[leonidasrup]

Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.

"As a direct result of the 1973 oil crisis, on 6 March 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced what became known as the 'Messmer Plan', a hugely ambitious nuclear power program aimed at generating most of France's electricity from nuclear power. At the time of the oil crisis most of France's electricity came from foreign oil. "

"Work on the first three plants, at Tricastin, Gravelines, and Dampierre, started the same year and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...

[ZeroGravitas]

Sounds like a good plan unless we've invented 2 much cheaper and faster to deploy methods to generate electricity.

[leonidasrup]

You probably mean 3 much cheaper and faster to deploy methods to generate electricity. In Germany, Poland, Balkans it's solar, wind, coal.

[ZeroGravitas]

Coal is generally more expensive than nuclear if you factor in health and carbon, which you should.

[leonidasrup]

How do you measure health effects of different sources of electric energy? If you compare deaths per TWh, then nuclear power is much, much safer then coal energy.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Nuclear power has problem with public perception.

One source of this media. Media loves to write and talk about nuclear incidents and really blow this out of proportion to real health hazards. For decades, newsrooms have operated under the premise that 'if it bleeds it leads'. If something happen infrequently and could have big impact on many people it makes more interesting news story.

Flight industry has similar public perception problem. Transport statistic shows that travel by airplane is safer the car, yet much more people fear flying then driving. A deadly airplane crash is reported in all newspapers, the daily deaths from the car crashes are not even mentioned.

Popular tv-series "The Simpsons" (three eyed fish, green radioactive goo), movies Spiderman (if I get bitten by a radioactive spider), Hulk (gamma rays make you super strong), China Syndrome, the german movie "Die Volke", etc., doesn't help much with education about nuclear power.

Deaths from burning coal don't get much attention in the media, because the happen continuously each year, over decades.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

[brigandish]

If you want to factor in health then private health insurance would be the way to do it.

[noosphr]

Those two sources can't be turned on demand. You need another four to make them semi viable. By which point they are neither cheaper nor faster.

[tialaramex]

> Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.

This is 2026. Doing things in 1974 isn't an option because time's arrow points the wrong way.

If you want Europe to do things now that it should have done in 1974 you'd need to explain how it'll stall on all the consequences for years. France, which you held up as a model says it can build a nuclear generator in about 5-6 years, but none of these optimistic projections came true this century, more typically the plant takes 10-15 years and it can be more.

So, suppose they start today likely they'll say the generator goes online in 2032. How does that help with the crisis Trump caused this month ? Worse, come 2032 the date is likely to be 2040 instead.

Now, renewables go a lot faster. For solar it's genuinely possible to get paperwork done in January and be selling electricity made with those panels by summer. It's not easy, plenty of projects will be delayed out a 1-2 years, particularly if local government don't want the project, but with a following wind it can really be the same year. Wind is slower, but still you will almost certainly build it and switch it on in five years, the optimistic guess France never hits for its nuclear plants.

[veqq]

You can put up a plant in 5 years without erroneous regulation.

[tpm]

Do you have some examples of that in the last decades?

[veqq]

China's been building dozens of them, some going up in 4 years. It's very easy to google this. https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1hsvl0w/chinese_re...

[tpm]

Going up from what date exactly? Construction start is when you already have all plans approved, permitted and financed, so 4 years from construction start is far from "putting up a plant in 5 years". So, some examples for 5 years all in?

[leonidasrup]

Barakah nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates. Build by Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO).

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

Nameplate capacity 5600 MW

Construction began

Unit 1: 19 July 2012

Unit 2: 16 April 2013

Unit 3: 24 September 2014

Unit 4: 30 July 2015

Commission date

Unit 1: 3 August 2020

Unit 2: 14 September 2021

Unit 3: 10 October 2022

Unit 4: 23 March 2024

[tpm]

That's 8-9 years of construction only.

[leonidasrup]

There is a trick, you can multiple build simultaneously. Or better with a slight delay, so that construction crews (which do separate phases of construction) can move between projects and use experience gained in one build in another build.

Nuclear construction requires highly skilled workers doing very high quality work. One of the biggest problems with nuclear construction in U.S. and Europe is that last significant builds have been done around 1985, companies doing nuclear construction closed or moved to other products, or moved to maintenance, upgrades of power plants.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html

[mono442]

The way the EU forces the electricity market to operate makes them completely unprofitable. Renewables are always given priority in the market, which results in other power plants operating at a capacity factor of 30-40%. Since nuclear power plants are mostly capital expenditure-intensive, this makes the electricity they produce absurdly expensive.

[leonidasrup]

Because the way how the EU electricity market operates first to supply electric power are the power plants with the lowest operating costs. This are usually renewables and nuclear power plants. Both are capital expensive and cheap in operating costs.

Usually the capacity factor of European nuclear reactors is higher than 60%.

olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor, had capacity factor 70% in the year 2024: https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/o...

Mochovce-3 had capacity factor 74% in the year 2024: https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/M...

In the U.S. they really try to get maximum from nuclear reactors. https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/W...

[ViewTrick1002]

That’s just a consequence of how they bid. The marginal cost for a renewable plant is zero. It’s non-zero for nuclear power.

But nuclear power don’t want to shut down since that both increases wear and tear and makes them unable to capture revenue when the prices become higher again.

So they bid negative expecting to eat the losses and let more flexible plant shut down first.

[leonidasrup]

Operating costs of wind power are for sure not zero. Especially repairs of offshore wind turbines are very expensive.

https://docs.wind-watch.org/offshore-availability-costs.pdf

Hydropower and solar have much lower operating costs.

All thermal power plants experience wear and tear and have to be regularly repaired and maintained. Nuclear power plants can load-follow (within technical limits), but as the operating costs (maintance, repair, staffing, fuel) are much lower then capital costs it makes economic sense to run them at full power.

https://shs.cairn.info/revue-revue-deconomie-politique-2025-...

[ViewTrick1002]

You have to distinguish between fixed O&M and the extra cost that comes from an extra hour of running.

I’ve been googling and using LLMs and there’s no literature on the subject, but the companies owning them effectively treats it as zero.

In government models they seem to have landed at €1 per MWh.

The best estimates both Claude and ChatGPT came up with was both ”low single digit € per MWh”.

This report was linked, and ARUP the author did not get any replies when they asked the offshore wind companies this question.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6966a5c7e8c04...

[testing22321]

In 20 years we’ll have one plant for $20 billion that generates electricity that is vastly more expensive than solar.

No, that is a terrible idea.

[leonidasrup]

Solar is cheap, but does not produce during night and much less during winter or under cloud cover. So you have to include costs of other power sources and energy storage.

[gib444]

Yup you just described the UK. Likely more than $20bn though !

Nice transfer of wealth...

[tpm]

The current estimate for Hinkley Point C is at £48 billion.

[leonidasrup]

"Why Britain is building the world’s most expensive nuclear plant"

https://spectator.com/article/why-britain-is-building-the-wo...