Comment by jacquesm

Neither nuclear nor gas or coal will matter any more in a few years. It took California only six years to install 41% of the battery capacity goal it has for 2045[1]. As batteries are becoming part for new solar and wind installations, they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.

[1] https://www.emi-bg.com/en/battery-storage-in-california-has-...

Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling and maintenance over their lifespans making them a poor fit for base load without extremely costly redundancy in a small country.

France is in that list (hello i'm from france too) because construction is heavily subsidized and decommission is overall not happening, not planned, and more or less not even approaching the planning stage. The few decommissions that are taking place are decades late and billions over budget.

It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have. Does that mean it's a bad investment? Not necessarily. If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth. Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.

And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive. TBH, i haven't followed developments in the last years in regards to french neocolonialism collapsing in sub-saharan africa, but here's a small article from 6 years ago: https://infokiosques.net/IMG/pdf/uranium_de_la_francafrique-...

Yeah I’m really confused why France is in that list (also, less so, but China - they have come a great way, further than almost any western country save France, I’m just unsure I’d the metric here applies evenly).

I’ll stand by the only reason nuclear power is unprofitable (in most cases) is because we decide it is unprofitable.

Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.

In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

If nuclear is such a big cash cow, why is edf in huge debts, state owned and suffering from aged power plants having issues?

When EDF signed a fixed cost contract to deliver nuclear in England the CFO resigned.

It's currently double its original budget and likely to grow further.

The "profits" are from running decades old reactors that were never transparently costed.

France doesn't have an answer for decommissioning costs.

Yes, France is pretty much alone in making nuclear work. It's impressive. That said, it is alone.

IE, I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions and culture that allowed this. Will France itself even continue them?

Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:

Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.

Yes this is true. Once you include all subsidies nuclear is cheaper than fossil fuels. Much cheaper than coal and oil and slightly cheaper or on par with gas.

But, the same is true for solar and wind which starts off much cheaper than fossil fuels in the first place.

Most new build energy is renewables, that's what nuclear needs to compete with.

Yeah, let's not forget defence budgets that are spent to prop up oil availability too.

That is clearly true, here and in other situations.

But, the public has made it clear they are unwilling to give up the implied subsidy the unaccounted externally provides.

Yes, think about the US military budget.

I'd argue at least half of it basically functions as a petroleum subsidy.

And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them, and would be even more so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated.

The only justification in nuclear right now it's deglobalization and energy independence. But I would argue all the money you throw into nuclear for that, it's much better served simply building out solar and wind

He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.

None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.

If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.

But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.

The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.

[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...

Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!

There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.

Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."

Yes, thank you. Eroi ist the only thing which matters from a hard physics stand point.

Peak oil was supposed to have happened decades ago but current projections put it well past 2050. Demand for oil is going to fall due to electrification long before we run out of sufficient oil production capacity.

It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.

That's a bullshit Statement. Nuclear in Germany was phased out because of ideology, not economics.

It was cheapest firm power in german merit order. Instead the guy that was later hired at gasprom had other plans, together with greens. As result coal is still used. New gas plants approved this summer

Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.

- https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...

- https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-d...

Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.

In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

> The reliability of french electricity

Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.

Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.

Until the rivers run low.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...

> Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.

Yeah but they get to dispose of their waste for free.

Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia

FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.

Plus you can stockpile it super easy.

Uranium is not rare. You can even extract it from sea water.

Russia's is just cheaper.

But it accounts for 5% of the cost of a produced MWh, so if it had to be generated otherwise, we'd know how to do it.

Refueling nuclear power plants only happens fairly rarely. You hold your customer hostage a lot less if you say “ha! Next time in 8 years time when you need to refuel, we won’t sell the goods to you!” as compared to literally turning off the gas tap.

Wrong uranium you can easily stock for 10years inadvance

You can easily store 10 years worth of uranium, unlike gas and oil.

Many is how? Why are people spreading such bullshit? Only a subset of plants, mainly VVER are dependent on Russia, albeit that'll change too.

Russia is ore importer itself and Orano+Urenco have enough capacity to satisfy most of Europe, both expanding.

Decentralized is not guaranteed. You mostly deploy ren in productive areas, see northern offshore, or that most of Ukraine's ren were in the South. Guess what happened to that. France has a decentralized grid too- many plants scattered around the country, each with multiple units

Nuclear power plants refuel on yearly cycles.

That's plenty of time to source alternative uranium supplies presuming you haven't stockpiled.

Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.

It's not. This whole discussion is confused because it's based on a misunderstanding of how electricity markets work. When states charge a captive customer base whatever nuclear project costs turn out to be, profitability is not a meaningful measure of economic attractiveness. Levelised cost of energy, or system cost of energy, under different regulatory and market regimes, is the relevant benchmark.

Even if they are state owned, they should break even at least somewhere on paper. Explicit and bounded subsidies are very different from implicit, open-ended ones.

It is usually people parrot-repeating (like GenAI?) whatever intox Grennpeace and the likes (e,g, the German government under Merkel) spread.

Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.

Power is an input. If it isn’t profitable it needs to be subsidized from elsewhere.

Healthcare is the same. It just turns out subsidizing it from wages works because healthy people are more productive.

Profitability isn’t a hard limit. But if something isn’t internally profitable, it requires an external partner to get going.

Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.

And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.

I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.

In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.

There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.

I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.

The same thing it means anywhere else?

Any argument that environmentalists run amok is the sole cause of nuclear's failure to launch has to address the fact that these two places, where environmentalists are a lot more likely to get a club to the head than a say at the table, are largely not expanding their nuclear power that much versus, say, solar in China.

China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).

China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market.

They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.

You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.

People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder.

If not, reading a list of this helps:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...

But sure, oil leaks can be bad as well. Solar leaks on the other hand seem bearable.

They are not profitable. They add taxes to gas so that it pays for it.

Sure, but then that's not "profitable" in the direct sense of "makes rich oligarchs richer".

I'm all for improving the quality of life for society. In the end the goal is to live well, not to destroy our living conditions for a few oligarchs to make more money. But "profitability" is not generally optimised like this, unfortunately.

I think that for your analogy to work, you also need to consider the total economic value that we get out of electricity as opposed to just revenue from electricity bills...?

If every government had subsidized and pushed forward a transition to ~100% nuclear power back in the 70s it would have effectively solved climate change. Electricity, industry and heat production account for >50% of CO2 production.

Then there's all the other effects of not having a high demand for hydrocarbons including less Middle East entanglement, less mining and drilling, more abundant and cheaper oil for uses other than burning it, etc.

Notice how for roads you compare the total economic value of all roads against the cost of them. But for electricity you compare a single power generation system. You are not comparing the same thing. A fair comparison would be the total economic value of having electricity against the cost of all electricity infrastructure. Sadly this fair comparison is irrelevant in this thread.

> 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.

There is more than money. There is stability (not depending on foreign oil, peak oil, etc), there is climate change, etc.

Emissions.

A lot of countries consider energy security national security, and national security always bats last.

A lot of countries also use it to help subsidize (or help cover up the costs of) their military nuclear programs.

So the alternative is relying on solar panels made by a quasi-hostile country, because for some reason we can't produce them economically ourselves, or continuing to burn fossil fuels?

Solar/wind made reliable is still cheaper than new nuclear (which also requires some add-ons for reliability/leveling.)

I am very pro nuclear :)

I agree with that, in Italy the telephone lines, highways and trains were privatized the same way, but that's just because politicians are corrupt and they were able to convince people that public companies had to make money like they were private and operating at a loss was bad.

IF the world got its primary energy from today's kind of light water reactors, uranium available at up to 3x the current price would only last for about five years.

A fully nuclear-powered world (including all energy use, not just grid electricity) would need breeding of some kind; otherwise the uranium just gets too expensive. So when you hear people claiming nuclear is cheap, ask them if that cheapness includes the technologies that would actually be needed for nuclear to do the full job.

Not sure why this is downvoted. Look up Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, it was 14 years late and (depending on whose figures you believe) cost nearly 10x more than the original estimate of €3 billion, bankrupting Areva in the process.