[tony_cannistra]

I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.

This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones.

Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additional radars on and within the turbine farms themselves.

So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.

[beembeem]

Result first (kill anything not carbon-based), find rationale later.

Same applies to how this admin forced layoffs at the green energy (hydro + nuclear) behemoth BPA [1] (which was funded entirely by ratepayers, not the federal government) then claimed an energy emergency to keep open coal plants serving the same geographies, coal plants that were already uneconomical and planned for shut down (or re-tooling to gas in the case of TransAlta's plant in WA). [2] Oh and they already re-hired some of the laid off staff at BPA because they overcut.

There is no point in taking these arguments at face value. It's an excuse generated after-the-fact, and in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy.

[1] https://www.columbian.com/news/2025/mar/12/letter-cuts-at-bp...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/doe-or...

[pbhjpbhj]

>in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy.

Also killing all humans, what idiots.

[array_key_first]

Well not them, they're too old to die to that. The goal is to have a cushy life for the ~5-10 years they have left. After that, it's somebody else's problem.

[andreyf]

Not all humans, just the ones that can't afford buy property in low risk areas, start companies to help people move, etc. and for those who can, appreciating investments galore!

[lucyjojo]

they're not idiots. they're sociopaths.

[brandensilva]

Boggles my mind a bit given much of the oil companies own the new renewable tech too. Why not keep investing in the future.

[benregenspan]

They might be the "wrong" oil companies. (In the case of Empire Wind, the administration is probably at best indifferent about screwing over the Norwegian state oil company.)

[balex]

Atlas shrugged

[defrost]

Should we understand this to mean that you are suggesting productive citizens should go on strike against a current dystopian United States administration?

[gregbot]

BPA is a federal agency. The Trump administration has been very supportive of zero carbon nuclear i believe they have promised $80 billion dollars to build new nuclear plants. Staff cuts dont mean they oppose using those energy sources.

[gardncl]

US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage which means they are deployed for roughly the same cost as natural gas (so, direct competitors).

Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly.

Good news? Net new solar and wind plants can come "online" in less than two years. Net new natural gas takes four years. Part of why 95% of new energy deployed last year were renewables in the US, not just the subsidies.

[vablings]

Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

It is important for base load power and overnight power and should always be the backing of the grid frequency. Total loss of grid frequency is much more difficult to recover from with synthetic inertia.

A healthy grid should have all of the following - Nuclear base load that keeps the grid stable and pick up from low solar

- Gas plants for surge power and base load when nuclear/solar/wind cannot take up the slack

- Battery storage for surge/storage during off peak

- Solar for very low-cost cheap energy during peak usage hours

- Wind for other power source ie when the sun isnt shining as much

source: https://grid.iamkate.com/

[bayindirh]

> overregulation.

Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).

Some things needs to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.

So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.

[vablings]

> We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.

I think this is vastly overstated by the media. Boeing is still heavily regulated and has a pretty good safety record compared 20 or 30 years prior. The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

> Some things need to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.

I absolutely agree. I am not for the removing ALL regulations from nuclear energy but there is a whole political servitude cycle that has taken place for a number of years to make nuclear "safer" when in actuality it has little to no influence on the technology and just adds burden and overhead especially in the new construction of a nuclear power plant

Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine. Despite us being regularly exposed various levels of radiation in our lives most people are completely unaware of. Some people are terrified of dental x-rays but will happily jump on an intercontinental flight without any second guess.

I think arguing in the opposite of "you can never be too safe" is kind of like the whole double your bet every time you lose at the casino yes, its technically true but you need an infinite pool of chips for it to work.

[ericmay]

There is room between under-regulation and over-regulation.

Given that we are experiencing high costs and other barriers to construction, we can do at least two things: reduce red tape where it makes sense or where the risk is acceptable to help lower costs, or the US government can, through a variety of mechanisms ranging from basic research funding to direct subsidies, spend taxpayer money to try and alleviate costs.

Given that we supposedly (and I agree) need to build nuclear reactors to help power our country and given that we aren’t building them, we can optionally use both levers to encourage construction. There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good, and so having more of them must be more good.

This is not accurate.

Regulations are simply a tool we can wield to achieve desired outcomes within various risk and need-based calculations. More regulations can be good, for example we should ban highway billboards- that would be a good regulation. Or we can eliminate regulations - allow businesses to build more housing using pre-approved designs that meet existing zoning code. Neither is good or bad, except in that it helps to achieve some aim that society has.

The regulation or lack there of, of nuclear energy in the United States has absolutely nothing to do with Boeing airlines screwing up some plane designs. Drawing a conclusion that nuclear energy must be regulated (it is) or over-regulated (it probably is or else we would build more), because of a belief that Boeing airliners weren’t regulated enough is, to put it lightly, nonsense, and you are mistakenly using the application of some regulation or lack of causing some bad things to happen, to imply that more regulation in another area would mean good things happen through this framework of regulation == good.

And further, if you’re going to suggest that Boeing is effectively unregulated, which is untrue in practice and in principal, then I’d argue that was for the best given that it is a hugely successful company that employs tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions have flown and continue to fly on their airlines every single day safely and without incident.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper

Americans have no broad idea how anything works. Decades of attacks on our education system have left us civically illiterate (and for a lot of people, actually illiterate too.).

[hammock]

> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).

Different people

[psunavy03]

This entire comment is conflating "overregulation" with "no regulation" when these are not at all the same things.

Oh, and with an extra seasoning of Murica Bad on the side.

[mlinhares]

There's also the surprise factor that it just never gets cheaper, the newly formed monopolies quickly take over and push prices up beyond what they were before and milk the cow they were given until all customers are bled dry.

People that missed the solar bandwagon during the Biden admin are going to regret dearly not having installed it at the price and interest it was back then, we'll never see that again.

[stuffn]

Regulation, I’d argue, is a far more efficient route to monopoly than “unchecked capitalism”. If you have enough money you can gain regulatory capture.

If you pay close attention the majority of “evil capitalists” the far left bitches and whines about so much are masters at this. Last mile service, car manufactures, medicine, law, construction, power, water, technology, banking, housing, etc. Most of the world’s billionaires got their money through fucking over the average person with regulatory capture. This must present the leftist with a conundrum they simple ignore because it doesn’t fit their paradigm. More government leads to more control of wealth by fewer people.

This isn’t to say all regulation is bad. However, the line between over-regulating and under-regulating is so thin it’s often better to err on the looser side. Otherwise, in many places, small business is immediately crushed and “late stage capitalism” is the result.

[CamperBob2]

So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe.

Here's what overregulation of nuclear power has done for us over the past several decades: "We can't risk releasing radioactive pollution in an accident, so we'll build coal plants that spew it into the air during normal operation instead."

[epistasis]

Nuclear is expensive because of the large amount of high-skill labor, including welding, that's required. For less economically advanced countries, that labor is cheap. For more economically advanced countries, that labor becomes more expensive. Regulation is a red-herring being pushed as an excuse, mostly by startups that are desperate to get the next round of funding, because it plays very well to the investor class, but it's not based in reality. I ask about this all the time and even if there are some half-baked critiques of things like ALARA, nobody has a path to actually making the Nth build of a reactor cheaper from changing regulations.

Even France, which is known for having far lower construction costs than the US on big projects, and for being very good at building out their nuclear fleet in the past, is at ~$12/W with their newest round of 6 reactors. And that's before they have even started construction:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-estimate...

This is roughly the cost of the latest US nuclear reactor at Vogtle, which is viewed as unrealistically expensive energy.

And even the most optimistic plans for reducing the cost of nuclear from the Liftoff report in 2023 from DOE doesn't place regulations as having much of a role in lowering costs:

https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-...

There's significant political interest in having regulation be the reason that nuclear is expensive, but I find almost zero people in the nuclear industry that are able to articulate where regulations increase the cost of builds or whether there's anything that could or should be changed about the regulations.

[Retric]

Nuclear is inherently expensive even with zero regulations you have the full costs of a coal power plant + more expensive lifetime costs for fuel + extra costs associated with nuclear such as more and more highly educated workers.

Meanwhile coal is dead because it’s already more expensive than the market is willing to accept.

The only hope for nuclear is massive subsidies, deregulation on its own isn’t going to work.

[jeltz]

How come Sweden as cheap nuclear power? The main reason electricity is kinda expensive in Sweden is because the EU forces is to export our cheap nuclear energy to Denmark and Germany.

[stephen_g]

Grid forming inverters for providing virtual inertia are only going to get better and better, there's no reason that as those control systems improve why synthetic inertia won't be able to be basically identical to real spinning mass. In the meantime while that technology matures, synchronous condensers can provide grid inertia without needing nuclear or coal, we already have about four in Australia supporting our grid and will probably have another dozen or so built over the next decade or two.

[sdenton4]

Or maybe it's expensive because it doesn't scale. The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them. And if we /do/ hit economies of scale, uranium availability is likely to become a problem...

[vablings]

> The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them.

I disagree. building big infrastructure projects always scales well. As stated by the project managers at Hinkley Point C (the most expensive nuclear reactor ever) they estimate that build times and cost will be significantly reduced for the second reactor due to the knowledge and expertise baked into the workforce. Frances nuclear revolution during the 1972 oil crisis also shows the same thing with construction cost getting lower the more reactors built.

There are other reactor designs that do not use uranium that have been tested and hypothesized.

[jandrewrogers]

> per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high

Unless you are the US Navy. It probably helps that they churn out dozens of the same few cookie-cutter designs without needing permission from NIMBYs.

[sheikhnbake]

I suspect geothermal is going to quickly replace Nuclear as the most viable option for base load stabilization. Tech has come a long way towards letting us access it away from hot zones and it uses a lot of the same infrastructure and expertise that the oil industry has already developed.

[cperciva]

Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

It's not just a matter of "overregulation". ALARA, aka As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable is an explicit goal of nuclear regulation.

[m0llusk]

Or possibly under regulated. Where exactly is all the radioactive waste going to go? Especially the spent fuel rods pose major disposal challenges. The one site that was looking hopeful appears to have been discarded. It is a bit late in the game to be pending basic stuff that is piling up. Most nuclear power plants are not well sited for long term disposal, though that is what is happening.

[xp84]

You sound like you know a lot, I’m curious if there’s a case to be made that instead of batteries that take a ton of minerals and need to be replaced, instead using the excess energy to store energy by e.g. pumping water to higher altitudes and letting it generate electricity on the way down later when needed.

[immibis]

Is there a comparison of how much nuclear costs versus the number of cities destroyed per year? Say, if we allow 1 meltdown per year does it become comparable to solar or does it require 10 meltdowns per year?

[nandomrumber]

How many cities per year does solar destroy?

What?

[lawlessone]

>Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

Would to prefer underregulating it?

How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?

[AlexandrB]

Changes to bring regulation in line with actual risk would be a good start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc

[vablings]

> Would to prefer underregulating it?

No

> How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?

Difficult problem. The issue right now is that nobody wants to be seen to remove a regulation from a nuclear. One of the biggest things is that ALARA/LNT needs to go away. It is not useful, and it is not based on good modern science

Creating new assessments based on modern research would be good and there is already a ton of evidence around that could be foundational for making real science based changes

[wahnfrieden]

nuclear also has a very limited lifespan if we go all-in on it. we will run out.

[TheTaytay]

Run out of what? The fuel? Given its energy density, and uranium availability, that seems unlikely, but I haven’t done math on it.

[fasterik]

This comment is also misleading. First, $/watt is not how levelized cost of electricity is measured, you need to use $/watt-hour (or more commonly, $/MWh) over the lifetime of the project. By definition, levelized cost of electricity does not include storage.

The cost is also affected by the percent of energy coming from wind+solar+batteries vs. from natural gas. Wind+solar+batteries are cheap when they are used to supplement natural gas. If they were supplying 95% of generation (Levelized Full System Cost of Electricity 95%, LFSCOE-95), then the price of wind+solar+batteries would be $97/MWh compared to $37/MWh for gas, and $96/MWh for nuclear. For LFSCOE-100, the price of wind+solar+batteries increases to $225/MWh, compared to $122/MWh for nuclear and $40/MWh for natural gas.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

So yes, natural gas is much cheaper than nuclear. But that doesn't mean that nuclear shouldn't play a large role going forward. The moral of the story is that the price of energy is complicated. It's likely that a combination of nuclear, wind, solar, and battery backup would be the best option in terms of price and carbon emissions.

[gardncl]

My comment is not misleading, you're just using outdated data from 2022.

Sure, happy to quibble over units.

The most recent mid-2025 data is from lazard here, it echos exactly what I'm saying.

Website: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

PDF of report: https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

Go to page 8 of that PDF and you will see these ranges for LCOE:

* Solar $38-$78/MWh

* Solar + battery $50-131/MWh

* Gas combined cycle (cheapest fossil fuel) $48-107/MWh

Yes, we are finally at price parity for the technologies.

[fasterik]

I didn't disagree that there is price parity for the levelized cost. There is still not price parity for levelized full system cost. If we used wind and solar for 95-100% of generation, the price would be much higher.

My point is not that we can or should replace wind and solar with nuclear. It's that it is far cheaper to use a combination of nuclear, wind, and solar than it is to use 100% wind and solar.

[belorn]

When they calculate that Solar + battery would cost $50-131/MWh, how is that number reached? What is the number of charge cycles and over what time span? It seems obvious that the cost of producing, installing and operating a 1MWh system of solar and batteries will cost more than a one time payment of $50-131.

Most of the time when I try to find any data there is the underlying assumption that the charge cycle is a day and night cycle, where the day produce the energy needed during the night, and not a seasonal storage that basically has a single charge cycle per year.

[ViewTrick1002]

First. $120/MWh for new built nuclear power is cheaper than any modern western reactors. Real costs are ~180-220/MWh when running at 100% 24/7 all year around. As based on Vogtle, FV3, HPC, proposed EPR2s, proposed Polish reactors etc.

The problem with these ”system costs” analyses is that they don’t capture the direct physical incentive structure of our grids.

Why should someone with rooftop solar and a home battery buy $180-220/MWh when they have their own electricity available?

Why should they not sell their excess to the grid cheaper than said nuclear power? It is zero marginal cost after all.

You can call it tragedy of the commons but new built nuclear power simply is unfit for our modern grids.

We need firming for near emergency reserves coming from production with the cheapest possible CAPEX without an outrageous OPEX.

Likely gas turbines running on carbon neutral fuels. But only if we determine that they are needed in the 2030s.

New built nuclear power simply doesn’t even enter the picture in late 2025.

[FarmerPotato]

Thanks for that.

A cost model has a lot of independent variables. It can be a weird function of the quantity you want of each technology. Not everything gets cheaper at scale. And you need to be able to manage time-varying demand.

For easy example: a few solar or wind farms cost $X to bring up, but to go large scale you need to also store or transmit the energy, plus keep fallback options. That makes 95% or 100% reliance prohibitive.

There is also the speed of powering on/off. Gas combined cycle turbines are fastest to come online/go offline, followed by hydroelectric (if you have it). Coal and nuclear are at the slow end. You need to have the ability to match total sources and loads at any time.

Just some intuition why total cost is a complex function.

[ViewTrick1002]

South Korea which famously had an enormous corruption scandal coupled to their nuclear industry. Leading to jail time and a complete regulatory retake.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...

The proposed costs for the Westinghouse reactors in Poland and EPR2s in France are pretty much in line with the unthinkably expensive Vogtle costs. They haven’t even started building.

[hunterpayne]

"They haven’t even started building."

Both Vogtle units (3 & 4) have been online for over a year.

[cyberax]

> US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity)

That's when storage is not considered. Once storage is factored in, the LCOE becomes anywhere between $5 to $20. In the US, solar makes a lot of sense in the southern states, less sense in Midwest and WA.

That being said, the US still has plenty of capacity to accommodate more "sewer grade" (no battery backup) solar generation. It will provide easy CO2 savings and it can work well with flexible power consumers (AI training datacenters).

[gardncl]

That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test. Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x? So, someone installing a home battery system is paying up to 10x their solar install cost to also have battery backup? No way.

Also, battery tech continues to improve rapidly, we're seeing breakthroughs like this rapidly reduce the price: https://spectrum.ieee.org/co2-battery-energy-storage

A good video on LCOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-891blV02c

[cyberax]

> That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test.

These are numbers from the known far-right organization....err... Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...

> Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x?

Exactly. And you need closer to 100x for some locations (Germany) for the solar to be reliable enough.

Solar is _very_ cheap when you don't care about reliability, and impossible otherwise. Wind is a bit more nuanced, but in general has a similar story.

[coryrc]

As usual, explain how you're going to power heat pumps in the Northern half of the country during a 3 week bomb cyclone. There are answers and they cost money.

The only answer we're using is to build 1:1 natural gas capability for solar, which is roughly double the cost. That's a solution, but it needs to be accounted for when comparing options.

[toomuchtodo]

This administration won't last long enough to see any of these nuclear ambitions to any sort of success (its takes at least a decade to build nuclear generators in the developed world). Words are cheap, and regime change is coming. Solar and battery storage is already the cheapest form of generation in most of the world, and will only continue to decline in price, while the US will continue to face system and labor challenges precluding the large scale construction of commercial nuclear. The US currently doesn't have enough labor to build residential construction and naval vessels, so it will be interesting to see where they attempt to source this labor from (assuming the usual labor pipeline challenges where it takes up to half a decade to turn a human into a skilled tradesperson from an apprentice or other form of beginner).

Citations:

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-...

https://www.agc.org/news/2025/08/28/construction-workforce-s...

https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/10/hbi-labor-market-report

https://www.slashgear.com/2034405/us-navy-warship-building-w...

[salynchnew]

> Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly.

People still insist that ecofascists(?) or NIMBYism is what killed nuclear, when the reality is that it was the coal industry.

[hunterpayne]

There is sort of some truth to that but its still pretty disingenuous to phase it that way. The more honest way to say it is that the NIMBYists are (probably somewhat unintentionally) keeping FFs in use by opposing nuclear.

Also, you (and everyone else in the thread) are listing capacity costs. Nobody cares about capacity costs except the CFO of a utility. Utilization costs are what matters. And by that (honest) metric, nuclear is quite cheap if you exclude the extra costs due to scientifically illiterate eco-activists and regulators.

People like to say that "A diamond is forever" is the best marketing effort of all time. I disagree, the ability of FF extractors to get ecos to do their dirty work for them is far more "impressive" (from a POV lacking in ethics).

PS The number of outright falsehoods in just this thread about nuclear should prove my point. Just research about how nuclear pays for cleanup and compare that to some comments in this thread for an example.

[jetpks]

on the nuclear front, the administration has cut investment and reduced action in exchange for cheap promises. judge actions, not words.

[tehjoker]

this point is very important. trump will take all sides of an issue rhetorically so you can almost always find some quote of his supporting whatever position you favor but they have a very definite political program that is concentrating control, cutting federal workers, rolling back renewables, doing spectacular stunts to favor racists, and aggression overseas

[gregbot]

> on the nuclear front, the administration has cut investment

Fascinating, I haven’t heard this from anywhere else is there something specific you are referring to?

Maybe this? https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-05/article-7001/trumps-fy-2...

Its not clear what specific programs this $408 million cut would affect but frankly ARDP and Gen III+ reactor development are not needed. What is needed is large construction investment in existing approved designs like AP-1000 and BWRX-300 which is what the $80 billion pledge is for. “The full details of the $80 billion deal, including the precise allocation of financing and risk-sharing, have not been specified.” With no contract signed your skepticism is warranted. https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-05/article-7001/trumps-fy-2...

[vablings]

So why make the cuts in the first place? There are so many things that could have been changed like getting rid of ALARPA for actual scientifically backed methods other than pointless gratitude's of X dollars for X industry. If the Trump admin truly believed in move fast and break things why is nothing moving

More power is always good (see china being 1# in solar, nuclear and wind lol), and it's known that the cost of energy directly correlates with growth right now there is no excuse for cutting any federal workers in the energy industry.

[rtkwe]

Promises are cheap with this admin, don't count any money until it's actually being paid out. Used to be I'd say until it's in a bill but this administration claims the unilateral right to cut any funded program.

[bakies]

Seems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws, facts, and balance checks. Just like the word "terrorist." It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.

So obviously the government can spend some of that $1T military budget on fixing their coastal radar.

I thought Massachusetts just won in court to get their money or construction resumed, wonder if this means they have to go back to court.

[dylan604]

> Seems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws

By has become, you mean always has been, right?

[bakies]

I guess I think it used to be more believable that it was used for security, but maybe I wouldn't if I knew better history.

[zmgsabst]

I’m inclined to believe always — as the case establishing “state secrets” for national security was actually about covering up negligence.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/48-crash-us-hid-behind-natio...

[BLKNSLVR]

Since 2001 at least.

[_aavaa_]

Since WWII and the bomb. See Bomb Power by Garry Wills

[shimman]

Behind the Bastards had a great series about this too (it was either that book, or another).

[sowbug]

Don't forget "war on" something that isn't a nation state.

[abirch]

I think the Washington Generals have a better record than the USA on “wars on” non nation states

[GolfPopper]

>It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.

Given that this is the same Supreme Court that ruled Biden (or Trump) could have them all shot[1], it seems near-certain that you're correct.

1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf (JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR dissent, pages 29-30)

[stefanfisk]

Here in Sweden a bunch of offshore wind farm project and even residential PV installations are blocked by the military for unspecified reasons that everyone assumes is that it blocks radar and other signal intelligence.

Even though you can partially work around the issue with better onshore equipment or just placing the stuff on the other side of the interfering equipment it is still a step down from not having any interference in the first place. Especially if you want to keep your listening equipment secret.

[ViewTrick1002]

The best part is that Danish, German and Polish parks are planned mere kilometers away from the denied Swedish ones.

The military will need to figure out how deal with off-shore wind no matter what.

[Scoundreller]

I did the same thing in Sim City: put my coal plants in the corner of town

[opello]

I'm surprised residential PV even interacts with radar -- or is that the other signal intelligence part?

[itishappy]

Big flat conductive panels make good reflectors.

[opello]

That makes sense but my first thoughts were that panels wouldn't be oriented so that the majority of that flat surface was perpendicular to the radar but instead much closer to parallel, and that aviation radar would be higher up than a house roof to avoid ground clutter.

[dzhiurgis]

Wonder if it can be leveraged as for passive radar. Synthetic aperture also comes to mind.

I’m clueless in this field tho.

[hunterpayne]

It probably has more to do with the fact that solar that far north is a non-starter. Any PV installed there will actually make AGW and carbon emissions worse, not better. Basically, the amount of carbon emitted due to manufacturing is greater than the carbon savings over the lifetime of the panel in those locations.

[stefanfisk]

Even it that was true, why would the military concern itself with that, and why only for the coasts?

[ViewTrick1002]

Solar is anti-cyclical with wind both daily and seasonally and an amazing resource during ~8 months of the year in Sweden.

I suggest you stop spreading misinformation.

[stefanfisk]

Since it’s all classified o honestly don’t have a clue. But passive radar is also a thing and something that the Swedish defense industry is fairly good at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar.

[jandrewrogers]

Even if it is a pretense, it is pretty obvious that this would allow ship-borne drones to use the wind farms as an effective screen. Putting radar platforms beyond the wind farms that are as capable as the existing land-based radars would be quite expensive in both capex and opex. Some of the existing land-based radars would likely need to be moved, ideally. No one was really thinking about this type of threat a decade ago.

That said, Democrats have also been trying to stop offshore wind farms for years (e.g. Vineyard Wind), so there is probably bipartisan support.

[Msurrow]

The construction on some of these windmill farms started years ago. Before that permits & legal has been in the works for a long time. This surely included security clearances.

The orange shrimp pulling the “national security” card now, on the same day as he also creates a new Greenland debacle, is very clearly simply an attempt to strong arm the danish govt into Greenland concessions (in turn simply to please his fractile lille ego)

[jeltz]

They were approved before the invasion of Ukraine and before our politicians could see how devestating drones can be. Just because the orange dictator did something does not mean it necessarily was wrong. Even a broken clock is right two times per day.

[ineedasername]

>"Even a broken clock is right two times per day."

That is incorrect. There are any number of ways in which a clock might be broken such that its hands are not in the correct position even once per day.

[gmac]

Not incorrect so much as underspecified?

The phrase more commonly starts with a ‘stopped’ clock, which works more clearly.

[onewheeltom]

Should be “a stopped clock is right twice a day”

[whatsupdog]

> dictator

Can we stop overusing this term? It has already lost it's significance. Every political leader you don't agree with is a dictator nowadays. What kind of shitty dictator he is anyways if he is being shut down by courts left and right, and has to shut down the government waiting for the Congress to approve budget? You do know that dictators don't give a fuck about courts and parliaments?

[jandrewrogers]

This reply doesn't address any core point.

When these wind farms were permitted many years ago, shipborne drones were not part of the threat matrix. It was considered purely hypothetical even a decade ago because it was not an imminent capability for any country even though e.g. the US DoD had studied it. In the last few years shipborne drones have emerged very quickly as a substantial practical threat, largely due to the Russia/Ukraine war. Governments around the world are struggling to adapt to this new reality because none of their naval systems are designed under this assumption.

Whether or not this is convenient for Trump doesn't take away from the reality of the security implications.

[Msurrow]

Yes, it does.

First of all: occam's razor. Political theatrics seems simpler than the US defence/intelligence forces sudenly realizing that drones can be launched from ships. Esp. with the timing involved.

Second: Established/traditional radar systems cannot spot drones. Take it from someone living in a country that recently had its airspace violated by (assumingly) Russian drones, affecting national infrastructure. It was considered an attack at the time. I don’t think thats the word we use any more, for political reasons.

Third: Trump already shut down one of these windmill farms once this year. Until the danish company building the park sued and got the courts word that the shutdown was illegal, and resumed construction. The current shutdown has much larger impact for many multi-national companies. Usually there is a political process expected between allied countries before such a drastisc move. We havnt seen that ie no attempt to solve a concrete (security) issue before punching the red button ie probably because there was no motivation for a solution ie the security issue was probably not an actual issue)

Fourth: Earlier this week the danish intelligence services released a new security assesment of USA (that takes Trumps behaviour on the international scene into account). That probably hurt the little mans ego, and now we see a retaliation. This provides yet another motivation for Trumps action, besides factual, real security concerns.

Looking at this purely from the security aspect is naive, and fails to consider the context of the real world.

[bluGill]

Before Ukrain everyone though drones were easy to counter. Now that has proven false.

granted Trump probably isn't thinking that, but the concern should be real. We need better drone defense before someone (Russia, Iran...) starts anonymously shooting down airplanes.

[janc_]

That's nonsense. Many countries have been using drones before. (Starting with Nazi Germany during WW 2.)

[scoofy]

The problem is that we have a Congress that cares more about in-group loyalty than they do about idiocy.

Meanwhile, we even have Michael Burry pointing out the obvious: we're losing to China because we're not building up every bit of energy capacity that we can. But, sure, why not just ban windfarms in a location perfectly suited to them:

https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2002285483158569147

[hammock]

Why is whatever Michael Burry’s opinion is particularly notable?

[scoofy]

The argument, not the man is important.

[alphazard]

Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US. That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if subsidies end. It makes sense for the area, the amount of wind, the serviceability of the deployments, etc.

Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more dependent on subsidies, it's a battle for/against rent-seeking. One party is in favor of this particular kind of rent-seeking and the other party isn't (they will be in favor of a different kind, no doubt). The subsidies are necessary for these deployments to make financial sense, and if they went away, then it would just be a bad place to put a windmill.

There is no national security issue, there is no real case for energy infrastructure either. This use case needs government money to make sense, and is therefore sensitive to political fluctuations.

[hammock]

> Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US

Idk what you mean by that. I pulled up a map and saw dots all over the place. They are concentrated on the east coast because you can’t build fixed on west coast (has to be floating) but they are pretty much anywhere on the east coast.

[pbhjpbhj]

Why do you say it's rent seeking? Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore.

You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?

[alphazard]

> Why do you say it's rent seeking?

Because that's what economists call it when you get something for nothing, as is the case with any subsidy. I'm not going to argue this point; interested readers can look up how these energy projects are financed. Windmills that are privately funded, including debt and risk show you where it actually makes sense to put a windmill.

> Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore.

Not going to argue with any of this, although you left out maintenance costs, and larger blades means more value at risk. I'm not convinced that your efficiency calculation is measured in dollars and not windmill hours.

I would caution any engineer types reading from pressing their nose too close to the details of a particular energy technology. Instead, it's better to focus on the business plan or economic shadow that a particular energy project leaves. Dollars go in and energy comes out. A bunch of money has to go in up front, then trickles of money slowly over time, and occasionally spikes of money have to go in randomly. In exchange there is a modest, predictable flow of money out, which eventually is larger than all the in-flows in the bull case. The question to ask is: how much in and out of dollars and of Joules at each point in time? How does that compare to hamsters on wheels, people on bicycles, and lighting things on fire?

> You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?

This was never a stated premise, and my post starts with the opposite sentiment.

[IndrekR]

Taiwan strait is filled with offshore wind turbines from both sides. This is not an issue for PRC nor Taiwan.

[hammock]

Either it is not, or is a huge issue. Those windmills could be deployed on purpose

[the__alchemist]

Yea... I don't trust the motivations, but can confirm that on AA radars looking low (Where you might find UAS or just low-flying aircraft), wind farms show up as clusters of false hits.

[anigbrowl]

It's not like they're moving around though.

[the__alchemist]

Yea; it will be obvious if you've accidentally locked into one, then look at it with eyes or other equipment. And the 0 ground speed. But UAS could hide in them effectively I speculate?

[stevage]

But if they're just false hits it's easy to filter them out, right?

[jandrewrogers]

It is more difficult than you may be assuming. How do you know the hits are false? These "hits" are collections of samples at points in time, not continuous tracks. The "tracks" are reconstructed by making inferences from the samples.

Determining whether any pair of sequential samples represents the same entity or two unrelated entities is an extremely difficult inference problem with no closed or general solution. If there is too much clutter, it becomes almost unresolvable. Aliasing will create a lot of false tracks.

History has shown that any heuristic you use to filter the clutter will be used by your adversary as an objective function to hide from your sensors once they know you are using it (e.g. doppler radar "notching").

For this reason the inference algorithms are classified but they will degrade rapidly with sufficient clutter no matter how clever. It is a limitation of the underlying mathematics.

[stevage]

That's a great explanation, thanks.

[the__alchemist]

Yes, but it increases the difficulty of finding an aircraft moving near them.

[AnthonyMouse]

> So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.

I approve of this, because they were going to come up with an excuse one way or another, but "it's classified" has been a BS excuse that has received far too much deference to cover for all kinds of nonsense going back many decades, and being sufficiently flagrant about it is exactly what it takes to create enough of a backlash to finally do something about it.

[dfxm12]

So clearly this is politically motivated

Trump has been charging at windmills ever since he was defeated in UK courts in a case where he didn't like that wind turbines (that provide enough power for 80,000 homes) could be seen from his golf course.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo

[Gibbon1]

Combination of he's vindictive and he's making an example of what happens when you don't preemptively pay him a bribe.

[KoolKat23]

It's well known ol' Don Quixote doesn't like windmills, I mean wind turbines.

[bvan]

This administration is entirely founded on lies. Irrespective of any merits, of any, of its actions it has zero credibility.

[einrealist]

> So clearly this is politically motivated

The oil price is too low. Venezuela and now this, it is all part of selling fossil fuels.

[pclmulqdq]

These things are also probably really loud if you happen to have a sensitive set of sonar buoys. I'm not entirely sure how you solve that one, because putting them in deeper water would also make them less effective.

[cr125rider]

This seems like maybe the least BS answer. Sub detection.

[janc_]

Should be easy enough to use some form of active noise cancelling for that.

[somenameforme]

Deployment of radars on the turbine farms themselves? I don't see how that's supposed to be a good idea. In the scenario we're talking about, war, electricity is one of the first targets. And those relatively defenseless turbines themselves are going to be targeted, and not only by air. The enemy getting to knock out military quality radar setups (which tend to be absurdly expensive), at the same time, is just icing on the cake.

[moomoo11]

Wind seems like a waste of money compared to solar. We aren’t the UK where they are a tiny island holding on.

We have a massive land area on which we can build solar and plug it into existing power lines or build that part out. Probably way more feasible and better power generation results than building wind out in the ocean.

[andyjohnson0]

> I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.

Could it be that they just feel that offshore wind infra is difficult to defend militarily?

[jandrewrogers]

No, they aren't any more difficult to defend than any other offshore platform. They do interfere with long-range land-based radar in a way that is problematic with the emergence of shipborne drones.

[triceratops]

Are they shutting down offshore oil drilling too?

[hammock]

Order of magnitude increase in difficulty to defend a wind farm vs an oil rig. Wind farms are dispersed, not continuously manned, harder to monitor/enforce a 500m maritime safety zone of exclusion, have a greater attack surface (subsea cables, substations), and are easier to sabotage with plausible deniability

[im3w1l]

This may be the major reason, but I can think of another. How will you protect far away sprawling wind fields from attacks in case of war? They can be attacked by ships, aircraft and subs. You can expect them to be taken out almost immediately imo.

[KaiserPro]

https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/14/3541/2021/

There is data on what wind turbines do to radar.

[whatsupdog]

UK has a much smaller coastline, so it might be more cost efficient for them to install extra radars. Also I'm sure the wind turbines interfere in acoustic submarine detection due to the noise they generate.

[sigwinch]

I feel like the defense against drones is denser, sharper turbines.

[reactordev]

This. Also, drones can be jammed pretty easily so making jamming stations on those platforms would be something too.

The Brit’s have the right approach, just put radar on them so now you can see past them.

[jeltz]

Jamming drones has gotten much harder. Ukraine and Russia have worked hard at defending against jamming.

[hdgvhicv]

Those drones trail fibre optic cable

[tim333]

The drones could fly over them.

You could mount interceptor drones on them though. Like https://youtu.be/bsy5xzdKahU?t=80

[giantg2]

I'd imagine subsurface detection faces issues with the large electromagnetic fields from generation and transmission too.

[Spooky23]

This administration is all about wielding any form of executive power that they can get an unscrupulous lawyer to cook up.

[trymas]

Only reason is that orange mussolini does not like seeing wind turbines. That's it.

He sees them on Scotland's shores while flying to his resort - like a child he needs to have a personal vendetta on something he does not like, especially now when he has power to do it. God forbid he will need to see such monsters on God loving free country of US of A.

[calmbonsai]

Yep. I worked with France's EDF on their offshore turbines https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/inventing-the-future-of-... .

This rationale by the U.S. is total BS.

[rolph]

yes i found that take as well, i also found it interesting that potential for an industrial colony, and early warning infrastructure is undervalued.

[standardUser]

That you could come up with one reasonable-sounding explanation while they offered nothing makes me wonder if the administration is too lazy, or too inept.

[me-vs-cat]

Anyone can land upon a good strategy -- especially because these strategies get honed by evolutionary processes. For them, this is a good strategy. Enough people, especially their supporters, have been trained to not be suspicious when they are non-specific. From my armchair, I don't see any downside to being non-specific in their current environment. Yet the extra delay gained allows so many advantages, if you're the type to use them.

[sl_convertible]

Also look at how defensible having your power generation outside your coastline is. This is creating a big vulnerability in your power grid.

[Denote6737]

It's entirely because Scotland put a windfarm off the coast of his golf course. Trump is a child throwing a tantrum.