Comment by icantevenhold
1 day ago
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.
We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.
Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:
Some recent ones:
Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power.
And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).
Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.
My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.
8 replies →
Valcoe paper is written by the founder of antinuclear movement in Denmark(which led at ti becoming one of the highest coal burners), has wild assumptions about hydrogen getting basically free for firming
Australia's weather is different from what we got in Europe. And let's not pretend many of aemos estimations are already obsolete due to increased costs of transmission and hydro storage that are huilt.
Dk still has worse emissions vs france/sweden, just like SA
If you don't like nuclear, you'll have gas peakers, like Germany
4 replies →
> Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper
Cheaper for how long? And in what conditions?
What happens in a post petrol world? What happens when china stops exporting panels/batteries/inverters (aka a good 50% of the current supply)?
1 reply →
Until one day a volcano wakes up and decides no one can have sunlight for a few months.
Edit to add: heh, the CSIRO eh? That bastion of truth.
4 replies →
I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.
8 replies →
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.
I don’t follow that logic. Because there was a law against its efficient?
The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.
Aren’t SMRs essentially unproven? I think only Russia and China built some working facilities, and the rest is still under construction.
I mean anything could happen but seems like a long shot
In a nutshell, yes.
The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.
What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.
That doesn’t mean they won’t have a use.
3 replies →
They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.
1 reply →
Countries should definitely evaluate LMRs (Large Modular Reactors) too. Most countries need large amounts of carbon free energy, not small amounts. And nuclear power plant economics have profited in the past from making larger, more powerful reactor units.
But yeah their most modern nuclear power plant was a BWR 4 with Mark II containment, which would probably not be worth modernizing instead of building a new GenIII+ PWR from scratch that lasts a century.
About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.
Fair - but using new (unproven) technology imo only increases the cost/time/risk overall?
Then just build GenIII+ PWRs like most other countries.
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)
Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime
[dead]
[flagged]
The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.
lol because nuclear reactors are so damn stable: https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/13/france-shuts-down-nuclea...
"France's largest electricity producer said the move was required to comply with environmental regulations."
This is a policy decision, not a technical limitation. Palo Verde has been operating in the Arizona heat for forty years: nuclear can handle situations of low/high-temp water.
Even while that was happening, we never stopped being a net exporter of energy.
The system worked as designed.
Can you use more than 2 words in your explanation next time? Reciting known talking points offers little.
[dead]
base load is a myth
"base load is a myth" is a myth
Six words: base load generation is economically obsolete
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#...
Thanks for sharing those links, very interesting.
I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.
Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh
You can also check the report from RTE (French grid operator) that models several scenarios and mentions this security of supply thing
https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/publications/ene...
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?
[dead]
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"
"as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill.
US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.
It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se.
The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x.
For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.
And is it reasonable to get their doses that low?