[ViewTrick1002]

> Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.

So you’re saying that we should turn off the nuclear plant?

What do we calculate? A generous 50% capacity factor?

The new built nuclear power now costs ~40 cents/kWh.

It just becomes ridiculously expensive when real world constraints are added.

[trebligdivad]

Yeh it probably is expensive - but we currently have no other way (other than gas) to cover the low-wind/sun periods; while there are times when the UK can almost run purely off wind, there are other periods where we get ~5% of that wind energy for a week or so; the battery storage is nowhere near useful for that.

[rcxdude]

They're right, though. Doing both is dumb. The alternative to renewables + storage is nuclear + storage, with the nuclear + storage having the advantage of the storage capacity needed being more predictable and a bit smaller, but with the massive disadvantage of the nuclear being extremely expensive and slow to build. But building enough nuclear plants to do what you're proposing, and then turning them off most of the time to get energy from the renewable plants you're also building, and only drawing from them unpredictably, is objectively the worst option.

[pfdietz]

Hydrogen or low capex thermal.

The UK has adequate salt formations for large scale storage of hydrogen.

[trebligdivad]

Looks like someone is trying to push for it: https://ukenergystorage.co.uk/

Good if they can get it to work; there's also a hydrogen/ammonia storage scheme being planned; https://www.statkraft.co.uk/newsroom/2025/statkraft-shares-p...

I think it's going to take a while, but certainly worth trying.

[MagicMoonlight]

Hydrogen is the worst possible fuel. It's the least dense material in existence so you need a ton of it. It has to be made from either cracking polluting materials, or using a huge amount of electricity. It is really difficult to store and really flammable.

Nuclear is endless clean energy. Why do people like you keep ruining everything? If it wasn't for you, we'd have had full nuclear by 1980. No oil problems, no terrorist states, no dubai.

[pfdietz]

This would be green hydrogen. Sure, it has low density, but underground storage is pretty cheap at scale. Yes, it's flammable, but that can be handled, and is handled routinely -- the world currently produces and consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen per year.

The huge advantage of hydrogen here is that a gas turbine power plant might cost $600/kW, a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. So if you have a need for a backup plant whose cost will be dominated by amortization of its fixed cost, hydrogen beats nuclear.

[lostlogin]

> Nuclear is endless clean energy.

The UK hasn’t had any nuclear waste problems?

It might be the solution but pretending it’s perfect is how we got here.

[matt-p]

It's so funny every time we build a nuclear plant we say 'ooooh expensive' then by the time it's built it turns out it's ~ at the cost of gas.

[mikeyouse]

Running existing plants is about the cost of gas - building new ones is extraordinarily expensive and is something like 3x or 4x the cost of other options, even after adjusting for nuclear’s much better capacity factor.

[croes]

Yeah, let‘s ignore that construction costs

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cev03wer0p2o

And the subsidies needed to keep the price "low".

That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs

[chickenbig]

Please no more of Stop Sizewell C's Alison Downes a.k.a. (Moira) Alison Reynolds [0] & [1], who also happens to be one of the directors of the Greenpeace Environmental Trust [2].

> That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs

I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?

[0] https://stopsizewellc.org/core/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/TE... page 5

[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...

[2] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...

[ViewTrick1002]

> I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?

I am not sure either. But they keep increasing the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 program, and they still haven't been able to pass them.

The French government just fell due to being underwater while being completely unable to handle it. A massive handout of tax money to the nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

[happymellon]

The current "real world constraint" is purchasing gas from Russia.

Yeah, nuclear is better than that.

[bauble12]

The thing Ive never quite understood is that the UK has no domestic supply of uranium.

[cjrp]

Canada, Australia and Germany are all big exporters; without tempting fate, I don't think the UK will have issues importing from those countries.

[ViewTrick1002]

Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1]

You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it.

[1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-...

[realusername]

The French gas plants have been built to support renewables, France didn't have almost any gas plants prior 2010.

There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol.