At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...
If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.
The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.
Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.
That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.
"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2025...
On the spectrum from "cheap" to expensive, where would that fall?
For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
When you actually need to generate electricity rather than gather it, what's better than nuclear?
France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.
How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?
(also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)
So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?
Yes, with extra steps.
Regulations, more so than their impact on price, cost calendar time.
Time, especially for already-lengthy and complicated infrastructure projects, costs volume.
And low volume means high prices and a slow pace of improvement.
Henry Ford wouldn't have built many automobiles, or improved them as quickly as he did, if every one needed to be individually permitted by multiple government agencies.
The failure of nuclear is that it never standardized and scaled to industrially-efficient volumes (outside of arguably France) at exactly the point that it could have technologically done so (~1970s). Had Offshore Power Systems^ begun producing floating reactors at volume in Jacksonville, FL in the late 70s, we'd be having a very different conversation about cheap American nuclear power today.
nuclear being expensive is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. the costs for certified equipment are high because the market is small and not competitive, because nobodys building nuclear, because everyone knows its too expensive to build and not worth it.
the only solution i see is massive state investment like what france was doing in the 70s. that would upset the market purists but its more practical than trying to push the industry with a neoliberal hands off approach.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.
(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)
Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.
France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal.
But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.
We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
No need to run the world: in the last decades, some environmentalists have been lobbying against nuclear energy and in the end, the people in many countries have become opposed to it by fear of it. And that feared is fuelled (among others) by environmentalists for sure.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
If it's about comparing energies financially (and many other dimensions actually), nothing gets remotely close to oil. But oil is limited and oil is destroying the world.
Also not to forget: everything nowadays depends on globalisation and therefore oil. We like to compare renewables to oil, but we forget that they totally depend on oil at the moment. Without oil, we don't build much renewables anywhere. So an important question is: without oil, do we need nuclear energy or not? I believe we do. I believe we also need renewables, to be clear.
Those regulations you despise were written in blood.
Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it.
Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.
An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent.
I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.
2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were much more likely to directly invest in energy projects. It didn’t have to compete with Labubus for private dollars.
3. Its current competition didn’t exist, given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten, and how much cheaper battery tech has gotten with signs all of them will only get even cheaper. And on the non renewable side, natural gas has become incredibly cheaper as well.
In a world with a lot of oil. How does that evolve when we don't have enough oil anymore?
Feels like renewables are extremely distributed, which sounds like it may be harder to manage without the happy globalisation brought by accessible oil.
To be clear, I believe we also need renewables. But I also believe that we won't remotely replace oil, so we need absolutely everything we can imagine, and that includes nuclear energy.
2. Once the vote is there(Switzerland is a direct democracy), the public funds will be there. Sweden has recently chosen to invest ~40B Euro.
3. Solar, really? In Switzerland? Many parts of the industrialised world receive very little sun, especially in winter, where coincidentally, energy usage peaks.
And intermittent power generation like wind is no competition to nuclear.
These are very weak arguments. Good luck replacing Oskarshamn with solar panels…
For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.
Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.
The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.
That nuclear power must take forever is a myth and is only due to dysfunctional politics.
That “you get a permit in the winter and it’s done by summer” is a totally bogus claim. Perhaps for some tiny installation compared to a power plant with 1.5GW output.
https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/o...
It is a hard sell when you have to front a good chunk of money, without a track record of successful build ups. It applies to other infrastructure stuff like HSR.
Let’s hope Switzerland takes the lead here, Sweden are already building.
The political will is there. Let’s do it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
SVT or SR has never shown me this, wonder why...
And what is crazy is we, in Europe, act and talk as if we cannot do anything without sucking up to USA or China.
We also have massive Hydro in Sweden. We can see what is currently giving us electricity.
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/
oh and dont get us started on the electricity zones and germany...
Turn on Barsebäck again... absolute asenine they shut it down. Will never happen, been too long, also owned by Uniper... (Germans)
And sadly S+MP+V will win this election it looks like. Say goodbye to any new nuclear power. Also it will be 2015 all over again but that is off topic...
After the accidents showed that these designs where just not quite safe enough, redundancy in the safety systems were added. The thing is; as soon as those reactor designs got a bit more safe, they got much more expensive quite quickly. Just look at France's history of nuclear reactor development.CP0, CP1 and CP2 were somewhat cheap and they were able to churn out the things in quite a number.P4 and P'4 were already much more complex, more expensive and it just wasn't possible to mass produce these things like before. By N4 the economy of scale had broken down almost completely.
That's the problem with nuclear reactors. They are simple in principle, but fiendishly difficult in practice and enormously complex. So complex indeed that the learning curve doesn't yield any compounding returns. That's what we've seen play out in the last 50 years.
I don't know how things evolved in Sweden, but I assume that Swedish reactors don't have all the safety features of modern reactors. I guess that's what made them cheap, just like the CP-series in France.
It's not about safety but features and wishes to have. French reactors were cheap even at P4 level but the demand hasn't increased as planned and electrification was not great, so construction stopped. EPR is a complicated mess trying to cater to all regulations at once, especially the harsh german ones. That's why EPR2 has some stuff stripped apart
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive.
It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition".
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
Ontario's Bruce A site (Units 1-4) have an age of ~45 years, and has just finished refurbishment (ahead of schedule and under budget) to run for another few decades:
* https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/refurbishment-of-bruce...
Ontario's Pickering B nuclear site (Units 5-8) have an age of ~40 years, and are about to be refurbished to run another 30+ years:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...
So while the 60-80 years has not been hit, it is probably less on the "speculative" side of spectrum and more on the "probable" side.
Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.
I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".
https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/georgia-nuclear-powe...
Renewables are not remotely displacing fossil fuels. Look at fossil fuel consumption.
