Comment by stymaar
17 hours ago
> 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.
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-...
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.
You're redefining environmentalism with a very narrow and technical view. Goodhart's law does not only apply to computer science, but to ecology as well, and says that CO2 emission alone is not a good metrics.
I'm not saying energy consumption overall is a perfect metrics, but the degrowth movement is a philosophy / science that's not aligned on a specific metrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
The energy received is always the same as the energy radiated, its just the temperature increases to maintain that balance.
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The issue is not only climate change. More consumption means more consumer goods, more resource extraction, more transport, more waste
We have huge environmental problems ranging from ecosystem simplification, microplastics, etc. The answer is not to keep consuming as we are. We really have to stop the neoliberal system that's based on ever increasing growth and externalisation of environmental impact.
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For France investment in nuclear is a big benefit, as you can see in the amounts of coal and gas burned to generate electricity in neighboring Germany in the last two decades, and still burning today.
Try to present the idea of "degrowth", to China, India, Indonesia, Brazil. They all on path of growth.
I agree that France, should be paying more to Françafrique countries, but raw uranium cost is only 50% of the finished nuclear reactor fuel. And nuclear reactor fuel is 5% to 10% of the operating costs of a nuclear power plant.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Heinrich Böll Foundation and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, both funded from Germany, published many documents criticizing uranium mining in Africa:
" Addressing uranium-producing countries in particular, whom it seems to want to stop or at least reduce their activities, the report also focuses on the health hazards associated with extraction and the neo-colonial aspect of exploiting the resource. Particularly virulent regarding France, which is the subject of three articles and cited in several others, the Atlas targets head-on Paris's relationship with one of its main suppliers: Niger.
The Atlas likens the uranium mining model to a vestige of Françafrique and accuses the French government of enriching itself on Niger's behalf while orchestrating an ecological, human and social catastrophe in the country. The French company Orano - formerly Areva - which mines and produces uranium in Niger for French power plants, is a particular target."
https://www.docdroid.net/y7NENZB/comment-lallemagne-finance-...
https://www.ege.fr/sites/ege.fr/files/media_files/German_Int...
Thank you for this post. It is informative and nuanced about a complex topic.
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!
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.
History behind the French decision to build it's own independent nuclear deterrence was interesting:
" De Gaulle asked asked Kennedy: “Would you trade New York for Paris?” His point was that if he wasn't convinced, would the Russians be? So it's not just about numbers of warheads. It's about the defensive posture overall. "
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/03/nuclear-deterre...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1962/08/de-gaul...
> 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.
It's interesting that they're feeling emboldened enough these days to not hide who they are and what their agenda is. That general movement had a slow motion replay of the Bolshevik vs. Menshevik action, where the moderates (like Patrick Moore, Michael Shellenberger) got purged, and after quite a long time of having an established, comfortable monoculture now they're starting to no longer feel the need to create fake narratives around why nuclear or mines are bad, now they're just straight up saying they want civilization to collapse. (Which is what would happen, there's never going to be any such thing as an orderly impoverishment)
Maybe it's for the best. If they're being honest maybe it'll clarify debates and positions.
> 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.
Taken to it's logical end it's quite literally just anti-human. Their ideal outcome is a suicide pact.
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And we have tried it too! There have been energy shocks before, where the price of energy spikes and causes corresponding drop in energy consumption, leading to degrowth.
They only talk about the benefits in the abstract, but not what an energy shock actually means. It means people can’t afford to pay for heating and freeze to death. It means factories close down because the inputs are too expensive. Construction stops because the raw materials (steel, concrete) are too expensive to manufacture, and people don’t have money to pay for new homes.
We have done all these things just in the last 4 years! So why should we do more of it instead of just building more renewable energy?
degrowth is compatible with increasing standards of living for 99.5% of people all the while being able to then actually preserve these standards up in the future.
our current model produces growth without proportionally increasing standards of living, and accepts that livelihoods will collapse all over Europe and Africa as it becomes increasingly hostile to agriculture due to climate change.
think of the viability of degrowth as a policy within the prisoners dilemma of global capitalism as you want, but please come up with a more serious critique that doesn't equally indigte the staus quo
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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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821997
I'd consider power generation (solar, wind, nuclear) as strategically important and accept that it may need subsidies long term. If this allows the country a degree of independence from external shocks, it would be worth it.
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...
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.
> Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,
That is factually wrong. Coal mining has to re-naturalize the areas used for mining after the coal was removed.
And most industries are supposed to not just leave toxic waste and instead have a plan what to do with toxic waste products these days. And no, an empty building cannot be compared to radioactive waste.
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Wind farms are expected to a account for it and it is routinely included in cost calculations.
> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,
Oil and gas extraction platforms here in Norway, I believe.
> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean
Does not mean it's a made up issue. That's classic whataboutism. Ecologists are not concerned just about nuclear activity, but precisely about the overall industry destroying our entire environment, and for whose profit?!
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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.
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If nuclear is such a big cash cow, why is edf in huge debts, state owned and suffering from aged power plants having issues?
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?
No. Either it's profitable or it is not. It is not.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Well sure, but the alternatives aren't really affected by this, because they don't have to be planned and financed these such long time frames. So this is a problem for nuclear. The core technology seldomly is the deciding factor for these things.
France doesn't have an answer for decommissioning costs.
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
Now check how decommissioning is going with Isar reactors instead of soviet ones
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" 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...
The 100% state owned EDF group take sole responsibility for the finances? What a relief for the taxpayers of France...
But at least the cost is factored in from the start. Those costs often double during construction but at least we know the decommissioning costs are factored into the fake numbers they use to get approval to start builds.
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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.
We've got the technology to drill deep bore holes, kilometers below where water will move on any time relevant to human existence, where we could stick what small amounts of dangerous material is left.
Encapsulating the waste and burying it somewhere on an abyssal plain in the deep ocean should also be a pretty low-risk approach, the IAEA has looked into variations of that.
Like someone else said, I think it's all expensive because some people want it to be.
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?
> using fossil fuels as hard as possible?
All the data showing that it is still free. There is no cost, generally anthropogenic climate change is increasing the habitability of our atmosphere.
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.
There is no reason to assume that fusion will be a particularly cheap power source.
Fusion has been 10 years away for the past 3 decades.
(I think fusion is great, by the way, but I just don’t believe any timelines at this point anymore)
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I see what you did there :D Good one, thank you!
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.
I remember reading about coal-fired power plants specifically in Poland, which exceed the radioactivity levels for nuclear plants. This because the burnt-off coal contains small amounts of radioactive elements, which form particles and drop off near the flue.
But of course there are no norms for max radioactivity levels at a coal power plant site.
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Steel is not vitrified, only high level nuclear waste - spend nuclear fuel with highly radioactive fission products.
Steel is taken apart and measured, non-activated steel can be melted down and recycled. Activated steel has to go into storage, either low level nuclear or medium level nuclear waste.
The biggest concern for steel is cobalt. During manufacturing steel with very low cobalt content is usually used for nuclear applications, but there is still small amount of cobalt.
In reactor, under neutron radiation, stable cobalt-59 changes to cobalt-60, strong gamma ray emitter with a half-life of 5 years. So neutron activated steel has to storage for at least few decades.
When done not properly, this is a health hazard.
" Circa 1983, construction was finished of 1700 apartments in Taiwan which were built with steel contaminated with cobalt-60. About 10,000 people occupied these buildings during a 9–20 year period. On average, these people unknowingly received a radiation dose of 0.4 Sv. Some studies have found that this large group did not suffer a higher incidence of cancer mortality, as the linear no-threshold model would predict, but suffered a lower cancer mortality than the general Taiwan public. These observations support the radiation hormesis model, however other studies have found health impacts that confound the results. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60#Steel_contamination
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Have a look at this nuclear plant in Northern Germany that is in the process of being decomissioned since 1995. It's still not finished, suspected end date is now in the 2040s and is now projected to cost about 10B €. For a single plant.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald (you have to translate that page yourself, the English version doesn't contain the relevant information)
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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?
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?
Sweden has been phasing out nuclear for 40 years, after a referendum where the people had the choice of "No nuclear!", "No nuclear", and "No nuclear". There was no "yes".
It's been phasing out nuclear since then.
Nowadays the Green party and the (formerly named) Communist party are the only ones against nuclear power, but thanks to the left block winning the recent election, they may push that one issue enough that they get to continue the destruction of our planet.
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> 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
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
The only money thrown around in French nuclear is handed out to EDF's competitors by EDF themselves as a compromise with the European Commission who didn't want EDF to reap to massive profits of the nuclear plants for itself (EDF has handed out around €100B over the past 15 years and still made a profit pretty much every year, despite massive forced investments in reaction to Fukushima).
Considering how much money is extracted from edf through dividends and in the past through arenh, it's the opposite - edf is subsidizing french state.
I'm sure edf would be happy to get 18bn/y in govt handouts like ren get in Germany through EEG
> 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.