But what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter time scales but not over the entire year.
Short term for self-reliance Finland can use natural gas (won't need much), wind and hydro. Since they are a nation with many friends they can also buy electricity from neighbors.
To solve the variable production from solar and wind, most nations should probably have a safety valve in the form of synthesized fuels. Meaning that during summer when energy is abundant and has to be dumped at negative prices, we use the surplus to synthesize fuels instead.
Synthesizing fuel is inefficient, but since you use surplus energy that doesn't matter.
These are options that are viable right now, but there are also promising developments in batteries that could make them viable for season storage too.
The good thing about northern regions is that they tend to be wet and have low population density. This is pretty good for pumped hydro even if batteries aren't cheap enough at a particular time. But it's not clear when the manufacturing costs of batteries will hit a minimum. So far they continue to decrease.
> The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined.
Because it doesn't have very many nuclear power plants relative to its size? France has the same number of nuclear reactors as China despite being a much smaller country.
I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.
Worth mentioning that while France has 57 operating reactors and China has 58 operating reactors, it's also the case that China has an additional 38 under construction (with plans for more again) compared to France having zero additional reactors under construction (despite announcing plans for new reactors three years past).
>I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.
I don't think that's correct. The infrastructure investment is clearly much much smaller for solar, in practice. IEA and other organizations have observed that solar is the cheapest source of electricity that humankind has ever developed, and this was already a few years ago, when it was more expensive than now.
Consider that several countries are adding the equivalent of several nuclear plants of energy generation yearly by now. Germany, Japan, Canada to name a few. Adding the same capacity with nuclear would be a budget-defining decision for years.
Solar is just so much cheaper and faster to make that nuclear becomes "too little too late" by comparison.
If any nation could decide to make 100s of nuclear plants to match the output from solar it's China, but it just doesn't make sense. It makes way more sense to invest in energy storage to stabilize the massive amounts of energy from solar. China does that too.
Nations that have nuclear weapons will of course keep nuclear plants around anyway, but it is really really hard to make a case for nuclear just for energy supply in 2025.
>Great comparison to use the most delayed neuclear power plant constrution in human history to extrapolate an argument. Really fairly done.
Not as unfair as disregarding my points entirely just because I used the latest reactor built in europe as an example. ;-)
We can use Hinkley point C instead?
When Hinkley point C is completed, estimated 2029 at the earliest, it will have taken 12 years and will produce as much electricity per year as the solar panels installed in Germany last year. And those panels are already producing, now.
Hinkley point C is estimated to cost 44 bn euros by 2029, and it will still cost money after that of course, for maintenance and operations.
If that money had been spent on battery storage for solar instead, the UK might have gotten way more energy at a way lower cost per GWh, and they would have had it _already now_.
When they are in place, battery banks and solar panels have a basically negligible maintenance cost compared to a nuclear plant. Its an investment where you pay upfront and get benefits down the line.
I don't see how nations that wait 10 years for 2-3 GW of nuclear will be competitive in any energy-consuming endeavor against countries that add 40-50GW of solar every year.
And at night, nuclear power plants produce infinitely more power than solar. Same during winter months.
Solar simply can't work alone for northern countries without insane amount of batteries. We're talking about having a MONTH of supply in reserve for Germany. It's probably even worse for Finland.
Nuclear fuel is cheap, if you can somehow reduce the capital costs associated with building them, they are a good base load solution. Couple them with hydro storage and you have the ability to deal with demand spikes. I don’t think China is going to stop investing in nuclear or solar anytime soon.
This comparison makes no sense at all since both factors: the huge delays for nuclear and small delays for solar are direct results of policy.
So countries going for nuclear will do the going by removing those hurdles
>This comparison makes no sense at all since both factors: the huge delays for nuclear and small delays for solar are direct results of policy
It's not policy it's physical logistics. Just building the roads to the site where you want the nuclear plant takes months and it's hard to transport anything else to the site before you have those.
You also need to sign thousands of workers who need to be physically on location, meaning you need housing, parking, plumbing, salary administrators, doctors, catering, janitors etc.
Solar is entirely trivial by comparison. Any small town has enough carpenters and electricians to assemble megawatts of capacity in weeks. Which is why it grows so much faster than anything else.
I would add that also a lot of solar power is funded by small capital (homeowners). There is no real way for small capital holders to fund and gain profits from nuclear energy, and installing wind or water turbines are not realistic at 99% of homes.
>Question to you. Why do you think Olkiluoto 1&2 took 5 and 7 years to build instead of 18?
I can only speculate, but I suppose two major reasons could be that Europe had several companies that could and did build reactors back then, and that o1 and o2 were much smaller than o3.
O1 and o2 were also built before we knew about things like Chernobyl and 9/11 of course.
>Countries going for nuclear will wait decades to get the same power that solar can add in weeks.
And it will last 80 years, day and night. Solar can give you what, 20 or 25 years and 12 hours each day? And China can't hamstring your country either by just refusing to sell you more solar panels. There is almost certainly a place for photovoltaic in a nation's power grid as a sidekick to some other more serious technology.
Sorry if I'm mistaken but I reckon solar panels (and especially batteries) produce much more waste. Also they require vast areas for the same energy. You should keep all the variables in the equation and not just say how quickly you can dish out some panels.
Probably not reliable but this is what ChatGPT outputs over 100 years, assuming equal output (100 TWh total):
Type Nuclear_Waste(tons) Solar_Waste(tons)
-------------------------------------------------------------
Solid_Total 12_000–23_000 6_000_000–20_000_000
Hazardous_Toxic 2_000–3_000 (HLW) 600_000–1_000_000
Longevity >100_000 years ~500 years (some metals)
Land_Required ~0.1–0.2 km² ~5–10 km² For 1 TWh/year of continuous output
I still dream of a future where nuclear batteries can be fitted in every item that needs it, but we can't get there without development. There's only so much energy a square meter of panels can output.
I want to highlight two things as counterarguments - 1) nuclear waste is not comparable with solar panel waste and 2) Land use for solar is not comparable with land use for nuclear.
Solar panel waste does not require army supervision to prevent it being used for terrorist acts. The US army has personell permanently stationed at plants that have been closed for several decades by now. They keep costing money for decades after they stopped producing any power.
As of 2025 there isn't a single nuclear site that has ever been in operation that has stopped costing money for the population of the country it is in, simply because of the waste. And there is no end in sight.
As for land, solar panels are usually deployed on land that can still be used for other things. (Rooftops of homes and office buildings, grazing grounds for sheep and farmland for crops that need shade).
The last point is of course why many countries have been able to deploy solar that matches the output of their nuclear generation in just a few years. You have hundreds of thousands of carpenters and electricians that can work simultaneously on building solar panel installations and they get approved by homeowners without any bureaucracy.
Looking at China, the US, the EU, Japan and even a nuclear pioneer like Canada, you see that Solar adds the equivalent of several new nuclear power plants per year, and the power is available immediately.
The only argument with merit is that nuclear works at night and during winter - but so do many other things, much cheaper things, things that don't take a decade+ to build and don't require eternal expensive vigilance.
"Waste" is a nebulous term; it usually means "is not currently recycled". But you can't build a waste-recycling industry until after there's lots of waste to recycle, for simple economics of scale. Using waste as a justification to not build new stuff is just stupid.
Batteries especially are just absurd - they're ~10% lithium (and it's mostly in the electrolyte, which realistically means the electrolyte is 100% electrolyte, excuse the tautology), whereas 'lithium ore' is mostly 1-3% (there's some higher, even as high as 8%, but it's mostly 1-3% IIRC). With sufficient scale, that stuff will disappear like scrap copper left on the curb for an hour.
Nuclear is cost competitive if you have a reliable cadence of building plants and if folks get out of the way of location permits and waste storage and people can actually make decisions about them without endless debates and lawsuits. The problem is one-off designs and the decades long gap between project inception and when investment returns start coming in. As opposed to solar where I could order a few panels and accessories online and start producing energy within a week. Obviously larger solar projects take more planning but if you've got a roof, a credit card, and an electrician on hand you can start producing electricity or expand your production in a very short time achieving break even in a few years.
I thought it was cost-competitive with something on the scale of mega-dams and takes about as long to finish too. Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
> Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major problem.
The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case.
Except now thanks to climate change the water levels might drop below the intake in lake Mead. Lake Powell is even worse, Glenn canyon dam was always a mistake, and it might stop producing power next year.
Without flooding enormous ecosystems and disrupting river flows, and on average half the CO2 emissions per unit of generation than hydro has, and a staggeringly lower land use per energy footprint (hydro is 100x larger, wind is 10x larger). Nuclear seems like one of the only sane choices from an environmental point of view.
Nuclear has never been particularly affordable. It's always been more expensive than coal or gas, even in France in the 70s-80s and China in the 2010s.
The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined.
Finland spent 18 years and 11 bn euros to get 1.6 GW of nuclear, the US spent 7bn in subsidies and got some 20 GW of solar in 2022 alone.
Countries going for nuclear will wait decades to get the same power that solar can add in weeks.
Nuclear basically makes no sense at all in 2025.
(For nighttime use dirt-cheap batteries and natural gas now, even cheaper batteries and generated hydrogen gas later).
But what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter time scales but not over the entire year.
Short term for self-reliance Finland can use natural gas (won't need much), wind and hydro. Since they are a nation with many friends they can also buy electricity from neighbors.
To solve the variable production from solar and wind, most nations should probably have a safety valve in the form of synthesized fuels. Meaning that during summer when energy is abundant and has to be dumped at negative prices, we use the surplus to synthesize fuels instead.
Synthesizing fuel is inefficient, but since you use surplus energy that doesn't matter.
These are options that are viable right now, but there are also promising developments in batteries that could make them viable for season storage too.
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Finland's electricity production is already 95% non fossil fuel, so you don't need to worry about them.
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The good thing about northern regions is that they tend to be wet and have low population density. This is pretty good for pumped hydro even if batteries aren't cheap enough at a particular time. But it's not clear when the manufacturing costs of batteries will hit a minimum. So far they continue to decrease.
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> But what to do in Finland during the winter months?
Is this a serious question or "raising concerns".
A quick search brings up wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Finland
and hydro: https://www.andritz.com/hydro-en/hydronews/hn-europe/finland
And connections with friendly neighbours: https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/cef-energy-finla...
I'm sure that there is a role for Nuclear or gas to cover the last few % that renewables find hard to reach. For now.
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> The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined.
Because it doesn't have very many nuclear power plants relative to its size? France has the same number of nuclear reactors as China despite being a much smaller country.
I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.
Worth mentioning that while France has 57 operating reactors and China has 58 operating reactors, it's also the case that China has an additional 38 under construction (with plans for more again) compared to France having zero additional reactors under construction (despite announcing plans for new reactors three years past).
* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
>I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.
I don't think that's correct. The infrastructure investment is clearly much much smaller for solar, in practice. IEA and other organizations have observed that solar is the cheapest source of electricity that humankind has ever developed, and this was already a few years ago, when it was more expensive than now.
Consider that several countries are adding the equivalent of several nuclear plants of energy generation yearly by now. Germany, Japan, Canada to name a few. Adding the same capacity with nuclear would be a budget-defining decision for years.
Solar is just so much cheaper and faster to make that nuclear becomes "too little too late" by comparison.
If any nation could decide to make 100s of nuclear plants to match the output from solar it's China, but it just doesn't make sense. It makes way more sense to invest in energy storage to stabilize the massive amounts of energy from solar. China does that too.
Nations that have nuclear weapons will of course keep nuclear plants around anyway, but it is really really hard to make a case for nuclear just for energy supply in 2025.
Great comparison to use the most delayed neuclear power plant constrution in human history to extrapolate an argument. Really fairly done.
Japan builds them in 3 years. USA took about the same during the heights of its use.
>Great comparison to use the most delayed neuclear power plant constrution in human history to extrapolate an argument. Really fairly done.
Not as unfair as disregarding my points entirely just because I used the latest reactor built in europe as an example. ;-)
We can use Hinkley point C instead?
When Hinkley point C is completed, estimated 2029 at the earliest, it will have taken 12 years and will produce as much electricity per year as the solar panels installed in Germany last year. And those panels are already producing, now.
Hinkley point C is estimated to cost 44 bn euros by 2029, and it will still cost money after that of course, for maintenance and operations.
If that money had been spent on battery storage for solar instead, the UK might have gotten way more energy at a way lower cost per GWh, and they would have had it _already now_.
When they are in place, battery banks and solar panels have a basically negligible maintenance cost compared to a nuclear plant. Its an investment where you pay upfront and get benefits down the line.
I don't see how nations that wait 10 years for 2-3 GW of nuclear will be competitive in any energy-consuming endeavor against countries that add 40-50GW of solar every year.
4 replies →
> Japan builds them in 3 years
Japan hasn't built a new nuclear plant in 20 years.
And at night, nuclear power plants produce infinitely more power than solar. Same during winter months.
Solar simply can't work alone for northern countries without insane amount of batteries. We're talking about having a MONTH of supply in reserve for Germany. It's probably even worse for Finland.
Nuclear fuel is cheap, if you can somehow reduce the capital costs associated with building them, they are a good base load solution. Couple them with hydro storage and you have the ability to deal with demand spikes. I don’t think China is going to stop investing in nuclear or solar anytime soon.
This comparison makes no sense at all since both factors: the huge delays for nuclear and small delays for solar are direct results of policy. So countries going for nuclear will do the going by removing those hurdles
>This comparison makes no sense at all since both factors: the huge delays for nuclear and small delays for solar are direct results of policy
It's not policy it's physical logistics. Just building the roads to the site where you want the nuclear plant takes months and it's hard to transport anything else to the site before you have those.
You also need to sign thousands of workers who need to be physically on location, meaning you need housing, parking, plumbing, salary administrators, doctors, catering, janitors etc.
Solar is entirely trivial by comparison. Any small town has enough carpenters and electricians to assemble megawatts of capacity in weeks. Which is why it grows so much faster than anything else.
I would add that also a lot of solar power is funded by small capital (homeowners). There is no real way for small capital holders to fund and gain profits from nuclear energy, and installing wind or water turbines are not realistic at 99% of homes.
Question to you. Why do you think Olkiluoto 1&2 took 5 and 7 years to build instead of 18?
Nobody is arguing anyone should build reactors the way Olkiluoto 3 was built.
>Question to you. Why do you think Olkiluoto 1&2 took 5 and 7 years to build instead of 18?
I can only speculate, but I suppose two major reasons could be that Europe had several companies that could and did build reactors back then, and that o1 and o2 were much smaller than o3.
O1 and o2 were also built before we knew about things like Chernobyl and 9/11 of course.
>Countries going for nuclear will wait decades to get the same power that solar can add in weeks.
And it will last 80 years, day and night. Solar can give you what, 20 or 25 years and 12 hours each day? And China can't hamstring your country either by just refusing to sell you more solar panels. There is almost certainly a place for photovoltaic in a nation's power grid as a sidekick to some other more serious technology.
>For nighttime use dirt-cheap batteries and
Also made in China.
Sorry if I'm mistaken but I reckon solar panels (and especially batteries) produce much more waste. Also they require vast areas for the same energy. You should keep all the variables in the equation and not just say how quickly you can dish out some panels.
Probably not reliable but this is what ChatGPT outputs over 100 years, assuming equal output (100 TWh total):
I still dream of a future where nuclear batteries can be fitted in every item that needs it, but we can't get there without development. There's only so much energy a square meter of panels can output.
I want to highlight two things as counterarguments - 1) nuclear waste is not comparable with solar panel waste and 2) Land use for solar is not comparable with land use for nuclear.
Solar panel waste does not require army supervision to prevent it being used for terrorist acts. The US army has personell permanently stationed at plants that have been closed for several decades by now. They keep costing money for decades after they stopped producing any power.
As of 2025 there isn't a single nuclear site that has ever been in operation that has stopped costing money for the population of the country it is in, simply because of the waste. And there is no end in sight.
As for land, solar panels are usually deployed on land that can still be used for other things. (Rooftops of homes and office buildings, grazing grounds for sheep and farmland for crops that need shade).
The last point is of course why many countries have been able to deploy solar that matches the output of their nuclear generation in just a few years. You have hundreds of thousands of carpenters and electricians that can work simultaneously on building solar panel installations and they get approved by homeowners without any bureaucracy.
Looking at China, the US, the EU, Japan and even a nuclear pioneer like Canada, you see that Solar adds the equivalent of several new nuclear power plants per year, and the power is available immediately.
The only argument with merit is that nuclear works at night and during winter - but so do many other things, much cheaper things, things that don't take a decade+ to build and don't require eternal expensive vigilance.
"Waste" is a nebulous term; it usually means "is not currently recycled". But you can't build a waste-recycling industry until after there's lots of waste to recycle, for simple economics of scale. Using waste as a justification to not build new stuff is just stupid.
Batteries especially are just absurd - they're ~10% lithium (and it's mostly in the electrolyte, which realistically means the electrolyte is 100% electrolyte, excuse the tautology), whereas 'lithium ore' is mostly 1-3% (there's some higher, even as high as 8%, but it's mostly 1-3% IIRC). With sufficient scale, that stuff will disappear like scrap copper left on the curb for an hour.
Make nuclear cost-competitive and people will start building it.
Nuclear is cost competitive if you have a reliable cadence of building plants and if folks get out of the way of location permits and waste storage and people can actually make decisions about them without endless debates and lawsuits. The problem is one-off designs and the decades long gap between project inception and when investment returns start coming in. As opposed to solar where I could order a few panels and accessories online and start producing energy within a week. Obviously larger solar projects take more planning but if you've got a roof, a credit card, and an electrician on hand you can start producing electricity or expand your production in a very short time achieving break even in a few years.
I thought it was cost-competitive with something on the scale of mega-dams and takes about as long to finish too. Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
> Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major problem.
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The unit economics of dams get more and more competitive when their size increase.
So, hell no, nuclear is not competitive with mega-dams. It's not even competitive with small dams.
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It was cost-competitive before it faced ridiculously unfair regulations due to being so easy to fear-monger about.
There is a finite amount of hydro in the world. They will run out of viable dam locations pretty quickly at this rate.
All the good sites were used by 1940.
The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case.
Most later dams are at worse sites.
In which continent?
For the curious:
Cadillac Desert is a great history of American dam building and the Bureau of Reclamation
Except now thanks to climate change the water levels might drop below the intake in lake Mead. Lake Powell is even worse, Glenn canyon dam was always a mistake, and it might stop producing power next year.
Tidal, on the other hand, still has plenty of opportunities.
The nuclear industry was destroyed in the 2000s. You can try to rebuild an industry with 100s of billions of dollars…
… or you invest that money into renewables and battery technology.
$80B is buying 40MW of hydro. What would that get you for nuclear? 4MW?
Looks like at least 30GW
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Without flooding enormous ecosystems and disrupting river flows, and on average half the CO2 emissions per unit of generation than hydro has, and a staggeringly lower land use per energy footprint (hydro is 100x larger, wind is 10x larger). Nuclear seems like one of the only sane choices from an environmental point of view.
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If we use Vogtle as a cost benchmark you'd get roughly 5 GW (note you typo'd units to MW).
Given these projects will be overseas we shouldn’t use the extreme outlier of Vogtle in the US as the benchmark.
It’s 40GW of hydro
Nuclear just isn't economically viable. Maybe fusion someday.
> isn't economically viable
That is not an intrinsic truth. We have chosen to make it economically unviable.
Most things get cheaper to build with time. Nuclear is an outlier where it used to be affordable and now it isn’t. That’s insane.
Nuclear has never been particularly affordable. It's always been more expensive than coal or gas, even in France in the 70s-80s and China in the 2010s.
Here's how much it cost to build nuclear in France during its golden age: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs. Adjust for inflation and draw your own conclusion.
China's nuclear costs are more opaque, but are estimated at $3B per GW. Again, not competitive.
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why is it different like that?
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Tell that to China
China has been building them at a relatively lukewarm pace compared to its solar and wind expansion
> China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...