[nickpp]

Yes, free markets have fuelled a technological boom that delivered us renewables - an incredible, completely unexpected feat. But it may be a case of too little too late.

The problem is we spent last 100 years spewing CO2 into the atmosphere instead of switching to nuclear due to the nuclear fear-mongering from environmentalists. Now we are facing Climate Change, a civilization-ending danger. And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.

The rational strategy would thus be a (slow, controlled, careful) cost-reducing deregulation and nuclear buildup in parallel with renewables and closing down of legacy plants.

But we are facing the same resistance and fear mongering from the exact same politicians and ideologues that got us into this predicament in the first place. I am pretty sure no solution can come from the same people and way of thinking that created the problem.

[hef19898]

Fun fact: Free markets have not a lot to do with the technological leap of solar, that was mostly German subsidies for PV. In the end only Chinese companies benegited from that, but that is a different topic.

Nobody, I repeat nobody, is financing new nuclear reactors in the developed world (except specialized and military applications). The money goes, for quote a while now, into renewables and, sadly, some coal plants (which is mainly due to CO2 certificates being too dirt cheap, and making coal plants financially viable). The free market and financials decided against nuclear, as did politics in a lot of countries.

One thing you do ignore so, getting new nuclear reactors up and running takes decades in Europe, there is no such thing as a fast built out. Not even if the public and political will would be there, which it isn't. All we do achieve with argueing for new nuclear capacity is slowing the build out of wind and solar down and slow development of grid scale storage tech.

[bumby]

>The free market and financials decided against nuclear

I'm just trying to fully understand the position here. How do you mean "free market"? Because it seems a disproportionate amount of nuclear cost is driven by regulation. I'm not even saying that unwarranted, but it certainly seems to be very different from the colloquial definition of a "free market".

[hef19898]

"It seems" is usually not true. Sure, nuclear is regulated. As are all other forms of electricity generation. As usual, regulation is written in blood, or in the case of nuclear three figure billions of clean-up costs after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Regulation, I might remind you, that was written by staunchly pro-nuclear organizations.

Also, just necause you have regulations doesn't mean you don't have a free market. Hence, there is a free market for nuclear electricity. Thing is, nobody wants to finance new projects (with the exception of developing countries, but those have a lot of catching up to do).

One cost nuclear power plants do not have to carry is insurance against large accidents. No insurance comoany would take on said risk, hence the state is carrying that risk. Soubds to me like a huge cost factor is taken off from nuclear power plant operators here (just to pick one example).

As said elsewhere, I'm all for keeping existing NPPs running as long as safely possible (which was the reason Germany had to shut down a couple), and shut down coal plants instead. Building new NPPs takes too long to be a viable solution, and is too expensive (and hence the lack of fubding for new ones).

[bumby]

The rants about regulation being rooted in safety miss the point. As I stated before, I'm not making a claim that regulation is bad or unwarranted. What I'm pushing back on is the idea that the nuclear industry operates in a "free market." Utilities, in general, do not operate in a free market in the US. They are regulated monopolies. A startup cannot just decide to start generating electricity and tie into the grid, irrespective of whether they meet all the safety regulations. Not all regulations are safety-based but rather based on economics of scale being beneficial for the consumer. That's why it's not a free market.

So while there's a lot to discuss about the relative costs of nuclear, claiming they are the result of a free market doesn't really hold water.

[nickpp]

> Free markets have not a lot to do with the technological leap of solar, that was mostly German subsidies

The technology used to make solar panels is the same used for semiconductors. It evolved al Moore's law speed thanks to an unregulated free market for the tech industry. Same reason we enjoy a cheap supercomputer in every pocket in 2023 instead of the city’s Eniac. That’s what lack of regulation does.

What German guvernamental subsidies did was to build a lot of Solar capacity in a country with relatively little sun. I hope it works out for them, but I remember earlier this year importing nuclear electricity from France.

[hutzlibu]

" I remember earlier this year importing nuclear electricity from France."

And I remember france hat to partially shut down their reactors in the summer, because the rivers were too warm to cool them.

[nickpp]

Nope. The rivers where just fine to cool reactors, it was that they were heating the water too much for the (outdated) environmental regulations.

[mschuster91]

> And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.

It absolutely is. Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind combined, so over a year the equivalent of a dozen average large scale NPPs.

Even accounting for the availability problem, aka capacity factor (wind ~0.3-0.5, solar .25), that's the equivalent of four NPPs a year. The rest? Can easily be covered with a combination of hydro, geothermal, massive grids and dynamic load management (both on the demand side aka load shedding and on the source side aka powerwalls with feedback capability).

[nickpp]

> Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind

I root for them to succeed. I do love renewables. But I know that in my country at least the waiting time today for panel purchase, installation and grid connection is over a year. However they are subsidized by the state so that adds time and bureaucracy.

The rest… I have my doubts: it’s all ideas but little reality. We’ll see in about 5 years time, I guess.

[hef19898]

The demand side became pretty proficient regarding load shedding as well, making literally millions off of it.

[mschuster91]

Meh, a lot of heavy industry is still running on machines from the 60s. Incentivising them to upgrade their old crap to modern times would cost them billions (which is why they've been dragging their arses so long), but it would bring a lot of consumption savings and flexibility to the grid.

[hef19898]

I personally knownof three energy hungry places, two former employers and and one nearby, that runs those really old machines (chemical plants from before the war, WW1 in one case, graphite production of the same age and paper machines at pretty old sites) that are perfectly able for almost a decade now to adapt their production, within certain limits of course, to provide load balancing. They even go as far as adapting production to electricity prices in the spot market and speculate with their long term contract volumes. Litterally making millions, to the point production for zhe waste bin is almost profitable (which renders the whole sustainability angle moot, but I digress).

Morw of that, some storage, bio gas and hydrogen peaker plants, geo thermal and renewables and we are good to go.

[mschuster91]

> plants from before the war, WW1 in one case

JFC. I get why this is profitable, these machines have been written off financially a century ago and have been money printers ever since for that reason, but this kind of behavior should be seriously penalized - it makes competition for new companies really hard (because they have to pay down the value for new machines), and it's bad for the environment as a whole because if they're still running the same motors and control units from back then, then they are wasting a lot of electricity, most likely also emit a lot more toxic effluents than a plant with modern emission controls and mitigations would, and most likely run at lower yield rates than modern processes so they're wasting more raw materials.

[hef19898]

The machines were old, control equipement was / is newish. The same stuff would be impossible to produce on new plants in Germany, environmental restrictions are too strict. Kazachstan, India and China are the places to go. And even China didn't want that dirty shit anymore. The old sites work because they operated for ages.