I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Are you serious when putting France in this list? Nuclear is such a cash cow here that EDF manage to make profits even while being forced by the regulator to sell a big fraction of its nuclear capacity below the operating cost and buying it back to them at market price! (We're talking about a multi-billon subsidies scheme, look for ARENH).
And that is despite (rather legitimate IMHO) regulatory constraints that have no equivalent in any other industry.
Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
If the nuclear power would not be profitable, then Germany would not have push nuclear phaseout through parliament in 2002. (Law: "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity")
The German nuclear phaseout, had as side effect a national security issue, increased dependence on Russian natural gas.
Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).
The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
So profitable yes. Would the owners/investors have made more money if they just bought random stocks based on some index? Probably. But not a loss.
Technically as a Mankala principle company TVO will never make any profit or loss. Profit here is some imaginary “how much money would they have made if the energy was sold directly to the nord pool”
I’m curious why profitability is the concern here? I was under the impression that abundant clean energy would be of higher concern than profitability of energy companies - unless you mean that profitability concerns will reduce the willingness to invest and develop more nuclear?
I guess we could argue that these sorts of operations should be state owned?
Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?
China is the only country on Earth that I would trust to build, manage and maintain nuclear power plants.
The point you're touching on is that nuclear power is expensive, so much so that not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the world without significant government subsidies. And even then the LCOE cost is basically the highest amongst all electricity sources. And it only gets that "low" by them pushing out the lifetime of the power plant, at least on paper, to 60 years.
As an example, Hinkley Point-C ("HPC") has that 60 year lifespan, a cost that has doubled since it was approved and a contracted electricity cost that is among the highest in Europe but I believe that contracted price only lasts 35 years. So what happens then? Likely because of increased costs of plant maintenance the costs are going to go way up.
But back to China. China is building over 30 nuclear reactors currently. It has largely standardized on two designs (rather than a unique design for each site). It owns the supply chain and the IP. And each project is getting cheap credit from the state (under 2%). All of this is going to make the end result far more cost competitive.
I cannot stress enough how much standardization matters here and China has proved this time and time again, for example with trains (both long-distance and for metros). A time-consuming and expensive part of any large capital project is procurement. Every city in the West that wants to build light rail has to put out RFPs for the rolling stock. That process is time-consuming and you get no economy of scale. China basically says "this is what you're using" and it saves years and billions off any project. As an example, there are cities in China that had no metro system 20 years ago that now rank in the 10 largest metro systems in the world by track length, number of stations and ridership.
Any private nuclear power plant in the West is going to try to raise profits by cutting maintenance. We see this with every private utility in the US. Even with oversight by the NRC, the NRC itself is subject to budget cuts.
There are large, unsolved problems with all of this too. Processing the fuel, processing the spent fuel and the transportation and storage of spent fuel are all unsolved problems, despite what the pro-nuclear crowd like to say.
China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…
…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.
If your trying to argue that 417 operating reactors and 377 GW of operating nuclear capacity at end-2024, producing roughly 2,600–2,700 TWh/year, about 9% of global electricity isn't profitable at all and that somehow all that money is just lit on fire not generating profit/value? Bold claim -- the ecosystem is about $300-500 B/year globally per isn't profitable?
How can the scientific progress of developing nuclear power + medical isotopes and the entire value chain associated with that development, incredibly long lived assets, nuclear fuel development not have been profitable? The fact that you have baseload generation that supports the entire grid?
What part of the equation are you talking about - at what part of the project life cycle? Are you trying to say they were built and weren't profitable the minute the switch turned on?
I agree with the sentiment of your post. In short: "I'll believe it when then finally build and operate one."
About decommission: (segway first) When the United States Navy decommissions nuclear submarines (and there are a lot!), they basically chop out the nuclear reactor whole, then seal in a giant steel box, and bury it in an open trench. It called "Trench 94" at Hanford Site, Washington (state). You can read about it here[1]. The photos are weirdly dystopian. You can also see it on Google Maps here[2].
How do small modular reactors (SMRs) plan to decommission? Can they follow a similar route as the US Navy? Honestly, I don't know if the size is comparable, or if "sealed in a big steel box" will also work for SMRs.
Profit is the best way to measure that economic outputs exceed economic inputs, which is the whole point. But profit doesn't work so well as a measure when the outputs are hard to measure per individual beneficiary. Inputs are generally always pretty clearly measurable, but outputs aren't always, as in the case of roads and bridges - although even there often you can.
Electricity is super-duper easy to measure the individual benefits of, so profit is a really simple and easy way to measure the overall effective economic benefit. It's not perfect though - there are external costs to consider which aren't paid for directly, but we have lots of experience with that across all sorts of industries and usually solve for that via taxes and regulation, which become part of the profit equation.
Most electricity and infrastructure is profitable. But not after carving it out in a way that looks at it in complete isolation. Just like train infrastructure creates a lot of business around the area of the train infrastructure, even if the train itself may seem not self sustained.
I'm fairly sure that the total economic value that we get out of roads far exceeds the cost it takes to create and maintain them, yes. A similar argument can probably be made for justice systems and armies.
If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.
Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?
There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.
Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.
Not sure about profitable but the lower the cost is the generate electricity, the better off the world will be. Cracking energy is, to state the obvious, a huge unlock.
Yeah but we are su subsidizing so much stupid stuff in the world, that dont need to be. Safe and clean energy is on top of my list of things i am very much ok with.
In France, which has the most nuclearized electricity, 13% of the electricity bill is actually a tax to finance the subsidies to solar and wind power plants.
Nuclear is highly profitable, if you compare prices for 24x7 electricity (i.e., if comparing with solar, factor in the cost of energy storage at grid scale, or separate power generators able to provide for peak demand).
Does it need to be profitable without subsidies? Governments run a lot of stuff at a loss as a service to citizens. For instance highways, trains, post offices etc.
Where is most of that future power going? Where are those power plants going to be installed? What need does those particular nuclear reactors would fill?
Do not get me wrong: I am not anti-nuclear per-se, but my main concern is that it would have made sense to have a long term strategy including phasing out of nuclear not directly shutting down in the 90's as the Italian did, but progressive phase out with upgrades to existing plants... Now it seems to be going a bit backwards.
Also, to contrast and put in context, in Belgium, Nuclear power plants were build by the state and therefore paid by the tax payers, raising taxes in order to afford them. The underpinning idea was that you pay a bit more and then once paid off you can get cheap energy.
This is not what happened, the power plants got privatised and the gains went to the new operators, leaving tax payers with the bill...
Yes, because profitable enterprises are able to grow faster than unprofitable ones. If you think something is good, and want more of it, making it profitable is conducive to your goals.
Also, dealing with the nuclear waste can be problematic. Even if you recycle it like France, it still costs to re-enrich it and still produces waste itself.
SMR makes no sense. It never did. It's a program to fuel academic empire-building and to siphon government money in the form of research grants and investment.
You see this pattern a lot in academia. Education is a great example. We know what works when, for example, it comes to teaching literacy. It's phonics. But over the past few decades we had a fad with "sight words". The evidence has come in that this has been a disaster. So why did it happen? Because nobody is going to get prestige in their education PhD by pushing an existing idea. They're incentivized to reinvent that wheel to shape themselves as an expert in the new wave.
That's exactly how SMR came about. It takes the idea of scaling by going small and repeating what you're doing rather than doing what you actually need to do and that is to standardize large designs. Larger reactors are just more efficient and that's physics.
I bet I could come back to HN in 10 years and SMR will still be exactly nowhere yet people will still be promising a bright future for it.
That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.
In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.
Nuclear power is not a renewable power source in the technical correct meaning of the word. Fission material is "only" abundant, in that we can win nuclear fission material from many sources, including recycling spent nuclear material, but it is not available and spent without human intervention (otherwise we could argue fossil fuels are renewables, too).
As an aside, nuclear fission power differs from renewable power in many other ways, too. It is not clean, it is not easy to harvest, it is not safe, it is not cheap, it is not a mass job engine, it is not low-maintenance, it has less utility, and it has less flexibility.
That's why I think lifters are really the only true path to cost reasonable nuclear power... They "burn" almost all fuel and have separation procedures for the other fission products, and I believe they can consume nuclear waste since it's a breeder reactor.
Given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and that the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 fleet are ruinously expensive France is unable to build competitive new nuclear.
In most sunny places a decentralized per-home solar policy is cheap, sustainable, and more robust to severe local weather events.
While fission reactors are still the cheaper initial energy choice (like a future cancer patients love of cheap cigarettes.) Small Modular reactors are a fools errand for most places, as they have all the same security, labor, and maintenance issues of full sized installations. Thus, instead of repairing one of four turbines every few years, the contaminated components must now be reprocessed or safely hidden away on mass.
Maybe fine for submarines or aircraft carriers, but for massive infrastructure it is trivial to prove it causes major long-term problems.
Anyone that has ever purchased a property with an old leaky heating-oil tank nasty surprise site-reclamation cost... will understand the initial unit price never covers the actual clean up cost. =3
Solar and wind aren’t profitable either if you count the entire lifecycle including bill of materials, production, transportation, maintenance, and teardown for replacement.
At least it is greener and cheaper. Especially Solar cells have become incredibly cheap now. Combined with battery storage, it's far safer and cheaper than nuclear.
And in a territory affected from seismic activities, I would avoid nuclear at all
> France and Switzerland shut down nuclear power plants amid scorching heatwave
Spain's reactors were fine. Regulations of cooling water discharge temperature are what are limiting the reactor output. Adding cooling towers to the power stations leads to a poorer condenser vacuum than river water, reducing electrical output by a few percent, but still a possibility. Whether it is economically worthwhile to retrofit cooling towers is another question.
The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.
As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
It doesn’t matter what you think. What does the data tell us?
Won’t it also take decades and cost billions to roll out renewables to the extend that they can even put a dent in total energy usage? So I don’t see how that is even an argument.
It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
For a point of comparison, I understand the Fukushima plant survived the mag 9 earthquake just fine - but got damaged by the ensuing tsunami. Specifically, the water flooded the diesel generators for emergency cooling - and it went downhill from there.
Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?
Just like with skyscrapers in Taiwan, we can and have built earthquake-resistant nuclear power plants before. Fukushima only failed due to the tsunami water shorting transmission lines and the emergency generators. It withstood the earthquake itself fine.
wow, seems like Italy and Turkey are few places where you _would not_ want to go back to nuclear. Wild. I guess the old geezers approving this wouldn't even live to see the first meltdown anyway.
Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.
The German study is not undisputed, but the opposing side was funded by nuclear industry, while the original study was done by insurance providers and aligns with the Japanese results.
Neither study considered terror, or hybrid warfare as additional risks.
Given the amount of sabotage we see in Europe at the moment, premiums would probably be even higher.
Are large hydro dams insured for the total costs of catastrophic flood event?
A typical third-party liability insurance cap for large hydroelectric dams ranges from $50 million to $100 million per occurrence, with major facilities stacking excess liability layers well beyond that.
Dam failures can cause very large costs. The 2015 Fundão tailings dam breach:
"
On 25 October 2024, mining companies BHP and Vale signed an agreement with the Brazilian government to pay nearly US$30 billion in compensation over the Mariana Dam collapse. The terms include $18 billion in funding for public authorities and $5.6 billion in additional compensation, resettlement, and environment restoration.
"
1975 Banqiao Dam failure, Deaths 26,000–240,000. Property damage: 62 dams collapsed, more than 5 million houses collapsed, 10.75 million people affected
For sabotage in Europe, I would be much more worry about security of hydro dams, chemical facilities and water supply. They are much more weakly protected then nuclear power plants.
In Germany liability was covering 2.5bn+ full assets of owners. I still find it funny how germans are concerned about nuclear when each 2y the same nr of ppl die as total estimation for Chernobyl (if we assume LNT is correct at low dosages). Yet nobody demands full cars ban. Even funnier considering Germany is still burning coal and approved subsidies for new gas peakers
Your document shows 10.9 ct/kWh normalised production cost for 2025 (roughly double the ~5 ct of a normal year, because the plant was offline half the year). That shows how exposed such a plant is when it's offline; and running an existing, paid-off plant built in the 1970s, like the one you linked, is a very different thing from building a new one today.
Burning coal sure is stupid, but so is being stuck in the outdated idea that we need either coal or nuclear for baseload. Solar, wind and storage are much cheaper, more flexible and far faster to build (a year or two, not 15+). IMO that's a much better answer than starting some SMR pipe dream now. 10 or 20 years ago it would have been different, but there's no point clinging to a solution just because it made sense back then, and was rejected for the wrong reasons.
From google translate
"""
Depending on the probability of such an event occurring, the annual premium varies between €0.01 and €305.83, based on a mean total insured sum of approximately €6,090 billion. If the entire insured sum were to be provided over a period of 100 years, the annual insurance premium per nuclear power plant would amount to €19.5 billion.
"""
No mention where the 6.09T EUR (presumably 2011) cost comes from. Given the stated insurance premium of 19.5B EUR power station per year I would naively expect such a cataclysm to happen perhaps once every 300 years. The global reactor fleet has been running for at least 19,000 years (https://www.ans.org/cdn/policy/statements/docs/ps51.pdf); the two IAEA INES level 7 accidents relating to nuclear power stations were Chernobyl and Fukushima, and cost nothing like 6T EUR. Therefore the numbers in the insurance study do not align with what is observed.
In my opinion the best argument for nuclear power is not money, but environmental.
The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But also: What is the cost of non-nuclear's raising of co2 levels and climate change?
The environmental argument would be to reduce coal as quickly as possible.
Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.
I agree with everything you said but want to add some more about the Price-Anderson Act. It does a few things:
1. It caps the liability for an incident at a single reactor. It goes up with inflation and I believe it's currently $500 million;
2. It establishes an industry-wide secondary self-insurance fund for broader incidents and caps liability. I believe the current theoretical value is $15-20 billion; and
3. In the event of a wider incident, the per-reactor liability cap is lower than (1). I believe it's $150 million.
So who pays if an incident exceeds these caps? The government does. These are either entirely or largely privately owned. Why exactly are we subsidizing private providers this way while enjoying none of the profits?
Now go and look at the cleanup costs of either Chernobyl or Fukushima. The latter is going to take decades, possibly a century, and the costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Chernobyl is probably higher.
Yet these get hand-waved away by nuclear advocates despite there being 2 major events when fewer than 700 nuclear plants have been built (and I believe that includes non-power plants).
It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?
It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.
This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.
> certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.
> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.
The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).
So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.
>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,
That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.
The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.
Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
>t's that or buying gas from Russia.
Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.
And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?
Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.
It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.
To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.
> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment
... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;
3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);
4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;
5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;
6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;
7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;
8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;
9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";
10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and
11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.
We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.
I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.
I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.
Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
> It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.
People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.
That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.
Time and demographics are also a component. Italy is old, has worker shortages for living wage work (and is currently issuing ~500k work visas over three years to attract labor to the market), and a new nuclear generator takes at least ten years to build. Each year, an additional 1TW of solar will be deployed globally. Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled.
Nuclear power plants are uninsurable in the private market. There is no natural investor base for a product that is uninsurable. Unless you are an imagining a culture war where real capitalists are fighting corporate welfare queens, it's not a culture war issue.
>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.
>The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.
Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.
I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?
I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.
Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.
In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.
This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.
I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.
Italian here. I seriously doubt this thing will lead anywhere. If something slightly more concrete than this will appear, there will be an insurrection. NIMBY is very strong in Italy (after decades of attempts, we are still without a spent fuel depot for this reason).
Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way. As soon as popular opposition will manifest, the politicians will forget the whole issue.
“Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way.”
Public opinion can change very quickly, and it usually it does not need to change significantly to have a big impact (see Brexit).
40 years ago public opinion was heavily influenced by the Chernobyl disaster, the last major nuclear accident (Fukushima) happened 15 years ago and it is quite far from memory.
Much more pressing matters today are energy costs and independence, so I expect a new referendum would have at the very least a much closer outcome.
To be fair, the referendums for Nuclear were so poorly timed. Just after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I don't know if this was a deliberate choice of the governments leading the country those years (the tinfoil hat in me can see big oil pushing for those referendums at those particular times) or pure bad luck. Anyway, public opinion was highly biased which led to "No" winning with fair margins. With that said, I believe NIMBY is a contributing factor and not the whole explanation.
I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.
nuclear is a great option for ice breakers & submarines.
in a connected grid nuclear cannot economically compete against solar (which pushes the cost of daytime energy to effectively 0€) so it has to be heavily subsided, which raises the cost for everyone. a euro spent on nuclear is a euro not spent on batteries or hydrogen production
>massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather.
Italy has all that right across the pond.
And no energy source can beat solar on the speed of build out. And when it comes to the energy the next few years is all about build out [for AI]. Countries who get it right - like China, look at their solar and new datacenters getting powered by it, may be US if the required thinking wins - are going to lead the world in the near to mid-term future, the rest are going to be struggling seconds.
Building nuclear today in the energy field is like building tanks in military whereis solar is like drones - i.e. we have choice between 2 classic paradigms - very limited vertical scalability with extremely costly units vs. unlimited horizontal scalability of extremely cheap units.
I doubt that number but it would be an improvement: the MW in Italy is far beyond 200 USD/MW in wholesole market.
Btw, it is not completely about price/MW but it is also about sovereignty and... No, there is no U mines in Italy but a commodity market is much more managable than the oil market.
That's about half of the average cost right [1], so literally it will make electricity cheaper. Also, it will be cost that will not go up willy nilly when someone decides to do something absolutely stupid
Italy is hugely dependent on natural gas for electricity, so it actually makes economic sense.
South Korea has a lot of nuclear power for related reasons - they can't risk being too dependent on LNG imports, lest some of their more volatile neighbours capture the shipments.
Hopefully Germany will follow next. It’s absurd that they rely on fossil fuel and coal when they can build modern nuclear plants that can provide stable energy for the energy heavy industries.
It would take 5-10 years to build the power plants and maybe with Chinese aid even faster
I don't think that nuclear projects of any size could pass current environmental impact assessments.
Only a severe energy shortage could motivate politicians enough to temporarily skip these, like they did for the LNG terminals. But you can't build a nuclear power plant of any size within a single legislative period so its just not going to happen.
Where in comparable countries (= in europe) did new reactors take less than 10 years (from scratch even)? So we are at at least 10 years. But more realistically, taking recent megaprojects into account, its 20 years. In that time, batteries are way ahead and you can overbuild _so_ _much_ renewables and people even do it without subsidies (strangely, nobody builds nuclear plants without subsidies).
regarding the "stable energy" point: germany has one of the most (if not _the_ most) stable grids in the world and that is even with 50+ % renewables. And given it sits in the center of europe with grid connections all around, it's far cheaper to buy from whomever has the most favourable weather anyways (and sell to them if they don't). Thats why one of the biggest issues right now is not nuclear, but grids.
Partially true, the largest uranium mines are in Canada, Australia and Namibia, but it is a commodity market and it is way more managable than oil market.
Also, you can stock pile uranium and forget about the market for ten years. Oil strategic reservers requires large infrastructures and usually last only few months.
Fun fact: in the 60s Italy was after the US and UK the county with the most advanced nuclear energy plants. These days still North Italy produces key parts of nuclear reactors in other countries.
As an Italian, I know exactly how this playbook plays out.
Nuclear energy is a big business for intimates friends, so on the trend that it's a green tech (apparently no carbn footprint, but what about the depleted fuel?) they approved the reopening of this technology.
Why going for SMR?
Well, it's the penalties business model and SMR is ideal because they are on paper, no valid proven commercial implementation.
A company wins the contract, in this case i'm not sure if they'll go for a open bid, the contract include research, design, building and so on. At some point the political wind changes, contract canceled and hundreds of milions in contractual penalties to pay. It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends, with zero obligation to ever break ground.
It's from 19th century that they are thinking about a bridge between Sicily and mainland. The last time the project was revived, the playbook went exactly as described above: years of studies, cancellation and massive state penalties paid out to contractors for a bridge that still doesn't exist (Sicily and mainland are on different tectonic plates).
No mention there is no national deposit for nuclear waste, especially in a highly sismic territory.
>It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends,
I agree completely and would go so far as to claim that presently in 2026 that money-transfer mechanism is the real motivation for any nuclear project in any country. Renewable options are the better path now from a technical point, but politicians and their buddies can't easily make as much money from that.
In the current landscape—with the costs of solar and wind power steadily falling and storage technologies emerging, driven by the expansion of electric vehicles—I really don't know what kind of commercial future nuclear energy has (in terms of delivering lower energy costs).
Brace yourself, every large nuclear accident has been preceded by the Italian considering nuclear again. (Well at least Tchornobyl and Fukushima, ”which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice”)
Has there been a single SMR deployed and working yet? There were lots of talk about GE BWRX-300 and Rolls Royce SMR but none of them seems to have even started construction.
This is somewhat strange. Italy has a lot of sun, and a lot of mountains for these pumped storage hydropower plants. It is way harder to store output from PV on Great European Plain.
I wonder how much of a factor is that nuclear plants are effectively "unbombable". Ukraine's thermal plants have taken a beating, but their nuclear plants are still generating.
Good luck with that. No problem with investing some money , but it has to be commercially viable first and recent Western projects all over the globe have not instilled any confidence in that.
If a power source is profitable on its own, it can be financed by private investors. If it is unprofitable, it needs to be financed at least in part by the state, so it would come at the cost of the taxpayer.
"I'm virtue signaling because I'm Pro nuclear yes it's a luxury belief you're promoting something nuclear power is a luxury belief you heard it here first because they're going to put these things in poor communities and so it's never going to affect your life they're putting them next to Data Center in like Oregon like it's easy for you to say oh I support nuclear look how Progressive I am look how smart I am you haven't internalized the downsides [...]"
Looking at the top comments in this thread claiming a bunch of false things I see HN is essentially fully captured by anti-progress populism at this point.
It’s sad to see, for a former community of “hackers.”
I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.
I just don't get people saying how terrible climate change is going to be for the world and then refuses to support nuclear.
If climate change is such a critical problem, then let's try everything to get this solved even if it costs more to do it. If you are only willing to do some solutions because it is cheaper then I don't believe you when you say it is important to solve.
And frankly, we don't know the full impact of climate change, so having as many alternatives as possible just makes sense. Hydro can be impacted by droughts which will be more common. Solar may be impacted if there are increased storms. Wind may be impacted due to stilling (slowing of wind due to an increase in co2).
Why not throw nuclear into the mix to ensure we do not run out of power?
Most of the environmentalists will tell you that it's dumb to shut down nuclear, but building new plants just takes too long and is too expensive. Why then not just put the money into things that are cheap now and will get even cheaper tomorrow?
Hedging against downtime is comparatively easy, just diversify by location and improve the grid, which is way less expensive than building out power plants.
Every source of power has pros and cons. They all have risks and benefits.
If there is a push to do a specific clean energy I think we should go for it regardless of the cost. If you think the climate issue is going to be a very severe issue then you should take every option at our disposal and encourage every push for an alternative to fossil fuels. Since you are refusing this, then I assume you don't think it is severe.
Large countries may be able to hedge against downtime, but smaller countries can't. Also, like I said, we don't really know the impact of all of this which is why we should diversify as much as possible. One of those diversifications should be nuclear as well as solar, wind, and hydro.
Always funny to see how plutonium pilled hn is. Nuclear power in Italy is idiotic. They won't even be able to cool the damn reactors. Europe is drying out.
the Mediterranean has dried up several times in history and it will dry up again, as the African continent collides with Europe. Currently, water flows in at Gibraltar with a very strong current to try to keep up with evaporation, making the Mediterranean saltier and saltier (than the Atlantic) over time. When the strait closes because Africa and Spain push together, the Meditteranean will very quickly dry up.
We are currently running nuclear at a capacity factor of around 91% in the US. Solar is somewhere around 24%.
1GW at noon vs 1GW forever. The area under the curve is what matters. Not the peak of the curve.
How much more would you be willing to spend to get 4x the nameplate capacity and to also get it whenever you need it?
The economics of a single plant are irrelevant in comparison to the requirements of the grid that it operates within. If someone could invent a source of power that magically scales exactly with the duck curve in Texas, I guarantee that would fetch a premium on the market, even if other economic characteristics are not competitive.
The solution to nuclear is to standardize the design and deployment process. France has demonstrated it can be done. Perhaps their engineers should be in charge of some new global standards body.
I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Profitable compared to what, that provides base load?
If energy prices are too high, industry suffers. If you let the price rise, maybe China just eats your lunch.
What's the option value vs risk of gas price rises? Gas sets the marginal price of electricity in Italy today for 60% of the year [1]
[1] https://www.terna.it/DesktopModules/AdactoBackend/API/direct... "However, the electricity system remains significantly exposed to gas price volatility, which in 2024 determined electricity prices for more than 60% of the hours."
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> country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA
Are you serious when putting France in this list? Nuclear is such a cash cow here that EDF manage to make profits even while being forced by the regulator to sell a big fraction of its nuclear capacity below the operating cost and buying it back to them at market price! (We're talking about a multi-billon subsidies scheme, look for ARENH).
And that is despite (rather legitimate IMHO) regulatory constraints that have no equivalent in any other industry.
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Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
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That... doesn't seem true?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.
Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.
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Profit is not everything.
> That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Spot on. That, plus... peak oil.
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If the nuclear power would not be profitable, then Germany would not have push nuclear phaseout through parliament in 2002. (Law: "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity")
The German nuclear phaseout, had as side effect a national security issue, increased dependence on Russian natural gas.
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Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).
The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
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>I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable.
This is comparing to the base case of fossil fuels. But those have tremendous negative consequences.
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But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
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Why does it have to be profitable? Not everything is a publicly traded company with quarterly earnings reports.
You do things with it's output that are profitable instead.
TVO in Finland seems to have managed that.
https://www.tvo.fi/material/sites/tvo/sijoittajasivut/pwmzkr...
So profitable yes. Would the owners/investors have made more money if they just bought random stocks based on some index? Probably. But not a loss.
Technically as a Mankala principle company TVO will never make any profit or loss. Profit here is some imaginary “how much money would they have made if the energy was sold directly to the nord pool”
I’m curious why profitability is the concern here? I was under the impression that abundant clean energy would be of higher concern than profitability of energy companies - unless you mean that profitability concerns will reduce the willingness to invest and develop more nuclear?
I guess we could argue that these sorts of operations should be state owned?
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And you're basically telling bullshit. French nuclear is profitable and made profits pretty much every single yearexcept 2022. Swiss data is open too https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
Such statements can come either from ignorance or malice
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And I’d argue if you’re saying we need to take complete end to end costs into account, oil isn’t profitable either.
If oil companies are ever on the hook for climate change, the bill will be measured in trillions.
no country had made road or water profitable either
This is false. Nuclear power plants are very profitable, if streamline the regulations that are choking them to death with bureaucracy and no safety.
Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?
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I am not sure what you mean by profitable here?
I am generally of the opinion that nuclear power is not justified on the basis of base economics.
But I thought South Korea made a good swing at it, but I haven't kept up on things much
China is the only country on Earth that I would trust to build, manage and maintain nuclear power plants.
The point you're touching on is that nuclear power is expensive, so much so that not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the world without significant government subsidies. And even then the LCOE cost is basically the highest amongst all electricity sources. And it only gets that "low" by them pushing out the lifetime of the power plant, at least on paper, to 60 years.
As an example, Hinkley Point-C ("HPC") has that 60 year lifespan, a cost that has doubled since it was approved and a contracted electricity cost that is among the highest in Europe but I believe that contracted price only lasts 35 years. So what happens then? Likely because of increased costs of plant maintenance the costs are going to go way up.
But back to China. China is building over 30 nuclear reactors currently. It has largely standardized on two designs (rather than a unique design for each site). It owns the supply chain and the IP. And each project is getting cheap credit from the state (under 2%). All of this is going to make the end result far more cost competitive.
I cannot stress enough how much standardization matters here and China has proved this time and time again, for example with trains (both long-distance and for metros). A time-consuming and expensive part of any large capital project is procurement. Every city in the West that wants to build light rail has to put out RFPs for the rolling stock. That process is time-consuming and you get no economy of scale. China basically says "this is what you're using" and it saves years and billions off any project. As an example, there are cities in China that had no metro system 20 years ago that now rank in the 10 largest metro systems in the world by track length, number of stations and ridership.
Any private nuclear power plant in the West is going to try to raise profits by cutting maintenance. We see this with every private utility in the US. Even with oversight by the NRC, the NRC itself is subject to budget cuts.
There are large, unsolved problems with all of this too. Processing the fuel, processing the spent fuel and the transportation and storage of spent fuel are all unsolved problems, despite what the pro-nuclear crowd like to say.
This is wrong, Germanies Konvoi where immensely profitable. The greens complained about these as money printing machines.
Yes, while we’re looking at expenses, add the military to oil.
What exactly does it mean for a powerplan in china or russia to be profitable?
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China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…
…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.
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why is profit the right descriptor?
wouldnt you instead count the net benefits to the whole economy from having that cheap and plentiful electricity?
This statement is kind of wild.
If your trying to argue that 417 operating reactors and 377 GW of operating nuclear capacity at end-2024, producing roughly 2,600–2,700 TWh/year, about 9% of global electricity isn't profitable at all and that somehow all that money is just lit on fire not generating profit/value? Bold claim -- the ecosystem is about $300-500 B/year globally per isn't profitable?
How can the scientific progress of developing nuclear power + medical isotopes and the entire value chain associated with that development, incredibly long lived assets, nuclear fuel development not have been profitable? The fact that you have baseload generation that supports the entire grid?
What part of the equation are you talking about - at what part of the project life cycle? Are you trying to say they were built and weren't profitable the minute the switch turned on?
Off topic, but this guy on youtube is a knowledgeable (pro-nuke) resource.
https://www.youtube.com/@tfolsenuclear
I agree with the sentiment of your post. In short: "I'll believe it when then finally build and operate one."
About decommission: (segway first) When the United States Navy decommissions nuclear submarines (and there are a lot!), they basically chop out the nuclear reactor whole, then seal in a giant steel box, and bury it in an open trench. It called "Trench 94" at Hanford Site, Washington (state). You can read about it here[1]. The photos are weirdly dystopian. You can also see it on Google Maps here[2].
How do small modular reactors (SMRs) plan to decommission? Can they follow a similar route as the US Navy? Honestly, I don't know if the size is comparable, or if "sealed in a big steel box" will also work for SMRs.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a46065875/trench-9...
[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/JJSQXzdiA4qTyYZt5
Why does electricity need to be profitable? Are roads, justice systems, or armies profitable?
Profit is the best way to measure that economic outputs exceed economic inputs, which is the whole point. But profit doesn't work so well as a measure when the outputs are hard to measure per individual beneficiary. Inputs are generally always pretty clearly measurable, but outputs aren't always, as in the case of roads and bridges - although even there often you can.
Electricity is super-duper easy to measure the individual benefits of, so profit is a really simple and easy way to measure the overall effective economic benefit. It's not perfect though - there are external costs to consider which aren't paid for directly, but we have lots of experience with that across all sorts of industries and usually solve for that via taxes and regulation, which become part of the profit equation.
Most electricity and infrastructure is profitable. But not after carving it out in a way that looks at it in complete isolation. Just like train infrastructure creates a lot of business around the area of the train infrastructure, even if the train itself may seem not self sustained.
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I'm fairly sure that the total economic value that we get out of roads far exceeds the cost it takes to create and maintain them, yes. A similar argument can probably be made for justice systems and armies.
If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.
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Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?
There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.
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It does not. But there are so many sources that can be. And easily at that. So why go this route?
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Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.
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Not sure about profitable but the lower the cost is the generate electricity, the better off the world will be. Cracking energy is, to state the obvious, a huge unlock.
Because in their wisdom the politicians have created energy markets.
The costs for generating electricity needs to be paid for somehow.
Having the consumers of the electricity pay for has a lot of advantages!
Yeah but we are su subsidizing so much stupid stuff in the world, that dont need to be. Safe and clean energy is on top of my list of things i am very much ok with.
So you won't mind if I prefer (some of) my tax dollars go to subsiding reliable energy production.
If safe is your metric, nuclear power kills fewer people than roof top solar.
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oh the irony...
In France, which has the most nuclearized electricity, 13% of the electricity bill is actually a tax to finance the subsidies to solar and wind power plants.
Nuclear is highly profitable, if you compare prices for 24x7 electricity (i.e., if comparing with solar, factor in the cost of energy storage at grid scale, or separate power generators able to provide for peak demand).
Does it need to be profitable without subsidies? Governments run a lot of stuff at a loss as a service to citizens. For instance highways, trains, post offices etc.
Where is most of that future power going? Where are those power plants going to be installed? What need does those particular nuclear reactors would fill?
Do not get me wrong: I am not anti-nuclear per-se, but my main concern is that it would have made sense to have a long term strategy including phasing out of nuclear not directly shutting down in the 90's as the Italian did, but progressive phase out with upgrades to existing plants... Now it seems to be going a bit backwards.
Also, to contrast and put in context, in Belgium, Nuclear power plants were build by the state and therefore paid by the tax payers, raising taxes in order to afford them. The underpinning idea was that you pay a bit more and then once paid off you can get cheap energy.
This is not what happened, the power plants got privatised and the gains went to the new operators, leaving tax payers with the bill...
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Why not subsidizing? What's the problem with that considering both renewables and fossils are subsidized?
Most sound smr is Canadian BWRX which is already under construction
Are fossil fuels net profitable after subsidies, wars, and externalities are considered?
Oh boy, they are sooooo profitable that there are wars around them.
Does it really matter if it's profitable? We're destroying the planet. Heaven forbid we lose money on something that gives us a chance.
Yes, because profitable enterprises are able to grow faster than unprofitable ones. If you think something is good, and want more of it, making it profitable is conducive to your goals.
> without counting subsidies
Every energy industry has subsidies. Believing that one of them should work "without subsidies" simply misses the mark.
Also, dealing with the nuclear waste can be problematic. Even if you recycle it like France, it still costs to re-enrich it and still produces waste itself.
SMR makes no sense. It never did. It's a program to fuel academic empire-building and to siphon government money in the form of research grants and investment.
You see this pattern a lot in academia. Education is a great example. We know what works when, for example, it comes to teaching literacy. It's phonics. But over the past few decades we had a fad with "sight words". The evidence has come in that this has been a disaster. So why did it happen? Because nobody is going to get prestige in their education PhD by pushing an existing idea. They're incentivized to reinvent that wheel to shape themselves as an expert in the new wave.
That's exactly how SMR came about. It takes the idea of scaling by going small and repeating what you're doing rather than doing what you actually need to do and that is to standardize large designs. Larger reactors are just more efficient and that's physics.
I bet I could come back to HN in 10 years and SMR will still be exactly nowhere yet people will still be promising a bright future for it.
Treat power plants as public infrastructure. No need for high returns or insurance of every risk.
That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.
In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.
We’re at the point now where this has to be a problem for the future.
Do you mean nuclear isn't profitable compared to coal, whose costs are externalized, or compared to other renewables?
> other renewables
Nuclear power is not a renewable power source in the technical correct meaning of the word. Fission material is "only" abundant, in that we can win nuclear fission material from many sources, including recycling spent nuclear material, but it is not available and spent without human intervention (otherwise we could argue fossil fuels are renewables, too).
As an aside, nuclear fission power differs from renewable power in many other ways, too. It is not clean, it is not easy to harvest, it is not safe, it is not cheap, it is not a mass job engine, it is not low-maintenance, it has less utility, and it has less flexibility.
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That's why I think lifters are really the only true path to cost reasonable nuclear power... They "burn" almost all fuel and have separation procedures for the other fission products, and I believe they can consume nuclear waste since it's a breeder reactor.
They didn't because the taxpayers will finance that and no politician would be able to sell this.
Yes, it is part of Trump's tariff deals forced on e.g. Japan:
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/us-japan-in-smr-deal/
Italy should be buying proven French technology instead.
Which proven French technology?
Given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and that the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 fleet are ruinously expensive France is unable to build competitive new nuclear.
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In most sunny places a decentralized per-home solar policy is cheap, sustainable, and more robust to severe local weather events.
While fission reactors are still the cheaper initial energy choice (like a future cancer patients love of cheap cigarettes.) Small Modular reactors are a fools errand for most places, as they have all the same security, labor, and maintenance issues of full sized installations. Thus, instead of repairing one of four turbines every few years, the contaminated components must now be reprocessed or safely hidden away on mass.
Maybe fine for submarines or aircraft carriers, but for massive infrastructure it is trivial to prove it causes major long-term problems.
Anyone that has ever purchased a property with an old leaky heating-oil tank nasty surprise site-reclamation cost... will understand the initial unit price never covers the actual clean up cost. =3
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Solar and wind aren’t profitable either if you count the entire lifecycle including bill of materials, production, transportation, maintenance, and teardown for replacement.
At least it is greener and cheaper. Especially Solar cells have become incredibly cheap now. Combined with battery storage, it's far safer and cheaper than nuclear.
And in a territory affected from seismic activities, I would avoid nuclear at all
China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
> France and Switzerland shut down nuclear power plants amid scorching heatwave
Spain's reactors were fine. Regulations of cooling water discharge temperature are what are limiting the reactor output. Adding cooling towers to the power stations leads to a poorer condenser vacuum than river water, reducing electrical output by a few percent, but still a possibility. Whether it is economically worthwhile to retrofit cooling towers is another question.
and for France, we're talking about 6 reactors voluntarily paused, out of 56.
I'm Italian and I'm super happy with this.
The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.
Curiously enough, some Italian town signs still have a small sub-sign reading "denuclearized municipality" (example: https://live.staticflickr.com/1421/712461235_e46a2c7db5_z.jp... )
As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
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I wonder why China has brought 27 nuclear reactors online in the past 10 years, with another 36 actively being developed.
If it's actually inefficient, there's no need to have laws against it.
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The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.
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About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.
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Because both are needed if you don't like gas. Fossils take even more billions so it's ok
Two words: base load
And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)
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Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
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It doesn’t matter what you think. What does the data tell us?
Won’t it also take decades and cost billions to roll out renewables to the extend that they can even put a dent in total energy usage? So I don’t see how that is even an argument.
can you link to data to prove the economics are bad?
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It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
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In my country, we also have a dormant nuclear plant because of Chernobyl and political reasons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/world/asia/philippines-ba...
Where in Italy would you put reactors?
https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-i...
Sardinia?
For a point of comparison, I understand the Fukushima plant survived the mag 9 earthquake just fine - but got damaged by the ensuing tsunami. Specifically, the water flooded the diesel generators for emergency cooling - and it went downhill from there.
Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?
That doesn't look good, and that's before you filter by proximity to a large river (that doesn't run dry in summer).
I would say near Pisa, on the Arno River.
Scroll up. There was one in Trino, Piedmont, which I imagine will be among the first sites to be considered.
Judging from the map, Piedmont, Liguria, Trentino, Tuscany and Basilicata have good sites.
Just like with skyscrapers in Taiwan, we can and have built earthquake-resistant nuclear power plants before. Fukushima only failed due to the tsunami water shorting transmission lines and the emergency generators. It withstood the earthquake itself fine.
wow, seems like Italy and Turkey are few places where you _would not_ want to go back to nuclear. Wild. I guess the old geezers approving this wouldn't even live to see the first meltdown anyway.
I think that there are plenty of blue areas on that map
Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.
we had a referendum in 2011
Right after Fukushima
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People usually do not include the costs of actual insurance into those calculations. If you do you end up with much higher prices per kWh for nuclear.
Additional cost estimate in numbers per kWh
Numbers:
Germany: + 0.139€-2.36 €/kWh
Japan: + $0.22–5.78/kWh
I could not find numbers for the US, but you guys have the Price-Anderson Act that limits the liability of nuclear operators.
Sources:
https://www.versicherungsforen.net/schaden-leistung/berechnu...
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/12/1301
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1082...
The German study is not undisputed, but the opposing side was funded by nuclear industry, while the original study was done by insurance providers and aligns with the Japanese results.
Neither study considered terror, or hybrid warfare as additional risks.
Given the amount of sabotage we see in Europe at the moment, premiums would probably be even higher.
Are large hydro dams insured for the total costs of catastrophic flood event?
A typical third-party liability insurance cap for large hydroelectric dams ranges from $50 million to $100 million per occurrence, with major facilities stacking excess liability layers well beyond that.
Dam failures can cause very large costs. The 2015 Fundão tailings dam breach:
" On 25 October 2024, mining companies BHP and Vale signed an agreement with the Brazilian government to pay nearly US$30 billion in compensation over the Mariana Dam collapse. The terms include $18 billion in funding for public authorities and $5.6 billion in additional compensation, resettlement, and environment restoration. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_dam_disaster#Governmen...
1975 Banqiao Dam failure, Deaths 26,000–240,000. Property damage: 62 dams collapsed, more than 5 million houses collapsed, 10.75 million people affected
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
For sabotage in Europe, I would be much more worry about security of hydro dams, chemical facilities and water supply. They are much more weakly protected then nuclear power plants.
https://www.nrc.gov/regulations-legislation/fact-sheets-broc...
In Ukraine a large dam was destroyed, you can see it from space. Terrible, but things moved on.
Things would not move on as smoothly if Chernobyl containment was bombed.
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No, it's included and is dirt cheap. German nuclear provided for about 5ct/kwh, similar to Switzerland https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... or other countries.
In Germany liability was covering 2.5bn+ full assets of owners. I still find it funny how germans are concerned about nuclear when each 2y the same nr of ppl die as total estimation for Chernobyl (if we assume LNT is correct at low dosages). Yet nobody demands full cars ban. Even funnier considering Germany is still burning coal and approved subsidies for new gas peakers
Your document shows 10.9 ct/kWh normalised production cost for 2025 (roughly double the ~5 ct of a normal year, because the plant was offline half the year). That shows how exposed such a plant is when it's offline; and running an existing, paid-off plant built in the 1970s, like the one you linked, is a very different thing from building a new one today.
Burning coal sure is stupid, but so is being stuck in the outdated idea that we need either coal or nuclear for baseload. Solar, wind and storage are much cheaper, more flexible and far faster to build (a year or two, not 15+). IMO that's a much better answer than starting some SMR pipe dream now. 10 or 20 years ago it would have been different, but there's no point clinging to a solution just because it made sense back then, and was rejected for the wrong reasons.
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> https://www.versicherungsforen.net/schaden-leistung/berechnu...
From google translate """ Depending on the probability of such an event occurring, the annual premium varies between €0.01 and €305.83, based on a mean total insured sum of approximately €6,090 billion. If the entire insured sum were to be provided over a period of 100 years, the annual insurance premium per nuclear power plant would amount to €19.5 billion. """
No mention where the 6.09T EUR (presumably 2011) cost comes from. Given the stated insurance premium of 19.5B EUR power station per year I would naively expect such a cataclysm to happen perhaps once every 300 years. The global reactor fleet has been running for at least 19,000 years (https://www.ans.org/cdn/policy/statements/docs/ps51.pdf); the two IAEA INES level 7 accidents relating to nuclear power stations were Chernobyl and Fukushima, and cost nothing like 6T EUR. Therefore the numbers in the insurance study do not align with what is observed.
And I would question the "accidental" nature of Chernobyl, given than the power plant has voluntarily been pushed out of its boundaries.
...and yes I know, then design flaws stroke. But the initial spark was not accidental at all.
In my opinion the best argument for nuclear power is not money, but environmental.
The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But also: What is the cost of non-nuclear's raising of co2 levels and climate change?
The environmental argument would be to reduce coal as quickly as possible.
Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.
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We also don't factor in a carbon tax for the fossil-fuel power plants.
Yet their CO2 will remain for 10'000 years on the atmosphere, affecting even remote populations.
I agree with everything you said but want to add some more about the Price-Anderson Act. It does a few things:
1. It caps the liability for an incident at a single reactor. It goes up with inflation and I believe it's currently $500 million;
2. It establishes an industry-wide secondary self-insurance fund for broader incidents and caps liability. I believe the current theoretical value is $15-20 billion; and
3. In the event of a wider incident, the per-reactor liability cap is lower than (1). I believe it's $150 million.
So who pays if an incident exceeds these caps? The government does. These are either entirely or largely privately owned. Why exactly are we subsidizing private providers this way while enjoying none of the profits?
Now go and look at the cleanup costs of either Chernobyl or Fukushima. The latter is going to take decades, possibly a century, and the costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Chernobyl is probably higher.
Yet these get hand-waved away by nuclear advocates despite there being 2 major events when fewer than 700 nuclear plants have been built (and I believe that includes non-power plants).
Now do the clean up costs of fossil fuel power generation
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It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?
> I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar.
Solar is 15% - a lot but not yet dominated. Solar works at day and demand is also highest during the day so solar should not be an enemy of nuclear.
It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.
This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.
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> certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.
> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.
The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).
So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.
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Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.
Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.
>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,
That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.
The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.
Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
>t's that or buying gas from Russia.
Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.
And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?
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Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.
It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.
To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.
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How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.
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> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment
... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
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Oh it has tons of cons:
1. It's the most expensive form of electricity;
2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;
3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);
4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;
5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;
6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;
7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;
8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;
9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";
10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and
11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.
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We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.
I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
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> upgrade civilization to the next level
Why?
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What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?
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> upgrade civilization to the next level
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?
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Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.
I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.
Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
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> It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.
People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.
That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.
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It can happen like in Sweden with proper guarantees
Time and demographics are also a component. Italy is old, has worker shortages for living wage work (and is currently issuing ~500k work visas over three years to attract labor to the market), and a new nuclear generator takes at least ten years to build. Each year, an additional 1TW of solar will be deployed globally. Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled.
https://www.reuters.com/world/italy-issue-half-million-non-e... - June 30th, 2025
Nuclear power plants are uninsurable in the private market. There is no natural investor base for a product that is uninsurable. Unless you are an imagining a culture war where real capitalists are fighting corporate welfare queens, it's not a culture war issue.
>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.
>The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.
Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.
I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?
I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.
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Prefab & faster construction possibilities would be a big one.
Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.
In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.
This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.
I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.
Because Trump is pushing SMR on all "allies", UK, Japan, Italy:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzevzwxwro
I couldn't find immediate investments from Kushner etc., but will dig further.
Italian here. I seriously doubt this thing will lead anywhere. If something slightly more concrete than this will appear, there will be an insurrection. NIMBY is very strong in Italy (after decades of attempts, we are still without a spent fuel depot for this reason).
Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way. As soon as popular opposition will manifest, the politicians will forget the whole issue.
“Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way.”
Public opinion can change very quickly, and it usually it does not need to change significantly to have a big impact (see Brexit).
40 years ago public opinion was heavily influenced by the Chernobyl disaster, the last major nuclear accident (Fukushima) happened 15 years ago and it is quite far from memory.
Much more pressing matters today are energy costs and independence, so I expect a new referendum would have at the very least a much closer outcome.
To be fair, the referendums for Nuclear were so poorly timed. Just after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I don't know if this was a deliberate choice of the governments leading the country those years (the tinfoil hat in me can see big oil pushing for those referendums at those particular times) or pure bad luck. Anyway, public opinion was highly biased which led to "No" winning with fair margins. With that said, I believe NIMBY is a contributing factor and not the whole explanation.
I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.
nuclear is a great option for ice breakers & submarines.
in a connected grid nuclear cannot economically compete against solar (which pushes the cost of daytime energy to effectively 0€) so it has to be heavily subsided, which raises the cost for everyone. a euro spent on nuclear is a euro not spent on batteries or hydrogen production
When it comes to Italy however, nuclear does not fit that niche of a plausible technology.
Finland? Sure! Italy has far better, cheaper, routes.
because certain political parties have made energy technologies part of their identities, which is... stupid.
>massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather.
Italy has all that right across the pond.
And no energy source can beat solar on the speed of build out. And when it comes to the energy the next few years is all about build out [for AI]. Countries who get it right - like China, look at their solar and new datacenters getting powered by it, may be US if the required thinking wins - are going to lead the world in the near to mid-term future, the rest are going to be struggling seconds.
Building nuclear today in the energy field is like building tanks in military whereis solar is like drones - i.e. we have choice between 2 classic paradigms - very limited vertical scalability with extremely costly units vs. unlimited horizontal scalability of extremely cheap units.
115 $/MWh.
Thats what EDF's stating their NUWARD SMR (up to 400MW) will cost in France, just as comparison. Not cheap for the taxpayers in Italy.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-plans-10...
I doubt that number but it would be an improvement: the MW in Italy is far beyond 200 USD/MW in wholesole market.
Btw, it is not completely about price/MW but it is also about sovereignty and... No, there is no U mines in Italy but a commodity market is much more managable than the oil market.
That's about half of the average cost right [1], so literally it will make electricity cheaper. Also, it will be cost that will not go up willy nilly when someone decides to do something absolutely stupid
1: https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/electricity-price
Italy is hugely dependent on natural gas for electricity, so it actually makes economic sense.
South Korea has a lot of nuclear power for related reasons - they can't risk being too dependent on LNG imports, lest some of their more volatile neighbours capture the shipments.
Hopefully Germany will follow next. It’s absurd that they rely on fossil fuel and coal when they can build modern nuclear plants that can provide stable energy for the energy heavy industries.
It would take 5-10 years to build the power plants and maybe with Chinese aid even faster
I don't think that nuclear projects of any size could pass current environmental impact assessments.
Only a severe energy shortage could motivate politicians enough to temporarily skip these, like they did for the LNG terminals. But you can't build a nuclear power plant of any size within a single legislative period so its just not going to happen.
Where in comparable countries (= in europe) did new reactors take less than 10 years (from scratch even)? So we are at at least 10 years. But more realistically, taking recent megaprojects into account, its 20 years. In that time, batteries are way ahead and you can overbuild _so_ _much_ renewables and people even do it without subsidies (strangely, nobody builds nuclear plants without subsidies).
regarding the "stable energy" point: germany has one of the most (if not _the_ most) stable grids in the world and that is even with 50+ % renewables. And given it sits in the center of europe with grid connections all around, it's far cheaper to buy from whomever has the most favourable weather anyways (and sell to them if they don't). Thats why one of the biggest issues right now is not nuclear, but grids.
It takes five years to build a wind turbine in Germany. There is a snowball's chance in hell that you can build a nuclear power plant in that time.
No thank you, we will happily continue with our investment in wind, solar and battery storage.
False dichotomy
hopefully not
Countries can also buy Uranium from their favorite fossil fuel country.
Saudi Arabia discovers 110 million tonnes of uranium-bearing ore in Medina: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-arabia-discove...
Partially true, the largest uranium mines are in Canada, Australia and Namibia, but it is a commodity market and it is way more managable than oil market.
Also, you can stock pile uranium and forget about the market for ten years. Oil strategic reservers requires large infrastructures and usually last only few months.
Fun fact: in the 60s Italy was after the US and UK the county with the most advanced nuclear energy plants. These days still North Italy produces key parts of nuclear reactors in other countries.
Exactly! Italy during 60s was building nuclear plants, launching satellites, computing and pioneering in several advanced fields
Good times.
As an Italian, I know exactly how this playbook plays out.
Nuclear energy is a big business for intimates friends, so on the trend that it's a green tech (apparently no carbn footprint, but what about the depleted fuel?) they approved the reopening of this technology.
Why going for SMR?
Well, it's the penalties business model and SMR is ideal because they are on paper, no valid proven commercial implementation. A company wins the contract, in this case i'm not sure if they'll go for a open bid, the contract include research, design, building and so on. At some point the political wind changes, contract canceled and hundreds of milions in contractual penalties to pay. It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends, with zero obligation to ever break ground.
It's from 19th century that they are thinking about a bridge between Sicily and mainland. The last time the project was revived, the playbook went exactly as described above: years of studies, cancellation and massive state penalties paid out to contractors for a bridge that still doesn't exist (Sicily and mainland are on different tectonic plates).
No mention there is no national deposit for nuclear waste, especially in a highly sismic territory.
>It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends,
I agree completely and would go so far as to claim that presently in 2026 that money-transfer mechanism is the real motivation for any nuclear project in any country. Renewable options are the better path now from a technical point, but politicians and their buddies can't easily make as much money from that.
Analisi molto lucida.
There should be a shared EU nuclear consortium, a public version of Airbus but for nuclear energy spearheaded by France.
The enduring fascination of isotopes and neutrons zipping in and out...
Taking a look at the costs (not to mention genuine safety and sustainability in the long run): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
In the current landscape—with the costs of solar and wind power steadily falling and storage technologies emerging, driven by the expansion of electric vehicles—I really don't know what kind of commercial future nuclear energy has (in terms of delivering lower energy costs).
Brace yourself, every large nuclear accident has been preceded by the Italian considering nuclear again. (Well at least Tchornobyl and Fukushima, ”which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice”)
Has there been a single SMR deployed and working yet? There were lots of talk about GE BWRX-300 and Rolls Royce SMR but none of them seems to have even started construction.
Can someone explain me like I’m a middle age person why Italy, and France, bet on nuclear fission?
It’s not competitive on cost anymore and we don’t have a good track record.
Most likely: Corruption in one way or another.
This is somewhat strange. Italy has a lot of sun, and a lot of mountains for these pumped storage hydropower plants. It is way harder to store output from PV on Great European Plain.
I wonder how much of a factor is that nuclear plants are effectively "unbombable". Ukraine's thermal plants have taken a beating, but their nuclear plants are still generating.
Good thing that sanity prevailed.
Anyone found a permanent repository, yet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
We should do what we do for fossil fuels: Permanent storage in the atmosphere.
Voting for it is easy and I hope it catalyzes innovation. But still, completing a damn reactor without insane budget overruns is the problem.
Enrico Fermi will stop spinning in his grave
he's only half spinning in his grave
Good luck with that. No problem with investing some money , but it has to be commercially viable first and recent Western projects all over the globe have not instilled any confidence in that.
Really good news for Italy and for the whole of Europe (if not the world)!
The atomic revival of Europe
Can someone explain to me why nuclear HAS to be profitable?
If a power source is profitable on its own, it can be financed by private investors. If it is unprofitable, it needs to be financed at least in part by the state, so it would come at the cost of the taxpayer.
David Sacks had an interesting stance on SMRs on Oct 19, 2024, before the election. Notice how he stands up for the downtrodden, poor population:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye012kzWJ3A (1:10:10):
"I'm virtue signaling because I'm Pro nuclear yes it's a luxury belief you're promoting something nuclear power is a luxury belief you heard it here first because they're going to put these things in poor communities and so it's never going to affect your life they're putting them next to Data Center in like Oregon like it's easy for you to say oh I support nuclear look how Progressive I am look how smart I am you haven't internalized the downsides [...]"
Sacks' image polishing agency is unhappy about pointing out gross inconsistencies. Do not question your betters.
Looking at the top comments in this thread claiming a bunch of false things I see HN is essentially fully captured by anti-progress populism at this point.
It’s sad to see, for a former community of “hackers.”
As an Italian… F-cking finally.
Most of oil and gas money goes to fund terrorism. Boycott it as much as possible
Even if it passes, you'll see the first nuclear power plant not before 15 years.
And it will not pass before the next legislature in 1 year.
So their plan to burn oil and keep the AC mandated no cooler than 24°C in their homes didn't work out? Huh.
Sweet. Minimum 20 years and $20Billion before any electricity is produced.
I wonder how much solar, wind and batteries you could get for that, and how quickly it would be deployed
> after voters *twice* rejected it in national referendums
Democracy is just lovely.
Have your citizens answer to a straightforward question on a topic twice, have them reject it, both times.
And the government will still go its way.
I'm not against nuclear per se, I'm just baffled at the "democratic" process.
The referendums were in 1987 and 2011, respectively. Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.
It’s much less frequent than the usual democratic election cycle, where people are also allowed to reevaluate their positions.
> Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.
But nobody asked, there hasn't been a third referendum.
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The government was elected by the people - if they disagree with this decision it will have consequences in the next election.
I think the public opinion and sentiment has changed quite significantly since 2011 when the last referendum was held.
The current Italian government is massively populist so they wouldn’t do this if they thought people would disagree.
I don’t see any problem with the democratic process here - sure it’s a flawed system but I believe it’s still the best we came up with so far
I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.
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Mind you the referendum vote was held only 2 years after the Chernobyl incident
Shouldn't people be allowed to change their minds?
A party can lose three election, and if they win the fourth, they still get into power.
Why are so many of the top comments like "But muh, nukelaer energy bad" and when pushed to explain why , its "bad. very expensive"
I just don't get people saying how terrible climate change is going to be for the world and then refuses to support nuclear.
If climate change is such a critical problem, then let's try everything to get this solved even if it costs more to do it. If you are only willing to do some solutions because it is cheaper then I don't believe you when you say it is important to solve.
And frankly, we don't know the full impact of climate change, so having as many alternatives as possible just makes sense. Hydro can be impacted by droughts which will be more common. Solar may be impacted if there are increased storms. Wind may be impacted due to stilling (slowing of wind due to an increase in co2).
Why not throw nuclear into the mix to ensure we do not run out of power?
> Hydro can be impacted by droughts which will be more common
You did read the news this summer? Like https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/03/europe/hungary-nuclear-pl... ?
Most of the environmentalists will tell you that it's dumb to shut down nuclear, but building new plants just takes too long and is too expensive. Why then not just put the money into things that are cheap now and will get even cheaper tomorrow?
Hedging against downtime is comparatively easy, just diversify by location and improve the grid, which is way less expensive than building out power plants.
Every source of power has pros and cons. They all have risks and benefits.
If there is a push to do a specific clean energy I think we should go for it regardless of the cost. If you think the climate issue is going to be a very severe issue then you should take every option at our disposal and encourage every push for an alternative to fossil fuels. Since you are refusing this, then I assume you don't think it is severe.
Large countries may be able to hedge against downtime, but smaller countries can't. Also, like I said, we don't really know the impact of all of this which is why we should diversify as much as possible. One of those diversifications should be nuclear as well as solar, wind, and hydro.
HN is full of solar salesman.
Because having a solution would put the climate change organisations out of a job.
Always funny to see how plutonium pilled hn is. Nuclear power in Italy is idiotic. They won't even be able to cool the damn reactors. Europe is drying out.
Italy is surrounded by water, do you think the Mediterranean Sea is going to just dry out?
His ignorance is on full display when he said plutonium.
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the Mediterranean has dried up several times in history and it will dry up again, as the African continent collides with Europe. Currently, water flows in at Gibraltar with a very strong current to try to keep up with evaporation, making the Mediterranean saltier and saltier (than the Atlantic) over time. When the strait closes because Africa and Spain push together, the Meditteranean will very quickly dry up.
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Maybe not them, but their children could do it. Italy's capability to assimilate is underrated.
Agreed on your second point, but why couldn't you make it without the blatant racism?
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oh, Im italian
Presidente Giorgia Meloni is awesome and it’s amazing to see a woman empowered by the democratic process and serving the will of the Italian people
https://youtu.be/sNhPplje7xM?is=h5VtnMe9wva-VKGM
* serving energy giants with subsidies.
About 139.000 workers employed in Italian energy industry by recent numbers, out of 24.000.000 employed population.
https://www.lavoro.gov.it/documenti-e-norme/normativa/di-tas...
Giants are people too.
Nature is healing.
We are currently running nuclear at a capacity factor of around 91% in the US. Solar is somewhere around 24%.
1GW at noon vs 1GW forever. The area under the curve is what matters. Not the peak of the curve.
How much more would you be willing to spend to get 4x the nameplate capacity and to also get it whenever you need it?
The economics of a single plant are irrelevant in comparison to the requirements of the grid that it operates within. If someone could invent a source of power that magically scales exactly with the duck curve in Texas, I guarantee that would fetch a premium on the market, even if other economic characteristics are not competitive.
The solution to nuclear is to standardize the design and deployment process. France has demonstrated it can be done. Perhaps their engineers should be in charge of some new global standards body.