[windows2020]

Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.

[triceratops]

Nuclear is great but we can do without bashing renewables as "insufficient". Solar + batteries are here right now and they're cheaper than nuclear.

[idiotsecant]

Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage. Storage is extremely expensive. Nuke is extremely cheap to generate -once its built. The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!) and each nuke plant is a bespoke effort which gets recertified each time. This is enormously expensive. There is reason to believe that small modular nuke plants will vastly reduce this cost. That means we might have a path to cheap nuke, but there is no immediate path to cheap storage barring a technological revolution (not just incremental improvements) in battery tech.

In the long run solar power will kill fossil fuels, but we desperately need a bridge to get us there and not destroy the carbon balance in the atmosphere. Nuke is that bridge.

[triceratops]

> Storage is extremely expensive

Define "expensive". Over what timescale? Have you seen https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

"Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier."

This is right now, July 2025. The costs of batteries continue to fall. How much cheaper will batteries be by the time we start churning out SMRs fast and cheap?

By all means keep beavering away at nuclear. Its time will come one day. But I won't hold my breath for it to solve the climate problem in the next 10 years.

[johncolanduoni]

“Very sunny” is doing a lot of work there. The storage required goes up dramatically once you run the numbers for somewhere that has seasons. The long-range HVDC lines between hemispheres idea is cute but probably geopolitically impossible; I don’t think the US will let its ability to literally keep the lights on depend on South America.

Storage could get there, but I don’t think it’s credible that manufacturing scale alone will solve the problem. We probably need some new, qualitatively different chemistries to become viable for solar to be viable for the whole grid. From a technical perspective the nuclear plants we could build in the 1960s could do it, whether we can still build them (no matter if the barrier is regulatory or practical) is another question.

[ViewTrick1002]

The other side of the question is:

How will you get me with rooftop solar and a home battery to buy your extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when I have my own imperfect solution almost the entire year?

Scale this up to a society adding onshore and offshore wind and you quickly realize that the nuclear plant will have a capacity factor at 10% or so.

Vogtle with a 20% capacity factor costs somewhere like 85 cents per kWh, or $850 per MWh.

Nuclear power due to the massive CAPEX is the worse solution imaginable to fix renewable shortcomings.

Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.

Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

[seec]

Electricity self-sufficiency is only realistic when: your needs are quite low, you own a house, you have capital to invest for both panels and storage, your heating is not electricity dependent (so most likely fossil fuel or wood, which isn't better)

Yet, most people live in cities, with plenty of appartement or shared houses where most of the requirements are just not feasible. And the trend isn't going in reverse.

So yes, YOU, may have your own individualistic solution but clearly, it's not something that is suitable for most people. Considering you do not have a real horse in the race, you should quit arguing and enjoy your own egotistical "solution" and let people who want to live collectively decide what's best for them.

[johncolanduoni]

I’m sure the French are crying about having much lower energy prices than e.g. Germany, even with the importing. I don’t see why we’d expect they’d pay more if the natural gas plants were in their borders.

[idiotsecant]

You sure wrote a lot here to make one point. Yes, if you're willing to operate your own disconnected microgrid you have enormous advantages. Not every entity can do that or is willing to accept the loss of reliability that comes with.

[Dylan16807]

In most of the US, the minimum solar power in winter is still more than half the average amount. We can set up enough panels within the country.

[triceratops]

> “Very sunny” is doing a lot of work there.

The price dropped 22% in a year. Next year it could be the same price in "somewhat sunny" places.

[johncolanduoni]

The additional storage needed when you need to store energy from the summer to feed the grid in the winter (instead of just for day/night and a few cloudy days) is not only orders of magnitude higher in raw capacity, but requires different battery chemistries that can hold charge for that long. 22% cheaper is a drop in the bucket.

[ericd]

Are you so sure that storage is so expensive? It’s been coming down the cost curve extremely quickly, such that opinions formed even an year ago are severely outdated, and it’s now solar+storage that’s being favorably compared to replacing nat gas plants, not just solar itself.

[johncolanduoni]

Storage that is good enough to replace peaker plants, and storage that is good enough to handle seasonal variations in insolation are completely different ballgames. The lithium battery chemistry in your phone will self-discharge on the order of a month - there are alternate chemistries but they have other problems right now.

[ViewTrick1002]

> seasonal variations

Or overbuild renewables reducing the seasonal variations. In cost terms when compared to nuclear power those would be insignificant.

With fossil based energy systems we didn’t match production capacity to consumption 100% with peakers having low capacity factors.

But somehow we can’t overbuild a kWh and need massive seasonal storage when it comes to renewables.

[idiotsecant]

Yes, if you have a magic planet spanning transmission system capable of handling the power flows over building solves the problem. Unfortunately that's orders of magnitude more expensive than storage, which we already can't afford.

[magicalhippo]

> Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage.

For say an AI training-oriented data center, you could scale down the power usage when supply is limited. You could change power limits on the CPU/GPUs, put the machines in sleep mode or powered off entirely. So the required storage would just be a slightly bigger UPS.

Not sure if the economics works out, but at least technically it's possible as it's more flexible than user-based loads.

[anonymousDan]

AI based training is an almost ideal match with this kind of supply. You could even imagine migrating long running training jobs to different parts of the world based on energy availability to optimise costs.

[idiotsecant]

So the model is buy some of the worlds most expensive hardware and let it sit idle for half the time? If I want to save the same throughput I need to buy at least twice the hardware!

Load throttling is one of those ideas that seems great as long as someone else is doing it.

[anonymousDan]

Ha, that's a great point. I guess if you have some latency sensitive inference workload the capacity will effectively be dynamic, but that is likely uncorrelated with local energy prices I imagine.

[loeg]

You don't want to waste your GPU capex by not running those suckers at 100%. (Other datacenter workloads it makes some sense to demand-regulate, but not AI.)

[Kon5ole]

Solar benefits from storage yes but it's not at all worthless even without it.

If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.

Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.

I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.

[delusional]

> The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!)

So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.

This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.

[idiotsecant]

You're approaching this with the nuance of a child. Yes, nuke regulation is burdensome, and yes it is necessary because nuke can have quite severe failures when failures occur. The solution is not to dogmatically suppose that one of those two basic facts is false. It's to engineer around the problem by making many exact copies of the same design, reducing the amount of regulation that needs to be applied on a per unit basis. That's what small modular reactors are. Certify once, build many.

[delusional]

> You're approaching this with the nuance of a child.

I'm really happy I got to speak to such and adult then. Fuck you too.

[zekrioca]

> Storage is extremely expensive.

No.

[destitude]

And yet we still have no place to put that "clean" energy when it is depleted.

[zamadatix]

You can bury the casks in my (literal) backyard if you'd like (please put the grass back). It's an overhyped issue much less impactful than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.

[triceratops]

> than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.

As I'm fond of saying, environmentalists didn't kill nuclear. I'm not denying they had motive. But they lacked means. They can't stop anything else they've set their minds to: fossil fuels, automobiles, deforestation, industrial livestock farming. Even whaling is alive ffs.

No, there was another party with both motive (competition) and means (lots of cash and political influence) to do the deed: the fossil fuel industry. And nuclear didn't help itself with accidents (and ensuing costly clean ups, one of which helped take down the Soviet Union), and budget overruns even when things went smoothly. Both found a convenient fall guy: the green movement.

Tl;dr nuclear hasn't grown because of money. It cost too much, and the competition had the cash to slander its reputation.

[maroonblazer]

I'd rather it be stored neatly in canisters underground than floating up into the atmosphere.

[loeg]

It can be left in canisters on site. It could be dumped in the ocean. It really doesn't matter.

[triceratops]

> It could be dumped in the ocean

FFS no. This is the reason environmentalists don't trust the nuclear industry.

[loeg]

This is a "no" purely for optics; it would be perfectly safe.

[triceratops]

Citation needed.

[loeg]

There's approximately 1.4 * 10^21 kg of water in the ocean. There's about 2.3 * 10^6 kg of waste per year. 10^-15 is a really small number.

(Hell, seawater is already ~3.3 * 10^-9 uranium.)

[protocolture]

God I hate this argument. Casks. The answer is casks. The short term solution turns out to be a fantastic long term solution. If that isnt good enough, demand it be reprocessed with thorium or something.

There. No more silly anti nuke gotcha. You can give up on that one permanently.

[zekrioca]

Nuclear proliferation.

[protocolture]

I am steelmanning this, and assuming you are making a hilarious joke at the expense of anti nuke activists. Instead of defending the storage issue, this is just a pivot to another unrelated and already well resolved issue. Thats exactly what the silly anti nuke folk get up to. Well played, solid joke, 10/10.