawmen built out of straw nobody else even brought into the discussion.
If you'd like to make the point that "cost of panels" can be misleading when supporting components and interconnects begin to take up the lion's share of costs then that sounds like a noble thing to remind folk of, but ideally not as a segway into shilling more fracking which includes untold environmental costs as externalities.
And they build a lot of modern coal power station with over 45% efficiency and flexibility in power output.
The problem is that the economics of a ”firming”/”peaking” nuclear reactor is absolutely stupid due to essentially being only fixed costs.
It is already stupidly expensive when running at 100% 24/7. Now try running it only when renewables and storage doesn’t deliver.
That's a fundamental problem with nuclear plants. Their classic "baseload" niche is gone. Like the intermittent sources, wind and solar, they need storage to hold what they overproduce during peak periods.
This is also true of geothermal, which, like nuclear, is almost all fixed capital cost.
It's only a problem because of capitalism. Every plant needs to independently make money, so nobody wants to be the ones spinning down because that's their profit margin dwindling.
But society would be better off with excess generation. So we either need a system where some are incentivized to spin down, perhaps by being paid a consistent amount regardless or something like that, or we need publicly owned power generation that doesn't care about profit.
This argument assumes we must build nuclear power.
The problem is that electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin. Now that we are moving beyond a purely centralized design.
Think about a homeowner or factory with their own renewables and storage.
They fundamentally operate on marginal price by choosing when they use their own system and when they buy from the grid.
If you add state owned reliable power to this mix they will cherry-pick. Their own cheap electricity when it delivers and the states subsidized reliable electricity when it doesn’t.
We can try add all manner of markets, fixed connection costs and what not to this but all it does is introduce strange arbitrage possibilities in the market.
Which is why we have settled on net energy markets and then the lowest possible amount of ancillary markets to shore up any gaps which would cause problems for the larger society.
We have needed to build nuclear power since the day it was invented. The amount of fossil fueled power generation is indisputable proof of that.
The only way we don't need nuclear power is if we have some other way of producing the energy we need without dooming the planet, and obviously we do not as we're still burning billions of tons of coal every year. Not to mention gas.
We could have made power generation fully fossil free many decades ago if we actually took climate change seriously. It would have been fine. Sure fossil fuels may have been cheaper, but if you include the damage they're already causing and will cause in the future you could multiply the cost of nuclear by orders of magnitude and it would still come out on top. Plus higher investment would lead to faster improvement in the technology, mass production of components and lower cost etc.
Thats crying over spilled milk. We’ve spent the past 70 years trying to build out nuclear power. It didn’t deliver cheap energy.
Today, renewables and storage are the cheapest energy sources in human history. They are filling the gap nuclear power never managed to fill.
I agree that renewable with storage is cheaper of you price in destruction of habitable zones of the planet. Most people don't, and the dollar cost of the storage is a problem over fossil.
Enormous amounts of storage is awesome and overproduction is a good thing when its marginal cost is ~zero.
The coal argument about China doesn't hold water when you look at what they're actually building. Around 80% of their new power sources are renewable, and 10 to 15% is coal. They're aggressively focusing primarily on building renewable -- so to say that their coal is 49% is either misleading or entirely missing the point.
This assumes that the renewables built are actually contributing to the economy, which we don‘t actually know for sure. In fact there was an article stating that they discard a lot of the energy produced because the grid cannot deliver. [1]
> China, the world's top producer of solar power, rejected 360 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean power from January to June, up 49% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report this month by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
1 - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-wave-cle...
That's why I said in my comment that China is "rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible."
They have 36-38 reactors under construction today [1]. I think that’s a bit more than just keeping the wheels turning
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67746
which is great, but as i understand it will still lead to an overall decline in share of nuclear power. The scale of their power production is unfathomable
Agree.
They’re building a massive amount of nuclear. They’re building a monumental amount of solar+wind.
Which works out to about 4 per year. And most of them are under 1GW.
> And most of them are under 1GW
No, almost every one is above 1GW - divide the net capacity by the number under construction to see the power [1]. They appear to be almost all CAP1400 (1.4GW), Hualong One (1.0GW), or CAP1000 (1.0GW). I see a single Linglong 1 (100MW) under construction. Proposed are all above 1GW.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#Future_...
That's far more than 4 per year? Their speed when building them has been pretty damn good.
And almost exactly half of all reactors under construction in the entire world.
You need to look at where those nuclear plants are being built, in the east, and where the new energy is out west that makes it appear that nuclear is falling behind. Having power generation that doesn’t need to be transported via UHV lines is useful, it also acts as a nice baseline that keeps the grid stable.
China is building more new nuclear power than the rest of the world combined. They’ll soon produce as much renewable electricity as the United States produces electricity
> There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now.
Not a particular fan of this paper, but it does illustrate a point ... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8867359 showed that for the UK to go 100% solar it would need an energy capacity of 1/3 of the total grid energy demand over the year. Figure 6 A shows the big trend of 6 1/2 months of discharge and 5 1/2 months of charge (i.e. cycle perhaps once a year). Seasonal variations do matter.
Not sure what relevancy a 2019 paper has today?
It also seems like they are constraining the system to have no overproduction.
It’s like assuming that a fossil based system has all its producers generating the expected capacity factor and then smoothing out the season and daily demand changes with storage. Due to the difference between summer and winter demand such a fossil system would also need to have months of storage to compensate.
Which of course is absolute stupidity. When you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve.
> Not sure what relevancy a 2019 paper has today?
The underlying demand and production has not changed so much since then. The requirements for storage still exist, and strongly depend on when the power is delivered as well as needed.
> a fossil system would also need to have months of storage
Coal and gas also get produced in the winter at a relatively constant rate. Plus we know how to handle piles of coal, caverns full of gas, tanks full of LNG, and linepack for shorter duration gas storage.
> you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve
Sure, you then have an economic problem. The effective capacity factor of the intermittents get driven down. How are they going to be paid for, if much of the time the market is saturated?
We have vastly moved the scientific frontier of modeling our energy systems since 2019.
All those analyses find that renewable grids are far cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
I find it telling that you call it an ”economic problem” and ”intermittents”. It seems like you have an axe to grind, but not much backing your standpoint anymore. So you’ve fallen to using derogatory.
Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.
A single cycle gas turbine would love to get paid running at 100% all year around. It doesn’t because CCGT plants with higher efficiency undercut it.
Just like what happens in renewables. They start crowding out each other. Storage steps in and solves the peaks. More renewables come online until they ”crowd each other out” and around we go.
That’s called being a market. Which you nuke fans seems deathly afraid of given the economics of new built nuclear power.
> https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
It is interesting to see how large-scale nuclear is handled.
120% and 60% increase in cost for FOAK and NOAK (Table 2-1), plus no learning rate for nuclear construction beyond that (Table C.2).
Interest rates during construction unfairly penalise nuclear as "GenCost uses the simplest way which is to increase the capital cost by the assumed discount rate raised to the power of the construction time" (page 97)." This results in ~20% increase in capital costs against other simple scenarios like equal construction costs across each year.
30 year plant lifetime, rather than say 60 years. That results in ~10% increase in capital costs.
> Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.
That line of reasoning only works if there is something to make one plant more expensive to produce electricity than another. For natural gas the cost of fuel is far greater than the CAPEX. For intermittents only the variable OPEX can distinguish between generators, which is mostly for wind and I guess most severely for offshore wind. Cannibalisation is the big problem for intermittents. The notion of succession doesn't work for them.
Now you’re desperately trying to rationalize new built nuclear power.
GenCost has an amazing FAQ section you evidently either ignored, or did not peruse.
For example here they discuss economic life vs operational life, when you live in reality rather than grasping for straws:
> Why is the economic life used in LCOE calculations instead of the fulloperational life?
> The LCOE calculation converts all upfront and ongoing costs to annual costs which is then divided by annual production. The capital cost component of a technology is converted to an annual repayment to the debt and equity providers. The annual repayment amount is determined using the economic life and the weighted average cost of capital. The economic life is shorter than the asset life for some technologies such as coal, nuclear and hydro. Some stakeholders have queried why this is so.
> Debt and equity providers require a shorter payback period than the total asset life for some technologies to avoid the risk that part of the equipment might fail or might need new investment (sometimes called refurbishment or extension costs) to keep operating safely and reliably. To determine the economic life, debt and equity providers might look to the warranties provided with the equipment. They might also look at the typical timing of refurbishments or life extensions for that technology. The economic life is an input provided by the engineering firm that AEMO commissions each year as an input to GenCost.
> Some stakeholders suggested that coal and nuclear could access special financing arrangements to move the economic life closer to the asset life. However, our preference is not to introduce special arrangements for technologies where there is limited Australian evidence. A common approach to the LCOE calculation is important to maintain comparability. The 2024-25 report does explore the impact of longer capital recovery periods in Section 2. It finds there is no significant benefit from the longer operational life of nuclear relative to shorter-lived technologies whose costs have been falling over time.
Even looking at China and South Korea they see essentially zero learning effects across plants after the FOAK build. Small ones at the same plant.
Crying about FOAK vs NOAK is not even close to solving the absolutely stupidly large subsidies new built nuclear power needs.
Again with the loaded terms. Sad. The market is limited until for example Jevons paradox expands it. Which will never happen with new built nuclear power due to how expensive the electricity is, that leads to energy poverty for generations instead. But I digress.
Look at Texas or California. About all new renewable projects in those markets are coupled with storage.
What you call cannabilisation, and try to paint like the end of the world, is simply the market working. Now pure renewable projects aren’t enough, instead you need to sell the electricity when the consumers demand it.
In just a year or two storage has massively smoothed out the price swings in Texas.
But again, that would require curiosity rather than desperately trying to poke holes the study already answered.
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
Not him but.
>For example here they discuss economic life vs operational life, when you live in reality rather than grasping for straws:
It's essentially just saying the market can't think long term enough leading to drastic differences in your calculations. But hence it's typically governments pushing these projects forward.
>The market is limited until for example Jevons paradox expands it. Which will never happen with new built nuclear power due to how expensive the electricity is
But it did happen for nuclear power in the past. Now you see essentially the opposite.
>Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
I'm not. I think it's a great set of technologies. But I think if one tries to get to 100% everywhere one's going to stub their toes on the scenarios where it's not all roses. Why? Because the storage part is hard at scale in a lot of places and the intermitency more pronounced. In Texas and Cali are incredibly sunny places in the south of the US. Silicon valley where it's already an issue gets 3 times as much sunshine hours during winter as let's say berlin and those hours are far less usefull.
>Crying about FOAK vs NOAK is not even close to solving the absolutely stupidly large subsidies new built nuclear power needs.
Is this not intentionally sidestepping the ludicrous amount of subsidies that have been handed out to renewables in aggregate?
Berlin would need to overproduce insane amounts in summer to handle it's winters.
The flip side is that what you are saying is that nuclear power will be commercially viable into the 2100s. And betting the house on that. While knowing that the electricity they provide is expensive enough to lead to energy poverty for generations.
That seems absolutely insane.
Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.
Who cares if we get to 95%, 97, 99% or 100% carbon neutral electricity when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Transition that final firming to whatever carbon neutral sources we land on when their emissions matter in the late 2030s and 2040s.
We need to optimize decarbonization per dollar spent with the shortest time to market.
You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.
We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.
The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?
And that is certainly not new built nuclear power.
>While knowing that the electricity they provide is expensive enough to lead to energy poverty for generations.
What are you on about?
>Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.
And the opposite happened in the past whilst europe was building bunch more of them.
>Who cares if we get 95%, 97, 99% or 100% when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?
Funny you say that when some of those are significantly harder. Are you going to turn on steel plants only in summer? Do you think that might have some effect?
>You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.
You should tell my government and the neighbouring governments.
>We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.
It did exactly that?
>The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?
it has spent €700 billion to $1 trillion on the energywende (a metric which doesn't properly include a lot of private investment) and ends as one of the worst emitters in europe whilst deindustrialising due to high energy prices. They jerk eachother off about how high their renewables share of the economy is every summer and then import and fire up the browncoal and gasplants again troughout the other seasons. When that solar panel is producing a 10th of it's average summer output (already below the capacity everyone loves to roll with for articles) in winter there's only one big winner possible. People like to point out how france's electricity production is subsidised when they come out looking good even when the gov intentionally puts a stick in it's wheels by essentially forcing it to subsidise pricing to competition.
If solar+battery were cheaper wouldn't the new AI data centers be opting to pay to build that rather than nuclear or LPG options?
Nuclear, FBOW, has one big advantage.
Namely, It's very easy to 'design to load' where you don't need to worry about the next shipment of Coal, or an extended weather event causing excessive cloud cover and depleting your reserves.
Heck, even as far as compared to LPG, you don't have to worry as much about disruptions or possible cost shifts around LPG supply.
Yes, I'm possibly tongue-in-cheek handwaving specific types of 'weather events' here and potential impacts, i.e. Tsunamis... OTOH it's a lot easier in current gen designs to make something that would have minimal risk for something, say, in the middle of nowhere Texas.
To be specific, solar with 4hr storage is price competitive with grid right now. Storage becomes expensive after that at 8hrs even with projected sodium or lithium prices. For a datacenter usage they probably need couple of days storage at 50hrs like the planned google datacenter. Only alternate chemistry batteries that could be scaled up easily like flow, iron air, zinc etc. could be competitive for multi day storage, though most of these are still at experimental or pilot stages.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91500104/google-minnesota-data-c...
> Google’s new Minnesota data center comes with the world’s largest battery—and won’t raise electric bills
> The tech giant says it will fund enough new wind, solar, and long-duration storage to cover the project’s power demand and avoid shifting costs to ratepayers.
Some of the data centers in Texas are at least partly being built to turn surplus natural gas into cash.[1][2]
1. https://energynow.com/2026/03/us-natgas-prices-at-waha-hub-i...
2. https://www.rbccm.com/en/insights/2026/05/natural-gas-powers...
It works better on a geographically spread-out grid, and the data centers are running into the same limit that renewable plants are, which is that the grid is struggling to keep up (in large part, in many places, due to a history of underinvestment).
They are cheaper, that’s why in most of the world, datacentres are being built where there’s copious solar or wind power.
The problem is that they need full power 24/365.
Data centers with good load balancing between regions do not need exactly the same power 24/365 so the latest solar-wind-storage is already cheaper in theory. But it would take few years before production of sodium and other batteries will scale up and the mean time a turbine powered by natural gas wins.
> there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production.
If geothermal works economically (outside of volcanic zones where it already does) then it's game over for any other power source except existing dams though because it solves all problems at once.
That'd be a great thing for humanity but I don't think it's worth stopping pursuing alternatives already, because it's still a big "if".
Won’t geothermal cool the Earth’s core?
Technically it would, but the same way an individual ant's breath contribute to global warming.
Note that the thermal energy contained in the inner earth isn't a fixed amount: the earth constantly generates new heat from friction and radioactivity, and that new heat is radiated away in space at night, alone the heat captured from the sun during the day. So technically geothermal will increase the efficiency of this heat transfer a tiny bit, but it's really a negligible amount. (In reality the ant's contribution to global warming is probably orders of magnitude than the phenomenon we're talking about here).
I'm not a geologist, but for comparison, the Siberian Traps[1] erupted for 2 million years, and there have been other large events on that scale. Any heat we release will be insignificant in comparison.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps
Not the core measurably, but my understanding is that it can very slowly cool the volume of earth immediately around the heat extraction site.
I have full faith in modern engineers' ability to account for these effects in the plant designs.
Nope. It is very far away from core. Core is very big. And energy is already flowing outwards. So just using it really have not any significant impact.
Real issue is that it is not actually usable everywhere. Again Earth is big and going deep in some places is very hard.
It could prevent volcanoes from erupting perhaps.
SMR is driven by funding, insurance, and regulation. China doesn't have these issues and builds conventional at a great price. China is building 37 reactors, only 4-5 are SMR-type units, and are larger at 600MW. The rest are standard PWR, and the 40+ in planning are dominating by standard PWR.
Regulatory risk is too high, building too infrequent to understand costs, funding for first-of-its-kind is too hard for nuclear in most countries. SMR makes it fundable. New designs give the hope that regulatory burdens can be lowered.
China's nuclear production is only growing in an absolute sense. As a share of production, it's dropping, from a very low level of 4%. China is building other power types far faster than nuclear.
This is an important point: in a lot of ways, SMRs are a strictly worse than 1000MW plant. The potential financial benefits come from all the other factors you mentioned. I would rather have a "worse" nuclear power plant that actually gets built.
Why? It then proves nuclear is uneconomical?
Regulatory arbitration like this serves nothing?
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see more nuclear, but bad nuclear is not in fact better than none.
It gives evidence the viability of nuclear is a political choice. China is using proven designs and delivering a good price for base load.
The hope of SMR is that it can be cost-effective at the same level that other factory-produced power sources are. If that's not on the table, then large-scale nuclear deployment mostly isn't going to happen.
> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.
That is literally the plan with several designs like NuScale (and I think TerraPower). The plan with NuScale is to ship the reactors on rail or barge, and then truck it in the last few miles. So they cost savings is in not having to custom desgin the actual components for each site, and build them on site. Standard reactor, standard monitoring systems, standard control room able to monitor multiple reactors, etc.
Plus, when you have 12 of them onsite in one large area, you can take one offline for refueling, and still produce power with the rest of them.
NuScale infamously failed to get their reactor funded in Utah (UAMPS and the CFPP), it was just too expensive. Costs kept rising, large utilities declined to sign up, and in the end those utilities remaining were going to hit the contractual off ramp so it was just cancelled. I have some links to minutes of municipal utility meetings in Idaho Falls that showed the wheels coming off (even though there was great local support for the effort.)
Their design requires considerably more steel and concrete per MW(e) than a large conventional PWR power plant. You don't do civil construction in a factory, and that's where much of the cost is. Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost.
Can you share the links? Would be interested to see! Thank you in advance
Here's one of the meatier ones (Feb. 2023).
https://idahofallsidaho.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Minutes/_0...
Your point is moot, it's the plan with almost all SMRs other than like the Deep Fission type of lazy ideas.
What about Valar Atomics?
Your last point is entirely backwards and missed the scaling concept entirely. I suggest you watch a documentary on the Model T. The point being that these aren't civil projects once it's modular. The prices and material are what's being optimized. To compare to large RPVs and BWRs efficiency is idiotic as that's the only place they beat SMRs and the known downside to SMRs which is the point of scaling it.
It has always been a regulatoryu issue. As given by the fact Valar has a microreactor currently running just to disrpove your thesis.
> The point being that these aren't civil projects once it's modular.
But that's simply wrong. All the projects (except for silly microreactors which don't have a prayer of being competitive) involve substantial civil engineering.
> Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost.
And why do you think they cost so much? Because people need to believe they are safe from catastrophic failure
Large scale civil engineering projects will always cost more than simply installing stuff that comes almost fully assembled from a factory (solar, wind, battery or small/medium gas turbines). Opex will always be much higher for a generation facility which requires 850 FTE specialist employees to operate (US average per plant) compared to the minimal requirements for on-site employees for utility scale solar or wind facilities. Generation tech which requires no fuel or hazardous waste handling and storage also has an obvious cost advantage. None of these factors have anything to do with “need to believe”.
I don't think I get your point. A project will not be approved and funded if the local population does not believe it is safe, so safety must be demonstrated through a variety of means, including some you mentioned. This is directly tied to the high costs involved.
https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs:
> To sum up, since the early 1970s, the cost of constructing nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been steadily rising. This can be traced to a constantly shifting regulatory environment, which has continuously changed plant design requirements, and added more and more safety features, which often were required to be implemented on plants under construction. The regulatory environment is partially a reflection of the fact that nuclear power and the risks of radiation had become increasingly controversial, and that early understanding of the likelihood of a nuclear plant accident was often inadequate.
Nuclear in this millennium is not competing with nuclear or other tech from the 1970s - it’s competing with newer technologies (solar, wind, batteries and gas turbines) which do not require 5 to 10 year huge civil engineering works. All these alternative technologies benefit from mass production in factories. While civil engineering does not get cheaper over time - not just for nuclear plant but all large infrastructure construction.
And that’s just capex - even if a nuclear plant could be built for free, the cost of operation (huge head count, fuel and waste handling), means it cannot compete with newer technologies. Indian Point shutdown years before end-of-life because it was too expensive to operate.
Nuclear plants are large and complex and expensive to build and run. I’m not sure why it should be surprising that electricity generation technology has advanced sine the development of the PWR - it’s been more than half a century. The world has moved on from electricity generation using a huge steam engine attached to an alternator with a fiddly and complex firebox.
It’s economics and newer technologies that have made nuclear power obsolete - not public opinion.
Oh ok, yeah I think we agree. the original quote I was responding to was "the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost." I was simply trying to say that safety and cost are not independent. Safety is a massive reason why nuclear costs so much.
NuScale's putative safety improvement came from considerably larger cost. Safety and cost may not necessarily be related, but in NuScale's case they certainly were.
> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.
The biggest costs to nuclear are associated with each of them being unique snowflakes. They need to be standardized and mass produced to bring down costs.
So the dream is many big plants (eg starting 10+ per year), which is what France did and China does, but since we can’t seem to have that here, small reactors are an attempt to solve that.
Most of the reactors we have in the US today are the result of building many of a few models per year during the late 1960's - early 1970's.
In 1974, 12 reactors entered commercial operation and 13 more were begun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
The technology was given almost a century to prove itself cost-effective. It did not succeed in the market and only ever worked with truly massive amounts of government subsidies.
High fixed costs + more reactor sites -> more expensive, more nuclear waste sites for taxpayers to clean up
Each of those existing plants were competitive against coal at the time without having the negative externalities of widespread radiation exposure (uranium in coal just released to the atmosphere); mercury contamination in all our freshwater lakes and the ocean, leading to strict limits on consuming fish for children and pregnant women; and a half-century of CO2 emissions.
Orders of magnitude more people are killed by rooftop solar, but we haven't raised safety standards on all other sources of electricity to be the same level we require for nuclear.
NuScale is a terrible example. Their flagship project collapsed before it even started because of cost escalation and their other project was some sort of crypto scam.
> For me, SMRs don't pass the smell test. Buying one big plot of land for a reactor, building one power interconnect, having a localized water impact is way easier and cheaper than many.
Some things would depend on the specific location and the grid around it:
The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station in New Brunswick may be 'overkill' because when it goes down every few years for inspections/retooling, there's little other redundancy available. SMRs would be useful for that regional grid: install 3-4 and one can go down with less fuss.
In (e.g.) Poland there were small/medium coal-fired generation stations near coal mines. If the mines are now empty (or retired for climate change), then the grid connections could be reused for SMRs on an existing generation site: less need to find a new site and build new power pylons, etc.
Security costs are also an obstacle. Any nuclear reactor requires 24×7 armed security and that's largely a fixed cost regardless of power output. You need almost as many guards for a small reactor as a large one.
There's a political issue. Just look at how hard it's been to protest all the new gas plants that came up over the last ~20 years. The reason is that we built many small gas plants, instead of a handful of large ones. It divided up the protesters to the point where they couldn't work together.
When we built less, but larger, nuclear power plants, they're easier to protest. If we can make SMRs economical, it makes it significantly harder to protest.
> Just look at how hard it's been to protest all the new gas plants that came up over the last ~20 years.
People have been talking about SMRs being the economic future for over 70 years. It has not happened because it not true.
The people protesting nuclear honestly shouldn't be allowed to vote if they claim they're clean energy due to the apparent lack of critical thought. Seriously, if you're an actual engineer or scientist, this statement is self evident.
SMR proposals still use one plot of land. The plant is just built to house multiple reactors.
It's really a pity that we missed the boat on large nuclear reactors. So much more power would enable so many use-cases and cheap electricity would have enabled us to have much less gas heating. Massive damage to the climate caused by misguided regulation. I tried to write to deregulation.gov on reducing the fund allocation required for fission reactor cleanup but c'est la vie. Death by a thousand cuts and then a few big rocks, I suppose. We lost half a century, but so it goes. Now we should be able to do large-scale solar and wind, and if it weren't for the Burning Man people we could have geothermal too, but we'll get there.
What does burning man have to do with geothermal?
They blocked geothermal drilling in the desert. After multiple years of blocking it with use of environmental law they finally managed to preserve it as a conservation area for sustainable tourism:
> Organizers of the Burning Man festival in northwest Nevada have reached a settlement with a geothermal energy developer that cancels an exploratory drilling project that some feared would ruin the ambiance of the counter-culture event.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/burning-man-to-buy-back-geot...
That's so weird. I have never seen more fossil fuels and wood burned just for art, than at burning man.
They should have had an artist work with them to make whatever the exploration gear was, look like a permanent installation. It might not have even required actual changes, just a label.
In addition to the sibling comment, I'll say that environmentalists have opposed nuclear energy for half a century, despite it being far better than coal or ng in terms of emissions. I'd say that the venn diagram intersection of burners and opposition to nuclear is significant.
Environmentalism comes in at least two forms. IMO they are entirely different things.
One form is science-based and concerned with finding out how to engineer our civilization to be more sustainable and compatible with the Earth's ecosystem. That faction has been mostly either pro-nuclear or at least open to it when renewables aren't enough or aren't ready.
The other form is a romantic back-to-the-land anti-industry or even anti-civilization movement. It's opposed to nuclear because it's a "techno-fix" when the real answer must be abandonment of high technology and advanced civilization and a return to pre-industrial (or even pre-civilization Paleolithic) ways of life. For this group that's the only acceptable answer. Finding a solution to climate change that didn't involve abandoning industry or growth would be bad, since it would allow "business as usual" to continue.
Returning to pre-industrial or pre-civ times would require the deaths of billions of people, since you can't support these populations without industry, but they don't mention that. That's the quiet part.
The second group is mostly the group that has opposed nuclear power. A few have even opposed wind and solar power, believe it or not. It sounds ridiculous but look it up. You can find cases, albeit more fringe than anti-nukes.
The second group also horseshoes around to the far right in some cases. Anti-vax and general anti-medicine ideology and the idea that we need to be "natural" in everything was originally something more associated with these types of greens, but today it's part of MAGA. There'a also an offshoot known as ecofascism. Look it up, it's also a thing. Also search up "Savitri Devi," a very odd crossover figure here.
Great reply!
The second type is also inherently misanthropic. Their ideal is some Eden without humans at all. _Any_ human impact is morally wrong to this type of environmentalist.
Contrast that with the conservationist hunters, sportsman, fisherman, etc. who wish to conserve natural environments with a keen eye towards sustainability and ecosystem health. Human intervention in culling herds can actually be a kindness to animals whose predators have been eliminated, yet some will oppose it regardless of what the Department of Fish and Game and other scientists suggest simply because it involves hunting and eating meat.
Cutting off the nose to spite the face... which rhymes with the nuclear debate here.
I'm pretty sure the actual second group is vanishingly small, it just seems larger because people in general don't know anything about anything so they will be vehemently against nuclear simply because they don't actually know that it's clean energy.
Similar to the "data centers use all the water" people. I saw a Facebook post with thousands of people raging against Nevada/Las Vegas data centers because they were being blamed for the region's dwindling water supplies - googled it and less than 1% of the water used in the area goes to the several dozen data centers. Seems to me like there's probably a lot of bigger fish to fry but I didn't look into it any further.
People are sheep. They jump on whatever bandwagon that happens to cross their path at the right moment. Almost everything people complain about they're just wrong about. It's actually insane scrolling on Facebook these days, it's just an endless stream of bullshit with hordes of NPCs raging about shit they know nothing about and every now and then there's a person with a functioning brain trying to spread some knowledge but it's obviously futile.
Most people can't tell you how taxes work even though they have been paying them their whole lives and complain about them constantly. They will happily tell you a bullshit story about "their friend" who passed on a pay bump because it would increase their taxes and reduce their after-tax income.
It's honestly so fucking frustrating. I mean nobody knows everything but as someone who has a decent overview of how the world works, who understands most important things at at least a basic level, it's just blisteringly obvious that the average person does not understand almost anything. They just got hooked into something at some point, somehow, and now that's their identity. Pretty much exactly like religion. Whatever cult they happened to be born into is obviously the only correct one, they'll ignore any and all evidence and arguments because it has nothing to do with reason. It's their identity and that's that.
Nuclear power has never been cheap and never will be. Every country that has tried has failed, and that included the Russians, the Chinese, South Koreans, French and the Japanese. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in Russia and China.
How has France failed with their nuclear fleet, exactly? Considering they produce so much power they're selling it to their neighbours at a profit.
All the cost were hidden off the balance sheet 40 years ago. They can't build them cost effectively (or on schedule) now that there's more scrutiny on where the money comes from.
And the cost of fossil fuels is future (not to mention current and recent past, I believe Germany has had over 15k heatwave related deaths this summer) human lives, you wanna calculate those into your little napkin math there?
They use it for national security, not price. They did not want to be held hostage to oil.
Unfortunately they have to shut down their nuclear reactors when it gets too warm in the summer, which is only going to get worse. Since nuclear isn't capable of generating baseload, we should instead invest into solar & batteries.
Except some of them are still building new plants today (large ones cause higher efficiency, unsurprisingly). For China and Russia those are entirely separate from the kind of reactors used for plutonium reprocessing or medical isotopes or whatever else, they only exist to boil water at the end of the day. The only incentive here is electricity, and both have plenty of other options available.
Bit of a paradox isn't it? They'd just burn coal or gas instead if that was much cheaper.
They just wish away the decommissioning costs by claiming they will last 60 years, 100 years, or forever.
large scale is cheaper more economical anywhere else. I don't believe making reactors smaller would work differently than anything else.
Hmmmnnnn. I remember getting excited reading a Wired article "Let a thousand reactors bloom" [0] - but that was back in 2004. I'm still waiting for a "pizza-safe" pebble-bed reactor.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2004/09/china-5/
This Nature article dubs TRISO fuel as "accident-tolerant", which is just as well given the lamentable history of it in actual use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor for instance, which suffered so many accidents that it was known as the "Shipwreck". It ended up with TRISO pebbles getting stuck in the reactor vessel, the primary circuit being hopelessly contaminated with fission products, and is now impossible to safely decommission using current technology.
It seems to me working SMRs really would be valuable, particularly for off-grid applications or where process heat is needed alongside electricity generation.
But as someone who was, like you, taken in by the pebble bed hype last time around, I've now learned to be much more sceptical about new nuclear technologies until they've actually been proven in practice.
TRISO is also more expensive, both in fabrication and disposal. It looks to me like another case of nuclear mis-optimizing for the wrong metric (safety vs. cost).
> but SMRs should be cheaper and easier to construct.
The word should is doing some real heavy lifting there. Especially given the subject.
I guess we'll know in 2030 when one should come online.
It just stupidly expensive if it is completed on time and budget.
To make the figure at least palatable for public funding the project assumes enormous learning effects for subsequent reactors.
We should know by then, at least.
Except Valar already did it earlier this year.
Not sure what you're referring to but in June they achieved criticality in a demo. While a good milestone that's not at all a functioning reactor connected to the grid. Let alone anything like a repeatable consistent production of said reactor.
I wish the article had more details on the cost to build these reactors, the cost to operate, refuel, dispose of fuel and then decommission. Details about how long they’re expected to operate, and how much power they will generate in their lifetime. Then we could get a projected cost per kWh for the power they will generate.
I ask because the last reactors the US brought online took so long to build and cost so much they caused the cost of power to go up.
This seems unworkable when solar is already causing power to be free (Australia), and gets cheaper by the day.
There's two reasons they take so long: large plants need to be redesigned as conditions on the site develop (soil type unexpectedly changes as excavation occurs) or regulations change during the process, and the second reason is that there's basically no nuclear construction industry.
The benefit of an SMR is that it can theoretically be built largely off-site without the same risk that larger plants have wrt needing to customize everything. That allows construction companies to centralize and reuse talent and suppliers rather than needing to drag them all over the country or subcontracting to people more accustomed to building offices.
In areas like where I live, there's weeks or more of time in winter where every day is overcast, short, and has little wind. To go completely renewable, we would need to pay southern regions to overproduce by triple digit percentages of their needs and then send the energy to us by HVDC that don't exist yet either.
A bad ice storm or tornado could leave millions without any power at all at the most dangerous time of the year to not have electricity.
It's doable, but we are a long way off and if SMR miraculously hits the right numbers, it'd be a better fit for us. Until then, we'll keep burning gas supplemented with solar.
A lot of people are betting serious money that they will cheaper, more flexible, faster to build, and safer. Including me - I'm working in the industry, and I think they might very well be future backbone of energy production.
But there's a real possibility when all this shakes out that SMR's only advantage will be their flexibility. And that might be enough. A major issue with gigawatt scale nuclear is that it's frankly too big for most markets. Only very large electric markets can can easily digest a new always-on 1000 megawatts of electricity, and you need to be building multiple plants at a time for this all to be economical. That's why the nuclear power rollout of the 60s through 80s worked, and why China and to a lesser extent India's nuclear industry is thriving presently.
With an SMRs smaller scale, there are just way more available projects where nuclear is feasible, and so a more consistent workload can keep everyone employed and subcontractor's backlogs filled. The flexibility in scaling lets you reclaim the benefits of having an experienced workforce and that knows how to build nuclear power plants, something we lost in the west when we stopped building them.
What % of global electricity production is in too small markets? Seems to be working well in EU at least, markets and grids being multinational.
I'd guess many places in Africa could be potential markets that have underdeveloped grids but growing economies and populations. Hence the SMR industry in South Africa since the 90s I guess.
We're looking specifically at new power plant builds. The majority of that is in Asia, with China and India being the bulk of it. But there is a lot of Asia outside of those two, and in particular Southeast Asia has a lot of potential. There is a lot of long distance transmission line connectivity already, and more planned, but you still want to product power close to where it's used so as to avoid losses in transmission. And the finances for a smaller country are just more straightforward if you're not spending multiple billions of dollars on one giant plant.
The next big market is actually replacement plants in the USA and Europe. Electricity generation may have peaked there, but much of the generating capacity is decades old and needs replacement. There are a lot of smaller facilities that are not gigawatt-scale that need to shut down, and it's easier to plug that gap with SMRs.
South and Central America are small markets, but they won't be ignored. There is a lot of complexity here with the inter-national hydro projects and broken up grids, so I'm sure some countries will look into SMRs.
Africa unfortunately just doesn't factor in except as a long-term possibility for growth. It's only 3% of electricity generation now, and its share will probably fall as Asia electrifies.
This is all worst-case scenario where SMRs are less financially competitive than current gigawatt-scale designs. If SMRs do actually succeed in being cheap assembly-line reactors, then all bets are off and the industry will experience explosive growth.
Even in Europe you can't necessarily bring online a 1200+ MW plant just anywhere, especially in the recent market where some PV production is curtailed in summer and brings the spot rates to zero.
In theory we should start investing in synthetic fuel production, but it's been mostly vaporware so far.
The problem is that you can’t assume ”always on” anymore.
Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Baseload is simply the lowest wattage your grid demands in a time period. Solar and wind have not made it irrelevant at all. All of the demand from data centers very much assumes constant reliable power which is in fact a perfect match for nuclear.
What solar and wind have made irrelevant is the assumption that constant supply of the baseload is an addressable market for a power plant. That only works if the supply is the cheapest on the market (something nuclear has even historically struggled to achieve without big subsidies), and solar and wind will supply the baseload much cheaper than any other source when they're running, causing a lot of problems for any plant on the grid that wants to run at a constant output.
There needs to be a market mechanism to ensure there is enough dispatchable spare capacity to meet demand when solar and wind can't supply it. More reliable sources of power are inherently more valuable.
Yes. That’s called ancillary markets. One such are ”capacity markets”.
Nuclear power’s problem is that neither its spread between CAPEX and OPEX, nor its operational profile fits them.
We also have electricity futures. Again with the problem that their cost is far far below what new built nuclear power requires.
Here’s some reading on electricity futures:
https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely do the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
[dead]
Why should your data center buy multiples more expensive nuclear powered electricity when renewables or stored renewables are available? They won’t.
And even if they sign a PPA the renewable arbitrage they could do exerts large downward pressure on the price they are willing to pay.
Which is to say, they would want to sign a contract saying ”deliver cheap reliable electricity when renewables and storage doesn’t do it”.
And now you are trying to fit an extremely CAPEX heavy square into a round OPEX sized firming hole.
Data centers are only 5-10% of all US electric power demand. A significant fraction of that load is responsive to spot market price. DCs incorporate their own battery storage infrastructure for backup purposes and some even sell stored energy back to the grid during times of high demand.
it is not at all a perfect match for nuclear. Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing the nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
Thats what OP means by baseload generation being irrelevant.
Data centers need power at night
How about you try to explain how this changes the economics of nuclear, and I’ll wait.
> Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
That's why truly free markets are a bad idea? We've been through this.
Repeat after me: the value of the electric grid is in its stability. It must not go down regardless of pesky events like the winter or cloud cover.
You don't get to sell below cost to push out your competitors, thanks to regulations.
But hell, whatever, I agree — let's only use solar & wind and see how it goes :)
Oh, now you want to burn coal/gas? Awww. Remind me, what was the cost of climate change again?
Not sure why you are being condescending.
Perfect reliability is not worth the squeeze. In Sweden, which is a very electrified country with harsh winters, the figure is that it is acceptable to have 1.52 hours per year of not matching demand with production. Paying for more reliability is simply not worth it.
The research has lately focused on system costs. Finding renewable systems vastly cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Big reactors also need a lot of cooling, and we've just had a very dry summer in Europe which forced some nuclear power stations to dial down or shut down entirely.
"a supplement produced with financial support from Oklo Inc"
"Oklo Corp. Logo Oklo is designing and deploying advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy"
There are no working SMR's ready to be deployed in the West. The company (NuScale) that was furthest along had its flagship project die after cost estimates ballooned. Its other project was a crypto scam.
Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.
The SMR in Darlington, Canada is already in construction.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/darlington-smr-n...
Are you forgetting Valar Atomics exists buddy? Or Aalo, or Antares or Radiant?
None of those are ready to deploy, they are in experimental testing. They have several phases of that still to go before they can get a license.
Although generally safe these reactors aren't totally safe.
I'm concerned lax physical security will allow miscreants to blow them up and spread nuclear materials over a wide area. The ensuing panic would totally destroy any goodwill nuclear power has gained over the last 20 years or so.
I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers playing the Good Samaritan with their claims of "Carbon Neutral Environmentally Friendly A.I."
Well, gas and oil plants are actively emitting pollutants that kill thousands. And nuclear still is the safest energy sort available.
People are far more terrified of flying, in general, than they are of driving. However, driving is far, far more dangerous -- with flying commercial being one of the safest modes of travel.
> And nuclear still is the safest energy sort available.
Surely solar is orders of magnitude safer.
Solar and nuclear are comparable: 0.02 vs 0.03 deaths/TWh (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...)
Depending on what kind of solar, it can have quite a high death/TWh ratio because people fall off roofs while installing them. As a ratio is far better now that so much new solar is ground level solar farms and not installed by amateurs or professionals who have a van, a ladder and watched a YouTube video that one time. Some older estimates based, I think, on generic roofing accident rates, were up to 0.44 deaths/TWh.
Wind is more dangerous than nuclear (0.04), I guess also from falls and accidents during construction and maintenance.
Edit: All are incredibly safe compared to the next worst, hydro (1.3, or 30 times worse than wind).
The differences in deaths from (non-accident) nuclear and wind/solar are very small compared to the amount of energy produced. The effect of the statistical value of lives lost is tiny compared to direct differences in energy cost, and so shouldn't have any effect on which is chosen.
This is not the case for coal, where the cost of lives can be substantial.
Yes, indeed all are far below the next one (hydro, 1.3, dam failures, I imagine).
And brown coal is sitting pretty at 36+, i.e. ONE THOUSAND times worse than nuclear.
The cost for coal depends a lot on how the emissions are treated, and how deaths from CO2 are calculated. A general problem with the latter is these are global deaths, and foreign lives are valued far below domestic lives. Kind of horrible, but choices on spending illustrate this.
The scam here is presenting average occupational accident rates as a measure of "safety" when the obvious risk of nuclear power is the rare large-scale events which render large areas of land uninhabitable for generations while producing few directly-attributable deaths.
Are those large-scale events in the room with us? Or are you saying over the last, however many decades of all sorts of countries running nuclear plants, we've just been oh so lucky to have a negligible number of serious accidents? Luck is an interesting argument.
Also, you may want to fact-check your "large areas of land" because you're just making that up, if talking about accidents that have already happened, or going of by feels I guess if talking about hypothetical accidents that have by luck not happened all this time?
The real scam is bikeshedding about the safety of nuclear vs solar while happily burning coal. Take a deep breath, let your lungs taste the byproducts of burning coal. And now, I dare you, say something about the nuclear waste "problem". barf
what about other risks such as the risk of large scale contamination of habitable areas?
Coal is particularly bad about large scale contamination. Nuclear has historically involved substantial contamination in processing plants (Hanford, Paducah, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats and so on).
Solar, wind, and battery do not have comparable large scale contamination risks.
The potential for widespread radiation leakage from nuclear doesn't exist with wind or solar. I would think a terrorist would hit a nuclear power plant over any wind or solar farms.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
> uninhabitable
Inhabitable: there are people living there off their own gardens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samosely
However Undesirable to you or I.
If refugees were allowed to live there, I wonder how many people would choose radiation over their current worse situations?
The article mentions people moving from Donbas (perhaps less inhabitable): "Following the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, refugees from that conflict settled in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or nearby".
Now calculate what % of habitable land on Earth that exclusion zone takes up.
Yeah, that's a lot of zeroes.
When you can sell NYC on building a nuclear power plant on Manhattan, then I will agree with you.
Only if you remember to reapply sunscreen every few hours.
Terrorists are only one piece of the issue. Corporations and "Responsible Adults" have done more to harm nuclear power in this country than any terrorist act has.
ConEd and Three Mile Island meltdown brought out a mass of normal people to chant "Hell No! We won't Glow!"
Hanford in Washington State.
San Onofre in So Cal.
Santa Susana Meltdown.
The reality is that everyone wants nuclear, but no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant.
Hanford was nuclear weapons, not nuclear power.
See "Responsible Adults" in quotes.
> Although generally safe these reactors aren't totally safe.
I have some seriously bad news about the safety of your totally-safe house against meteorites. Or for that matter, thermonuclear explosives detonated directly above its roof.
Now tell me: Is Your Car Safe From Supermaneuverable Air-Defense Fighter Aircraft? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7YVxLLIuGM
As a bonus, here's a channel with hundreds of commercial aircraft accidents in which thousands of people have died: https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot. Now enjoy traveling using the objectively safest mode of transport — commercial aviation.
"Miscreants" conjures in my mind an image of little British boys with dirty feet in Industrial Revolution era attire.
Those cheeky chappies from Vodkaland with their Polonium water and Novichok perfume don't half get up to some jolly old japes!
> I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers
Why is that a concern?
I'm also a bit confused by that criticism. If Big Tech wants to use a portion of their ginormous profits to create a much larger market for the commercialization of small reactors, it sounds like a net positive to me. The data center construction spree is basically, in part, a giant private stimulus program for our energy supply. Yeah it's messy in the short run, but considering how much of Big Tech's profits are arguably undeserved, I'll take it over other options if regulatory & legislative actions lack feasibility.
> A.I. data-centers
I wouldn't be so sure about that (in the US).
Like usage in A.I. data-centers assumes
that they get price competitive with low quality gas turbines run by state subventioniere natural gas...
or the government actual enforces proper environmental protections so that they can't continue running gas turbines without proper filters (and this isn't even (mostly) about climate change, but air pollution harming people)
and from how it currently looks both things seem unlikely :/
Regardless, better that they're the ones who spend the money for these reactors, and better that they use nuclear instead of coal or gas plants.
One option is to also mandatorily lock the powerplants to the municipal grid, and provide rebates to data center operators via net metering instead of simply giving them cash back.
But yes, the lax security and the laissez-faire don't give a shit attitude of the current admin far outweighs any of these benefits
Nuclear, while exorbitant, is necessary for security. See North Korea vs Iran/Venezuela. Nuclear scientists, supply chains, and a trained workforce takes decades to develop. Excess power production can be used to smelt aluminum. You can always have strategic excess supply of materials that can use flexible supply.
With solar and batteries getting cheaper and cheaper, is this still a topic? Or at least for the time being until that "cheaper" gets cheaper enough?
The problem with 100% solar+batteries is that you need to massively overbuild for the system to meet demand. It's far more cost-effective to have some portion of generation come from a firm, weather-independent source. The main options are fossil fuels, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Since fossil fuels emit carbon and hydro and geothermal are geographically limited, nuclear is the best option in a lot of places.
> firm
That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.
And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.
Natural gas and hydro are firm power. You're correct that nuclear is not a good backup power source, but that's not the suggestion. The question is whether adding high-capacity-factor firm generation reduces total system cost. In regions where hydro and geothermal are unavailable, nuclear is the next best low-carbon option. I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 100% renewables, especially transmission capacity between regions.
I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 99.99% renewables and/or using it as a straw man against the highly inexpensive and achievable 95% renewables.
You're also underestimating the costs of using nuclear to achieve 99.99% reliability on top of a grid with 95% renewables: in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power. In which case you might as well ditch the renewables. But the world does not have the quadrillions needed to go 100% nuclear. The world does have the 10s of trillions needed to go 95-99% renewable.
>in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power.
Where are you getting that from? Again, nuclear doesn't need to be a full backup, and nobody is suggesting we ditch renewables for nuclear. A perfectly viable solution would be a grid with a majority of power coming from renewables and storage, with enough nuclear generation to reduce the amount of overbuild necessary and to stop burning natural gas.
From this article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266627872...
>Individually, each firm technology delivers substantial cost reductions relative to portfolios restricted to wind, solar, and energy storage alone. Additionally, because each technology occupies a distinctive functional niche in the electricity system, having all of these technologies available optimizes the utilization rate of each resource and reduces system costs by up to 10% relative to cases with just one class of firm resource.
If you're using nuclear as a backstop in that way, you're using the same statistical techniques that let you use cheaper, less reliable sources of power for backstop.
> Like nat gas or hydro
Since hydro is impossible to "just" build, that's gas only. No, there's no "nat" gas.
> geographic diversity works really well
"Give up your energy independence :)" I'm sure world leaders are eager to jump on that great idea.
"and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production"
Well, that should be fine, I only usually need electricity.
You don't need to cross oceans to get good geographic diversity.
You are very wrong. US base load demand is around 400GW that must be provided 24/7
Baseload is a cost optimization strategy only relevant if your non-dispatchable power generation is cheaper than your dispatchable power generation.
https://en.acatech.de/publication/baseload-power-plants/
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
I am very dubious of any energy policy coming form Germany because they have managed to make their electricity among the most expensive in the world while STILL being high carbon.
> You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Just one word change needed:
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal or greater than your peak load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing any nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
base load demand does not mean it has to be met with a constant matched source, and in fact that no longer works economically.
This is fundamentally a pricing problem that hourly-matched carbon-free energy accounting tries to solve. https://www.eurelectric.org/in-detail/247-2/
Natrium has an interesting design for a 345MW reactor that has thermal storage that can boost output to 500MW for 5.5 hours. This lets it increase output during peak prices.
I mean, sounds kinda cool. But that 2023 idea is very clearly not going to happen in the current US political environment.
We’re in an era of brutal capitalism, and nothing else matters but price. Not even emissions sadly. Green compacts like this have no chance, and neither do nukes. Unless they pay the right bribes for some subsidies.
The Trump admin is actually very pro-nuclear power. They are ending the "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA) standard in favor of fixed limits which is actually a good idea, possibly the only one the Trump admin has ever had.
i know they are (or claim to be). Im extremely unconvinced that meaningfully changes the flawed economics of nuclear power. I would love to be proven wrong and a wave of innovative economically competitive nuclear technology emerges... possible, but seems vanishingly unlikely.
I think we'll see a few companies and projects connected to the administration get grants and tax breaks and favors, pull a few headlines, seem like there's movement. Maybe even build something! but ultimately be a meaningless footnote in the energy transition. Just another grift for the most corrupt admin in US history.
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely due to the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
thats, not true at all. Safety costs a little, but they are fundamentally massively complicated, huge, specialized, EXPENSIVE things to build. They require 100s of staff to run at all times. The insurance is so expensive only nation states can back them. The economics are flawed because on modern grids with cheap renewables, they will never pay back the ridiculous up front capex. Relaxing regulations changes very little about this situation.
China and Koreas are massively state subsidized (koreas 51%, chinas 100%). Which obscures the real cost, and these state enterprises dont have to pay insurance or decommissioning. Which is the only way you can make them work today - massive state subsidies.
if your argument is "well without regulations someone could build a reactor that somehow avoids all these economic constraints" . Maybe, but today thats a fantasy.
You can't compare wind and solar to nuclear you have to compare wind and solar with enormous amounte of battery storage which is extremely expensive and it would be hard to make enough storage
For interest, solid actual real world as of now numbers on solar + wind + battery storage in South Australia:
Renewables Revolution in South Australia (April 2026) https://sagj.scholasticahq.com/article/160759-the-renewables...
Some hand waving on full nuclear build out across all Australia: https://nuclearforclimate.com.au/how-many/
That is soft on timeline, skills and expertise, sourcing to make it happen, etc. All the things that caused the Australian scientific body's energy feasibility report to conclude that nuclear in Australia (no existing reactors, staff, etc) wasn't economic or rational given so much can be done with the upfront cost of nuclear that immediately begins with returning energy compared to an uncertain timeline and blowouts not returning energy for ???
Australia is the best case scenario for solar power. It doesn't work as well in a lot of places that don't get so much sun.
> Australia is the best case scenario for solar power.
Yes. (and no - it's a big country)
The USofA is also a large country with the same land area (mainland USofA at least) and many places suitable for solar and wind.
The South Australian capital, Adelaide, is on the 35th parallel (South), what works there likely works in the US at or below the 35th parallel North.
The essential point is that nuclear isn't a flat parameter free answer to all that ails - some places it makes no economic sense, other places it makes good economic sense ... and there's a world in between.
You just keep moving the goalposts and not responding to arguments. Until you have some idea of how nuclear is ever going to be cost competitive on today’s grids, good day to you.
If solar becomes 2 times cheaper, it will be economical to capture nitrogen from atmosphere and produce ammonia and use that for long-term energy storage and fuel. And with that one does not need massive solar overbuild.
This does not require any magic technology, just scaling up what is available today is enough and will definitely happen within the next 20 years, before small nuclear will have any effect.
If I recall correctly solar panels are already so cheap that to halve the installed cost again will require most of the efficiencies to be found in other costs like manufacture of associated hardware and equipment and installation. I don't know if those costs will be so easy to reduce.
> If solar becomes 2 times cheaper
It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.
Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it require temperatures over 600 Celsius to get to 70% percent of efficiency and not exactly small, with cheap way to produce ammonia they would provide energy dense batteries that could run for months if necessary.
> Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it
OK, so it requires a plant of fuel cells. And the cost per kW (i.e. discharge capacity) is? And it requires some facility to produce the ammonia; what is the cost per kW of electricity consumed, and at what efficiency?
Numbers would help to assess the proposal, given the claim that a halving of the cost of electricity from solar would make all the economics for ammonia work.
Solar + battery is very land inefficient, that's basically the main argument.
Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.
Land is cheap. Even in Europe, the cost of land onto which renewables are put is small compared to the cost of the renewable energy equipment itself. Here in the US, it's common for the land to be just a few percent of the project cost.
But batteries can be very distributed and stabilize and prop up the grid in ways a huge plant can't without building out distribution. (Situation dependent of course.)
> In March 2025, the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced US $900 million in grants to support the deployment of SMRs. One year later, the European Commission said it would invest up to €200 million (US $228 million) in the construction of SMRs.
Yes, it does seem to still be a topic.
And the US is spending vastly more to make sure renewables and solar don't get built. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/08/27/how-wind-...
> making sure
If this is the goal, they're failing spectacularly.
Scaling is a problem.
How many batteries do you need to power, say, entire Scandinavia during winter? That would be a lot of lithium, btw.
"Dunkelflaute" periods when it is dark and no wind to run the wind turbines are common in northern winters, IIRC the longest one a few years ago was 12 days long.
Which means that in order to have a reasonable buffer against it, you would need enough batteries to supply the entire region for three weeks. Not going to happen, unless we discover some much more efficient class of batteries.
Sodium batteries are cheaper for storage and does not require any rate/expensive minerals, just scaling up production. Then in Scandinavia the main problem in winter is heating and using heated water as a battery is already a thing. Then producing amonia or even carbon fuel from atmosphere for energy-dense storage will be viable option in 10-20 years. And of cause Norway and Sweden can have massive hydro for energy storage.
That 12 day event was a regional event in Germany, there was still lots of wind in the North Sea. And sun & wind didn't drop to 0, it dropped below 10%.
Dunkelflaute's are a German phenomenon: the standard pattern in most of the world is that the high pressure systems that suppress winds are generally sunny. And the high elevation areas in Germany are sunny during a dunkelflaute.
IOW, batteries aren't the only answer required to cover a dunkelflaute.
Hydrogen is one possibility for a 100% grid to cover Dunkelflauten and seasonal leveling (the former for wind, the latter for solar). To see the effects on overall cost per MWh, explore at https://model.energy/
Fission reactors in multiple European countries had to shut down due to heatwaves. And in Scandinavia (Sweden), they are "routinely" stopped for scheduled and most importantly unscheduled maintenance.
But those don't have scary sounding German names, I guess.
I don't find the word Dunkelflaute any more scary than the word Kindergarten, but I am used to speaking and reading German...
And you might have noticed me commenting on the need to shut down some reactors due to lack of water elsewhere.
boy am i tired of hearing that Dunkelflaute word as if its some kind of gotcha. Even ignoring the fact that you can continue to source power from other geographies during a localized phenomenon..... Just burn gas in peaker plants for the few days a year that this happens. That small amount of emissions wont matter for the next 50 years of decarbonization, after which we'll likely have plenty of other options.
The absolutism in all these arguments is so tiring, as if its not 100% perfect solution for 100% of every imaginable scenario than its no good. 95% reduction over a year would be astounding, we would have won the climate battle.
That's fine, but you need to include the cost of having barely-used gas peaker plants when calculating the cost of "renewables+storage". Laymen keep using arbitrary "marginal cost of solar with sun shining" to say "solar is cheaper than everything!". If it's true that capex of 80% gas peaker (and LNG storage and employees on standby and so on) + solar + wind + batteries is cheaper, then people should make that argument and provide the data.
The latest figures from ember etc are not only “sun shining”, they’re talking about 24hr firmed solar-storage costs, and they’re still mostly cheaper than fossil in most geos. It is true that we will have to pay for having gas fill the gaps - how much exactly is a very complicated function of market economics and real time power auctions. Depends on so many variables, how big is the shortfall, how long, what competition does the gas have locally and extra-geographically, many other things. For connected countries in Europe you are never going to get to a situation where you need an 80% sized backup to your production, there will always be varied other sources. And perhaps you just choose to load shed in truly black swan scenarios, rather than paying for enough backup for every possible rare scenario. Life does go on.
Though I confess predicting it is beyond me and I’m not sure how you would model it to achieve conclusions generally applicable to every country / market .
It is if the nuclear industry pays for it to be. See the disclaimer at the bottom of the article.
The future will be solar. Especially in underdeveloped regions without a centralized power grid, solar makes the most sense. And even in developed countries having solar panels on your roof and a battery in your cellar is the most cost effective way of getting all your electricity needs.
> Hermes 1, by contrast, is fuelled by tristructural isotopic (TRISO) pebbles — poppy-seed-sized particles of uranium, encased in a carbon-ceramic shell.
What writing
Seems like you'd end up with even more waste in the end. For example, the navy's nuclear reactor graveyard: https://interestingengineering.com/military/trench-94-the-ee...
You could probably just sink it all in the ocean near a subduction zone.
I wish this subduction zone idea would just die. It's dumb. Things move so slowly it wouldn't help, and subduction zones have large amounts of volatiles coming back up via mud volcanoes and, later, actual molten rock volcanoes.
If you want to dispose of waste deep in the sea floor do it far away from subduction zones. Or just store it cheaply in dry casks and minimize the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste.
Short-term, subduction zones are deep, maximizing the difficulty for malicious actors trying to get their hands on the waste. The subduction itself is more a marketing feature, for folks who oppose putting the waste anywhere on the surface of the Earth.
Longer-term - it's mid-ocean ridges, not subduction zones, where you find all the volatiles and volcanoes. Yes, millions of years in the future, some micro-percentage of the subducted material will re-emerge, hundreds of miles away, via volcanoes. So will vastly more natural radioactivity, whether or not we dispose of nuclear waste in the subduction zone.
> Longer-term - it's mid-ocean ridges, not subduction zones, where you find all the volatiles and volcanoes.
That's simply not true. Yes, there are volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges, but subduction zones also have plenty of activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_volcano
"There are 10 active mud volcanoes in the Izu–Bonin–Mariana Arc which can be found along a north to south trend, parallel to the Mariana trench.[43] The material erupted at these mud volcanoes consists primarily of blue and green serpentinite mud which contains fresh and serpentinized peridotite material from the subduction channel. Fluid from the descending Pacific Plate is released by dehydration and alteration of rocks and sediment."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_arc
(for description of how subduction zones create magmatic volcanoes)
Subducted material is very wet, and as it descends the volatiles ascend to melt the rock above, creating magma (water reduces the melting point of rocks just like it reduces the melting point of sugar.)
Just worth remembering that the cost/W of steam generators decrease quickly (almost linearly) with size up to ~1GW. What in reverse also means it increases quickly with reduced size, down to the point you can order them 3D printed on the internet (what is around a couple of kW).
And also that steam generators alone have a really hard time competing with solar nowadays.
How are the fusion startups coming along? There are at least 21 of them.[1]
The top 3, by funding. These all have more than a billion dollars.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The MIT people. This is a tokamak with better magnets. The magnet insight is that if you put a superconductor and a regular conductor in parallel, all the current flows through the superconductor. So you can plate a superconducting material on stainless steel tape, using stainless steel as an insulator. Winding a magnet out of stainless steel tape works fine. They demoed that back in 2021. But no fusion yet. Well funded, big operation, around 1000 people.
Helion Energy. This is a strange magneto-inertial fusion system. It's vaguely like a free-piston internal combustion engine generator, except that the piston is a plasma. After seven rounds of increasingly large prototypes, they can get D-T fusion, but it's not self-sustaining, nor do they get power out. Prototypes have thus far underperformed claims. Around 500 people.
TAE. Recently merged with Trump Media. Really.
There are quite a few others. Many are working on some kind of pulsed fusion, like the Livermore National Ignition Facility. This is known to create fusion, but is hard to turn into a useful power source. They can get to a non-useful fusion demo by pumping a lot of energy into a small space, so it looks like progress.
On the continuous fusion front, several startups are trying to revive 1950s Stellarator technology. For a few years back then, fusion energy looked close.
Anyone have expertise in this area? Are any of these going to work? Or is the product the stock?
[1] https://www.energystartups.org/top/fusion-energy/USA/
Helion most likely would not work. Even their own optimistic modeling gives very thin margins and even they completely ignore radiation damage to equipment.
Commonwealth and other tokamak designs are too optimistic as well. We do not know how instability in plasma will behave in production volumes.
Stellarator-based designs at least do not have big ifs, but they are way further and even they assume that radiation damage from neutrons will be manageable.
And all of this is ignoring costs. Outside of niche applications it is very hard to sea how fusion even if it works can compete with solar plus storage.
Literaly, designed for datacenters
I've always advocated for smaller atomic refactors.
...oh. Never mind.
Nuclear power's biggest problem is that it attracted, even back in the 1940's, a figurative army of techno-utopians - whose pie-in-the-sky promises of electric power too cheap meter, flying cars, and better-than-Santa's-sleigh safety were not quickly and loudly contradicted by people who knew better.
Probably didn't help that many of those keeping quiet had obvious short-term interests in promoting "nuclear everything". Even as various accidents, leaking waste dumps, and regular warnings of deadly communist mushroom clouds made it damned obvious to the general public that they were being systematically lied to.
Sadly, the pro-nuclear camp is still far too influenced by utopian and partisan considerations.
Yes, it'd be nice to see competently-done SMR's in regular use, for the use cases where they make sense. But if I was a policy maker with finite political capital and resources, I'd probably be winding down nuclear power - both to show the public that I wasn't too gullible to trust, and to show advocates for other technologies that lies and delusions would be carry harsh penalties.
Sure, and none of solar's advocates are utopian at all.
I don't think solar even needs advocates at this point. Battery backed solar should win on pure economics.
The general public doesn't care about utopian-measuring contests between different groups of zealots. They want cheap electricity on demand, safety, and a sense of control. Solar does a pretty good job of offering that. Nuclear? Nope.
I agree that the utopian tendencies of various groups are irrelevant. So I'm not sure why you brought it up.
Sounds like you're the one who's been lied to if you still believe the anti nuclear rhetoric. Study it more, it behooves you.
[flagged]
Donald Trump does a lot of stupid evil stuff to further fossil fuels but getting all the tech nerds excited about even more expensive nuclear power is actually evil genius.
Yes. They are apparently scrubbing the truth but archive.org still has it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250507123042/https://docs.nrel...
I'm sorry, if you're gonna link to a 111 page pdf, please at least quote the area of interest?
They're all ridiculously fuel inefficient and we're going to have to figure out how to dispose of thousands or tens of thousands of these reactors. Aside from that one that starts pre buried, where the plan is to just leave a spent nuclear reactor buried in a hole. A cost that will almost certainly be externalized to the taxpayers.
The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen.
Getting downvoted wicked hard super fast. But how else are we supposed to see this? How else do we citizens of the world interpret this? The fuel efficiency is a fact. The nuclear clean up has been a problem every single time.
'Fuel efficiency' is not the bottle neck to getting more clean energy on the grid, scale is. Waste? grind it up, vitrify it, bury it in an abandoned coal mine or something. People get more radioactivity from a coal power plant than they will ever get from properly handled nuclear waste.
It sure is. If the world were nuclear powered (all energy, not just grid) with burner reactors, estimates of uranium resources (not reserves) at up to 3x the current price would last about five years.
A fully nuclear world needs to use nuclear fuel efficiently, which means breeder reactors.
...and that's not a scenario that anyone is talking about employing with nuclear. We need enough for baseline load. Being able to build small modular reactors would give us scale that would help cut through the regulatory cost. By the time this crop of current reactors need to be decommissioned, we'd probably have dirt cheap grid storage figured out and could move away from them, but in the mean time, we need all the zero carbon energy we can get.
A world that gets 10% of its energy from nuclear and 90% from renewables is not substantially easier than one that gets 100% from renewables. The intermittency/seasonality issues are not solved by that relatively light sprinkling of nuclear on top. So the objections nuclear advocates use to justify nuclear over cheaper renewables are vitiated. Those problems have to be solved anyway, so why the 10% nuclear?
Nuclear really either goes big or it goes home. And you're saying it won't go big.
It's easy when you just ignore all the externalities! I'll be paying for the decommissioned nuclear plant near us for the next 20+ years through my electric rates. The plant is closed and no longer operational but still has to be staffed and guarded for decades during the decommission process. Imagine this issue scaled up across thousands of SMRs.
there is just one problem
like everything else with the current US administration
they deregulated nuclear safety
* https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...
* https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5920368/nrc-nuclear-rad...
any other administration even Republican I'd be willing to listen to why
this administration will happily kill thousands or give them cancer if it means another million dollars in their pockets
there is only one kind of nuclear reactor that should be built anymore
and that is Thorium reactors, they "fail safe" (or at least safer)
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ
Nuclear regulation could genuinely do with a lot of reforms that would streamline the process without appreciably impacting safety. Everyone would benefit. And that's the huge problem with the administration's breaking of trust and naked corruption: we as a lay people, what should we think if they come out with a bunch of proposals eliminate a bunch of commercial licensing requirement and lowering radiation safety standards? Is that because the old rules are genuinely archaic and not serving their purpose... or because Trump's family and donors are personally financially invested in the very companies mentioned in this article.
This is a great temporary solution to continue developing AI up to a reliable state, then the ownership can be transferred to a particular state that is major global presence in cybersecurity, semiconductor design, and tech innovation, who is already well positioned with key stakeholders in most if not all American tech companies with strong grantees in government support.
Major technology companies have signed strategic agreements for SMR development, but regulatory approvals and supply-chain scaling place widespread commercial deployment in the late 2020s through the 2030s. Now that we are in astronomical debt, it's our responsibility to turn our nation into a wasteland in order to provide this particular nation a scalable, full spectrum and robust AI defense solution that will allow them to achieve their geopolitical goals safely without fear of reprisal while they continue to expand their influence in tech and the global economy, hopefully culminating in extracting taxes on ships going through key trade canals near their borders and beyond.