Comment by asmodeuslucifer

> they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.

Unfortunately, this probably won't work everywhere. Particularly in Northern Europe winter is tough as there's very little sunlight (manageable) and often very little wind (not manageable,as it lasts longer).

Nuclear is an expensive way of solving this problem, but it's carbon neutral which is super important.

A couple points. No, entire plants aren't taken offline at once typically, individual reactor cores are, and modern designs work to minimize that. They still maintain extremely good uptime, especially if you're comparing them to intermittent renewables. Secondly, Italy isn't super tiny, and you need redundancy for outages and such in any grid regardless of its components.

> Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling

CANDU reactors, for one, can be (and are) refuelled live:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_refuelling

Every few decades they do need to be refurbished though.

I had a discussion with ChatGPT about this concern. When comparing a modern EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) to a modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant, the required maintenance cycles look fairly similar. For the nitpickers/tomato throwers (I see you!): I am using EPR because it is state-of-the art for nuclear power, and I am specifically using the term "modern" for thermal power plant because the newest ones (China, Japan) are nearly at the frontier of efficiency possible for that type of electricty production.

Roughly: EPR runs for 18 months, then requires 1-2 months of maintenance (which includes refuelling about one third of its fuel assemblies). A modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant runs 12-18 months, then requires 1 month of maintenance.

Next, I could not resist as other commenters already mentioned it. You wrote: "small country". As the Aussies say: Yeah, no. Italy is 300,000 sq km. That is not small. If compared to the United States, it would be the fifth largest state.

Finally, why does it seem that all discussions about electricity production on HN always devolve into the "Base Load Wars"? For me, it is starting to feel like a meme. (Are there LLM troll bots trained to enter HN discussions and make a bunch of "base load" arguments?) Seriously, can someone please create a text-based role playing game that revolves around a future society locked into eternal "Base Load Wars"? (See: PhD Simulator[1])

[1] https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. This is the first law of thermodynamics and as far as I'm aware nobody has managed to refute it.

Finding better ways of controlling where energy comes from and where it goes, and doing it in a controlled way that has minimal impact on the surroundings is good (from an ecological perspective)- it is the most pure good an ecologist can hope for.

"Reduce, Reuse" has its place, but that place has to be in-line with also finding a way to balance our human needs with the environment.

I don't think reducing our energy consumption is realistic, many things that have a long-tail reduction in energy consumption have a huge up front cost.

For example, electric vehicles are a bitch to manufacture but are less impactful for the environment over a long term; and this is amplified if the energy that is produced to be used in the electric car has a minimal impact on the environment (Solar, Wind, Nuclear) - but nuclear plants have a huge up-front energy cost too.

I'll be forthcoming and say that I have a concern that over-reliance on solar and wind may have negative consequences on the environment too- harvesting wind energy from the atmosphere that animals may rely on, will likely impact the environment in ways we haven't thought about. However it's significantly better than coal and gas, and that's the marker we're going for: not perfect.. better.

Everything is bad at a certain scale after all, we just haven't hit that scale with our renewables- and because of this, on a baseline, I agree with you.

> 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.

Why would an ecologist have to be against more energy consumption? For climate change, what matters is energy from the sun hitting the earth vs. energy being radiated back into space. More energy consumption also doesn't necessarily cause more pollution of any kind.

Thank you for this post. It is informative and nuanced about a complex topic.

    > Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.

I was born and raised in several countries that are a part of the NATO alliance. Without getting too preachy here, I want to say that I deeply value the nuclear deterrence that France proudly and effectively provides the alliance. Plus, personal here, I like the "je ne sais quoi/don't fuck with me" attitude of the French forces. I welcome the wildcard that keeps our adversaries on their toes!

    > If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive.

I am not French, nor deeply familiar with the arrangements here, but what happens if the uranium price is 2x or 5x? I am guessing it has little impact on the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant. Also: There are lots of alternatives. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Namibia control nearly three-quarters of the entire global uranium market. To be clear: I am not doubting that the existing purchasing agreements between France and its former African colonies are fair.

glad you pointed out something very few people point out in these conversations - the cheap uranium fuel France gets has a very large hidden cost.

the coups that happened recently in west africa are largely due to that largely hidden cost.

> construction is heavily subsidized

It's not subsidized, quite the opposite EDF is subsidizing its competitors through ARENH.

> 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.

It's not. It only appears expensive compared to other decarbonized means because the calculations never take the opportunity cost of intermittency. Wind and solar are only cheap because you never count the price of the back-up plan in the cost (and also because magnets and solar panels are bought for cheap from China). If you count the price of running an actual grid all year long then it suddenly becomes the most efficient option after hydro and that's why France has among the cheapest electricity in Europe. The German Energiewende is the canonical example of what the theoretical calculations leave out. It should have been cheaper and less carbon-heavy in the end, but instead hundreds of billions have been spent to get only expensive and high-emission electricity in the end.

>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.

Come on, the Uranium coming from Niger is a just a fraction of the consumption: https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/questions-et-reponse...

Finally, someone with common sense. Nuclear is bad BECAUSE it produces lots of cheap energy. We DON'T WANT this. More energy = more capitalism = evil.

DEGROWTH NOW!

> degrowth

Thanks for showing your true face. But no thanks for your anti-humanism.

> 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.

What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821997

Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating, even mundane things like business offices real estate or highways wouldn't be economically viable if they had to provision for decommissioning.

You could clean up the high activity thing and let the buildings and their asbestos in place and nuclear decommissioning would still be more environmentally friendly than every other heavy industry.

Do you think it is cheap to decommission a large water power dam?

That's just a bullshit Statement considering all german plants except experimental or soviet units are decommissioned on operator money.

Costs are accounted and in some cases you have even price breakdown https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...

The only reason nuclear power facilities get decommissioned is because anti-nuclear politicians panic and force them to shut down. Sure, there's an ongoing cost of maintenance and replacement, but once you have a nuclear power facility, there's no reason for it not to continue generating power indefinitely. We're not going to stop needing or wanting more energy.

[dead]

Re debt: check how much debt the SV giants have. Debt isn't a bad thing per se, it's just how you finance investments.

Its has always been state owned, and it's much better for critical infrastructures to be so anyway.

> suffering from aged power plants having issues?

There was one (1) instance if of a serious common issue between multiple plants found in 2022, unrelated to the age of the NPPs (the most recent were affected as well) which affected the exploitation for about a year. It was bad for a moment, but not that bad, it's like saying the automobile industry can't be profitable because the Tataka airbag problem happened. (And the corrosion issue was much less severe than the Tataka one!).

Because it isn't. EDF devt to EBITDA ratio is as healthy or healthier vs german eon/rwe. Debt is ok to have for big corpos, unless you think Apple is a failed company.

Over half of french fleet was already upgraded to have safety similar to gen3 reactors through great carenage.

France also set record production this summer vs prev ones

Because being a cash cow does not mean the cash will be reinvested by the owner. The owner might just milk the cow and use the money for other things.

Couldn’t be because nuclear-hating bureaucrats have over regulated the industry?

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

Yes, because they had to borrow at a 7 or 9% long term rate on the market (in the era of ZIRP!), which makes financing costs 70-80% of the overall final electricity price.

Of course that kind of deal was insane, but it says more about financing long term projects on the market than it says anything about nuclear as a technology.

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

EDF gave more in subsidies to its competitors through ARENH over the past 15 years than what the entire fleet costed.

French nuclear has been an indisputable financial success over the past 40 years (while giving France one of the cheapest electricity in Europe). Saying otherwise is just ignoring reality entirely.

I saw a DW Planet A documentary about decommissioning a nuclear plant in Germany. They walked around the plant in some safety gear, but with their faces fully exposed and no breathing apparatus. They said the project was decades behind schedule and it was costing ten times as much as expected. The decommissioning process involved spraying water and gels on slightly radioactive materials from the factory to reduce their radioactivity to effectively zero. The process created much more radioactive material than there was in the first place, which then itself had to be dealt with. The cost of decommissioning is determined by the lobbyists for the companies that do the decommissioning. Voters have no idea what decommissioning should cost, and no one will ever question going over budget. It's a great business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKIaRg3SdTw

" EDF Group assumes sole financial responsibility for decommissioning power plants. The cost is factored into operation from the start and included in the price of the kilowatt-hour. It is re-assessed every three years to take account of changing technical and financial assumptions, as required by law. "

https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/producing-a-climate-frie...

Just declare that LNT is wrong and treat materials as non radioactive if they are less than half the radiation level associated with cancer. For the rest you can try and reuse them in new reactors if possible or store it in the same place as other nuclear waste.

And the world leaders don't have an answer for the cost to keep our atmosphere habitable due to using fossil fuels as hard as possible?

technically speaking they don't have to be decomissioned and when they absolutely have to be I believe at that point we will have fusion which is only 10 years away.

Why people spread such bullshit statements? Take Germany which enacted EARLY phaseout, yet all it's reactors are decommissioned on operator money except experimental and soviet units

What are these decommissioning costs?

The reactor vessel and the primary coolant loop.

All that steel can be vitrified and stored in stainless casks somewhere fairly indefinitely.

Or just buried. It doesn’t stay reactive very long.

The rest of the site is no different to any other electricity generator, and no different really to the average industrial manufacturing plant.

Everyone likes to just say ”decommissioning costs”, without actually thinking about what any of that means.

It’s not like every nuclear power site is a Chernobyl.

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

Ontario, Canada may have something to say about that:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply

What about Sweden?

South Sweden, with most of Sweden's population is at 20 gC02eq/kWh and at 36% nuclear

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/SE-SE3/yearly

Also Ontario?

Finland?

For some definition of "work". They don't seem to be able to build new nuclear plants now without massive cost overruns.

I am pretty sure anyone could make nuclear work by throwing lots of money around

> I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions

Gaullism and strong governments are not in fashion these days. The main thing that made Messmer plan work was Messmer himself, a strong leader with the power to tell everyone to stfu and do it.

One can argue that Switzerland is doing a good job too. Also, it is profitable for existing plants for the next 60 years or so.

Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.

See nuclear topic, scroll just like 2 turns to see once again someone claiming nuclear is the one technology in all of history that doesn't improve with technology.

> Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive

Isn't this the thing where you require something in one case but not the others?

If every oil drilling operation had to carry enough insurance to cover Deepwater Horizon and every hydroelectric dam had to carry a policy large enough for Banqiao and every solar panel factory had to insure against leaving Superfund sites that leak into the groundwater in some of the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley then they'd be in trouble too.

> the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions.

People often say things like this and then if you actually have someone go through the existing process you find out that more than half of the labor is going to inspect things that aren't actually safety-related, or some corruption is involved which is quadrupling the cost because the contractor bribed a politician to make use of their services required by law or create artificial scarcity for something which is actually important but shouldn't cost as much as it does.

Insuring is dirt cheap. You don't insure against any nonsense but against most probable one.

Nuclear gets cheaper if you have several units built in same place and if you increase CF with various methods, incl higher enriched fuel

You can count only the pure costs of generation of single type of power plant. But the customers are also paying the costs of distribution, costs of backup and firming.

Is the customer 10, 50 or 500 km from the power plant?

Do I need to build a second backup power plant for each installed primary power plant, 100% backup capacity? Or 40%, or 20% backup capacity?

Costs of pumped hydro/battery energy storage.

What are the costs of CO2 emission? Europe 80 Euro per tCO₂, China/India 8, US zero.

War would be so much harder w/o oil, yet we fight wars for oil. Hmmm.

> 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

> so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated

That sounds very very questionable. We have like tens of countries in Europe that are trying to implement solar and wind energy throughout the decades, and are undoubtful lieders and visioners in that areas. And what is the practical results? Energy costs like 10 times more than if that energy was generated through burning fissile fuel alone.

Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage?

Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.

This must at least partly be region-dependent right?

In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).

From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?

> China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor.

I've seen it claimed that this figure is not equivalent to the time-to-build in West, as the clock starts later in the process. I don't know if that's true, but I've seen the claim.

SA is at 168 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly

France is at 32 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.

So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.

SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.

It is really ideal for solar.

But the emissions are still much higher than France.

Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.

But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.

Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...

This is despite increasing solar.

This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever

Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.

That’s just not true.

An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.

It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.

Yes. There's all kind of hydrocarbons that aren't economic or barely so, like oil shale or shale oil, with is rock with a stain on it.

Interestingly, Venezuelan extra heavy sour crude oil is not profitable to use at $55 a barrel, the price before the Iran war, but is profitable when it's over $90 a barrel.

It's easy to make money when someone else pays the costs but you get to keep the revenue.

This is wrong. The peak of conventional oil is documented around 2007. Since then, Europe's economy has been slowing down (if you look at physical indicators like how much is transported by trucks or what surface is being built each year, not artificial ones like the GDP).

Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).

Exactly, there were no economical reasons for nuclear phase out in Germany.

It was a political decision and in the end a very costly one: much bigger burning of coal then necessary, new gas power plants, increased dependence on foreign energy imports.

It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough

The 138€ is under pessimistic assumptions. Min profitability limit on the other hand is 9ct/kwh. But nobody denies fla3 was a failure.

You didn't understand the electric cap in France. It's a cap on profits. If edf sells at certain thresholds above 70€ due to market, the state will take extra profit. It's sort of like double CFDs for renewables except edf has no minimum compensation

Just after your quote:

> EdF responded that it "assumes full responsibility for the technical and financial aspects of dismantling its nuclear plants," and noted that it was currently decommissioning nine reactors, so had a good basis of experience. It also pointed out that its funds set aside for decommissioning were audited by the Ministry of the Environment, Energy and the Sea the previous month.

And, a little bit earlier, the article author's assesment:

> There are well-developed plans for dismantling these (which have been shut down since 1990 or before) and work is progressing.

Please don't cherry-pick articles.

There’s tons of costs associated with coal, oil, and natural gas extraction, processing, and use, which are neither priced into up front costs nor the price that customers pay for the product. If those were priced in, then fossil fuels would have to become more expensive. Those costs currently get diffused into various other areas and paid for by a wide net of payers, including both the customers and non-customers, and a big one is the government (taxpayer).

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

Palo Verde is right next to the Sonoran Desert and has been running for forty years in Arizona heat:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

There's no technical reason why nuclear plants can't run in low/hot water situations.

France net exported power this summer every single day and hour.

France net imported in 2022 less vs Germany net imported in 2024 in business as usual situation

Edf also announced yo add cooling towers to bypass old environmental laws, especially for Golfech

So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens. And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.

Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.

That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable

Hungary and Romania made a mistake by not diverting earlier more river flow. France net exported every single day of summer

You know when rivers run not-low? In winter when we need to heat all those freezing homes. Crazy how that works. Yup, it's not ideal in a summer heat wave... but that's precisely when solar can shine.

We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.

Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)

canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too

has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it

Maybe don't keep it all in one spot, though.

Many countries do not have the raw materials to build solar, wind turbines, and batteries so it doesn't solve the sovereignty issue.

Neither it is for nuclear. It fixes the externality

Healthcare is profitable like schools are, or roads, or public transportation, or sanitary systems: the goal is for us a society to live better.

When something is profitable in the sense that a few oligarchs make more an more money, I see it as a bug, not a feature.

I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.

>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries

I actually do since I'm Italian lol

Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant

> 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.

So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.

> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance

The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?

They’ve been building out every form of power generation they can. Nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. It’s all skyrocketing.

The talking point that they’re going green doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti...

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

Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments.

Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.

If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities.

It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)

It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?

I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did. Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.

I am someone who knows, hence my disgust. Time to learn about the radioactivity of coal fly ash and how carefully that’s managed.