[TreeRingCounter]

The article seems to blame "the bankers" for not investing in nuclear fusion, while completely ignoring the fact that most of the cost of new nuclear construction is from regulatory changes that happened in the last 50 years.

[LastTrain]

Those exist for a reason, care to say why they aren’t necessary before dismissing them outright? Surely you agree some amount of regulation is necessary?

[gamegoblin]

Any set of nuclear regulations that aren't just a copy of France's nuclear regulations are probably too restrictive. France gets 3/4 of their electricity from nuclear without any major incidents.

(Obviously this is overly simplistic, there is a set of natural disasters that France isn't subject to that other countries are, so France is just a starting point. But every addition should be justified by answer the question "What about our circumstances makes us different from France here?")

[Gwypaas]

Half of France's nuclear fleet is offline due to maintenance issues. They've gone from an electricity exporter to importer when it is most needed.

Have a look at Flamanville 3 and try to sell another 50 of those to the public.

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

[gamegoblin]

And yet... no major safety events and still generating a significant amount of electricity.

Obviously, as you point out, it could be better. But I'll take France, issues and all, over coal plants every day of the week.

I expect France will get their act together.

Re: net importer, their amount of import is basically a rounding error, on the order of 0.1% of their energy usage. They are energy neutral.

[Gwypaas]

The great thing is that the alternative is not coal plants anymore, it is renewables.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

[acidburnNSA]

LCOE is unrelated to systems costs of large decarbonized grid because it leaves out the costs of long-term backup, increased transmission, overcapacity needed to fill the night batteries, and more.

[wolfram74]

You've made two arguments here, all are necessary and some are necessary. There's a record of anti-nuclear sentiment being stoked by fossil fuel industry[0]

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

[prewett]

His point is that even if the reactor is free, it’s not competitive because of everything required to convert the heat to electricity makes it more expensive. That part has nothing to do with regulation.

[Gwypaas]

TMI, Fukushima and Chernobyl are acceptable events which we should simply deal with every 10th year when they happen?

[mjhay]

Those events killed orders of magnitude less people than coal plants do every year, from normal operation. Fukushima, in particular, only had one death attributable to radiation.

Fission is the only operational technology that can replace fossil fuels for base load. Grid storage for solar and wind is just so under-developed and difficult to scale. We have to stop emitting CO2 ASAP, we can't wait for tech that may or may not work. Ruling out fission because of these demonstrably small risks is wildly irrational, when the alternative is total global social and ecological collapse.

Humans tend to judge unfamiliar but small risks as being much larger - think of how there are annual panics about razor blades/fentanyl/whatever in Halloween candy, but not the cars that kill over 70 children each Halloween on average. This same tendency is exactly why there is so much irrational fear around nuclear.

[Gwypaas]

The great thing is that coal is not the alternative anymore, renewables are.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Base load on the producer side is an outdated term. It simply came into existence because the most inflexible plants used to be the cheapest, that is not the case anymore. You can talk about base demand, but that can be fulfilled using any source.

Or as Wikipedia puts it:

> The base load (also baseload) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week. This demand can be met by unvarying power plants, dispatchable generation, or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources, depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market.

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

> This same tendency is exactly why there is so much irrational fear around nuclear.

Or because you still have to measure the radioactivity of wild game and mushrooms in northern Sweden and Bavaria.

> Although game is considered a delicacy in Bavaria, large amounts of meat are disposed of. Because many wild boars are still contaminated with radioactivity - even 35 years after the Chernobyl reactor accident.

https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-04-26-35-years-after-...

[mjhay]

I've seen people make these semantic arguments you're making to confuse the situation around base load. The reality is that you have not offered any alternative, and your post only muddies the waters.

> Base load on the producer side is an outdated term. It simply came into existence because the most inflexible plants used to be the cheapest, that is not the case anymore. You can talk about base demand, but that can be fulfilled using any source.

Oh really? What's this more flexible power? Is it perhaps natural gas? It's interesting how anti-nuclear people always gloss that over.

> Or because you still have to measure the radioactivity of wild game and mushrooms in northern Sweden and Bavaria.

Having to test some mushrooms and game meat is nothing compared to the damage fossil fuels do in their intended use. Rivers and soils in many places have been poisoned by fossil fuel extraction, including from natural gas.

[Gwypaas]

Given your answers, I suspect you have a quite dogmatic view of the world, but we can nonetheless look into research and other sources.

> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].

> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.

> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Or we can take a look at Wikipedia for an even broader view

> 100% renewable energy means getting all energy from renewable resources. The endeavor to use 100% renewable energy for electricity, heating, cooling and transport is motivated by climate change, pollution and other environmental issues, as well as economic and energy security concerns.

> Research into this topic is fairly new, with very few studies published before 2009, but has gained increasing attention in recent years. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and desalination – is feasible and economically viable.[5][6][7][8] A cross-sectoral, holistic approach is seen as an important feature of 100% renewable energy systems and is based on the assumption "that the best solutions can be found only if one focuses on the synergies between the sectors" of the energy system such as electricity, heat, transport or industry.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

Use power-to-x, biofuel, or even in emergencies, burn natural gas for the last percentage points for all that I care. The important part is economically solving the energy transition for the vast majority of cases, not being an absolutist.

[The_Double]

All these proposed strategies to live with variable storage only work for short term variability, in places close to the equator. In my country, there is an almost 10x difference on solar energy between Summer and Winter. While (domestic) energy usage doubles in the winter.

The only feasable 0 carbon options are to either install an absolutely massive amount of Hydrogen storage and conversion, to give up any hope of self-sufficiency and import all electricity during the winter from places on the other side of the world, or to use Nuclear.

[nosianu]

The "key point" according to the article itself is:

> Now here’s the key point I’m trying to make: it’s not that fusion is expensive, it’s that everything else is cheaper.