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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.

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

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!).

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

Ontario, Canada may have something to say about that:

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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...

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."

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Plus you can stockpile it super easy.

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

Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?

I would say near Pisa, on the Arno River.

Judging from the map, Piedmont, Liguria, Trentino, Tuscany and Basilicata have good sites.

The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).

So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.

That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.

The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.

Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.

>t's that or buying gas from Russia.

Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.

And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?

It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.

To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.

... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)

1. It's the most expensive form of electricity;

2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;

3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);

4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;

5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;

6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;

7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;

8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;

9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";

10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and

11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.

Trivially. If we push hard, more than three orders of magnitude are possible (even for overall energy use, which is itself around an order of magnitude more than electricity), even without launching anything to orbit.

IMO it's much better if we go to space after the first of those orders of magnitude, rather than pursuing K1 on the ground.

> I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.

Solar is as likely as fission to lead to either of these things. Each of the four is a different beast.

Solar is also the only way to scale up to a K2, which would trivially obviate both even when the ships' primary propulsion is solar (laser) sails.

I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

Why?

What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?

Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?

Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.

I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.

That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.

Burning coal sure is stupid, but so is being stuck in the outdated idea that we need either coal or nuclear for baseload. Solar, wind and storage are much cheaper, more flexible and far faster to build (a year or two, not 15+). IMO that's a much better answer than starting some SMR pipe dream now. 10 or 20 years ago it would have been different, but there's no point clinging to a solution just because it made sense back then, and was rejected for the wrong reasons.

Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.

...and yes I know, then design flaws stroke. But the initial spark was not accidental at all.

With this mindset, nothing ever changes. No social problem was ever solved without looking at it from a social/political perspective. If you agree that growth ideology is problematic, then that's what you need to dismantle.

> To be fair, the declining fertility rate will probably solve a bunch of environmental issues

I think this is just wrong. The problem is the lifestyle: the throwaway culture and abundant consumption of throwaway goods. We could be just as many billions living OK in our environment, but you could have just 100 million average middle-class westerners continuing to fuck up nature (just slightly slower).

Europe only turned neoliberal a few decades ago and only some countries are deeply into it like the Netherlands. Before the 90s we were much more socialist and can go back that way.

China also isn't neoliberal. They're good at playing the capitalist game but they're not afraid to pull the handbrake where needed and they are going good things for green energy.

Nor do I see a great deal of concern for manufacturing, as long as it is done somewhere else. If it done here: it is super dirty and dangerous, jobs no one wants. Elsewhere: what great opportunity for them to rise out from poverty. The fact that the environmental regulations are nonexistent, either never brought up or dismissed because we can't regulate another government.

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

i like how he died. guts.

I know HN comments should be more constructive than that, but your comment is setting all these trumpesque fires in the form of lies, that no constructive debate or rebuttal would be useful. You would not be convinced, and anybody reading the back and forth would be under the misapprehension that "the truth is probably somewhere in between".