The economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them.
> By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally.
HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the entire local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.
> Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.
Only you don't. In latitudes that get winter, solar output is only about a quarter as much in the winter as in the summer. You often hear things like "twice as much in the warmer half of the year" to try and stuff October and March into the "colder half" and disguise how screwed you are in December and January. Worse, if you electrify heating then it's not just that solar supplies less in the winter, you also have more demand in the winter.
By this point you're not just overbuilding by a bit, you'd need five times as much or more in January as in July. "Five times as much" is already over what it costs to use nuclear. Then it gets worse, because you now have a price of zero during the summer and even the spring and fall because of the massive oversupply and lower demand, so you now have to recover the entire cost of the overbuild during the three months when you're generating the least amount of power.
Then it gets worse yet, because heating demand is higher at night and we haven't yet added the cost of storage.
Okay, let’s say that we use solar + battery to cover everything but Nov, Dec, Jan, when the days are too short. Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery.
So we end up using nuclear 1/4 of the time. But unfortunately, nuclear’s cost is in the capital expense, not the operating expense. We pay about the same amount for it regardless of whether we’re using it or not. So if we’re only using 1/4 the energy, the cost per watt of nuclear energy is effectively 4x larger.
This incentivizes further build-out of solar, catching those sweet winter profits (now 4x larger!), further squeezing nuclear’s usage, driving up its prices, and incentivizing even more solar.
Eventually nuclear gets squeezed out and solar’s profit margins go from “astronomical” (naturally, it’s power from the sun, nyuck nyuck) to “low margin.” But they’re still making money. Whoever built the nuclear plant is left with a very expensive stranded asset.
At least, that’s my understanding. I’m not a power company accountant. What I observe, though, is that power companies who do employ accountants aren’t building nuclear. They’re building shit-tons of solar. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because they’re hippies who hate nuclear.
> Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery.
The way energy markets work is that prices change based on supply and demand. So you build a lot of solar and then the price goes down at times when solar generation is high. (There isn't really enough solar in the grid for this to have happened yet in most places.)
Because nuclear has high capital costs but low unit costs, it continues generating all the time even if prices are lower some of the time. It needs to hit a particular average price but will take essentially any instantaneous price. It can't operate with an average price of $0.02/kWh but it can sell for that at noon in July as long as it's getting enough to offset it at midnight in December.
So, you add a bunch of solar to the grid and as a result the price of electricity during daylight hours in the summer falls below the average breakeven cost for solar. Nuclear is still getting more than that at night, when the price won't fall below the daytime price plus the cost of storage, and in the winter, when solar output is lower and heating demand is higher.
Because it's still recovering a lot of its costs on summer nights and even a little bit on summer days, the winter price nuclear needs never gets to be 4x as high, but it goes up some.
Now the solar companies are looking at that price and trying to decide whether it's worth getting. If they add more solar it's going to generate e.g. 4kW in summer, 2kW in spring, 2kW in fall and 1kW in winter. So for every 9kWh they generate, only 1kWh comes in winter, and that's during the day.
Suppose solar needs to average $0.04/kWh to be sustainable but we're already at $0.02/kWh in the spring, summer and fall. Then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be at least $0.20/kWh before wanting to add more. On top of that, if they do add more, then the price during other seasons drops. If those hit $0.01/kWh during the day then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be $0.28/kWh. And, of course, then the price in the other seasons would drop again, until solar would need to have $0.36/kWh in the winter because by then they would only be getting paid in the winter. Whereas nuclear still makes some in the summer at night.
On top of this the demand is higher in the winter at night, but it's not higher in the summer at night. So to use solar with storage, you would also have to amortize the cost of the additional storage during only the winter months. And the winter nights have more hours than the days, don't forget. So for solar to supply all power in the winter it needs the daytime price to be $0.36/kWh and the nighttime price to be more than twice that.
Then solar is intermittent. People still need heat when it's cloudy. Overbuilding solar sufficiently to handle the heating load on a cold cloudy day in winter? Nope. Hopeless. You'd have to use long-term storage in addition to short-term storage and that's a whole new category of expensive when we were already looking at prices nobody was going to like.
So what happens instead? Well, probably the daytime price in the non-winter months gets to something like $0.02/kWh and the daytime price in the winter gets to something like $0.20/kWh and you fall below the breakeven point for building more solar. Then nuclear takes the same $0.02 and $0.20 during the day and something more than that at night and continues to cover its costs.
Really the problem here is not that solar is going to push out nuclear in the winter, it's that natural gas could unless you have a price on CO2. Or more likely, without a carbon price people might not switch to electric heat instead of continuing to heat with natural gas and fuel oil.
So we kind of need a carbon price to do heating. Or to solve it from the other side (which would be even better), we need to get nuclear to be more cost efficient so it can out-compete natural gas since solar won't.
During the coldest winter month, solar energy produce (as per statistics from the solar industry in Sweden) somewhere around 3-7% of the amount produced during the warmest month. Households also consume around 2-4 times the amount of energy during the coldest month compared to the warmest month. Sweden is a country where only a small minority have air conditioning installed at home.
Those are the worst month vs the best month. Overall the winter is not that bad, but it is still pretty bad for solar. Talking with people who has had solar installed here, the general story is very similar. During periods where it do produce the market price is already exceptional low, so it isn't returning a major saving. When the market price is high, the output is low, forcing them to be connected to the grid and pay whatever the electrical company demand during the highest market peaks, as well as taxes and grid fees which themselves has increased to match the cost of high variability.
All this looks very different in countries with much warmer climates and where the major energy consumption from households are air conditioning.
The nice thing is Sweden has lots of hydro, which works as natural long-term energy storage. Every bit of solar you generate means water is kept in the dam for use later in the year.
You also can't ignore wind power which should be part of any plan to "overbuild".
Scotland at a similar latitude to the populated parts of Sweden has hit 100% renewables generation in the past and will do so again.
Renewables are not just solar and hydro storage is also suitable.
You are also ignoring that improving housing stock with good insulation is a much better answer to excessive energy use in winter than attempting to find more supply in winter.
> Sweden is just about the worst case, there's very few countries/people that far north.
Sweden is worse but it's still a significant issue in e.g. New York or Paris or Auckland.
> There's genius invention called "wires". HVDC has transmission losses on the order of 3.5% per 1,000km. You don't have to colocate the solar.
It's more than 1000km from the places that get cold to a part of the world where it isn't winter.
Suppose we ignore that it's winter in the US Northeast and Southeast at the same time and run HVDC 2000+ km to Florida because it gets an extra hour of sunlight. Long distance transmission can't be used to counter seasonal output and regional weather at the same time because one requires the generation to be spread everywhere and the other requires it to be concentrated closer to the equator. If we concentrate the solar in Florida to mitigate winter in New England then we're screwed when Florida is overcast.
HVDC (and even the grid in general) doesn't transmit all that much power. The largest currently existing line - Changji-Guquan UHVDC link in China - transmits 12GW. It's significantly more than what an average long-range link of current grids transmits, yes. But is it a lot?
Looking from consumption side, my home city of ~1 million people has several coal-fired plants, producing 1.5 GW of electricity and about 5GW of heating. Plus an hydropower station producing 6 GW. Most of that is consumed by an aluminium plant, but nonetheless, it's also part of the city. So that's roughly 12GW on a cold winter day (I suppose we do want to make heating cleaner as well), and probably 6 GW in summer. Heat pumps could be used to reduce power consumed by heating, but even the air-source pumps are not cheap, and they don't provide much efficiency gain in the cold. Ground-source pumps are extremely expensive and reqiure heat replenishment or the ground will freeze - such is the balance here.
So, the world's largest link to power just one city, out of tens of them. It quickly gets prohibitively expensive.
The only realictic answer, it seems, is annual-scale storage. I hope that "dirt pile storage" works well enough and succeeds, batteries are just too expensive and material hungry, hydrogen is problematic to store well either and we don't seem to have good enough scalable direct carbon capture to synthesize methane or propane.
Wires and HVDC transmissions are nice, but they have a fairly large downside. They are major infrastructure projects that cost a lot of money and they don't produce any energy. Adding that cost to the solar panels makes them significantly more expensive, and solar/wind farms owners are not exactly willing to bear that cost.
You don't need to colocate the solar, but you need to make sure you can get that power when you actually need it.
During crisis nations are going to restrict exporting electricity and prioritizing their own residents. Electricity that is generated in Germany is not going to warm up Nordic countries if Germany doesn't let it.
Wires are also susceptible to sabotage, especially undersea ones (which are the current major connection points to Europe).
I selected random date in July 2025. During that time Finland produced about 10GWh of solar. I selected random one from February 2025. During that Finland produced about 0.5GWh. February also actually doesn't have shortest daylight hours, mid-December situation is even worse. Christmas Eve 2024 produced about 0.05GWh.
You sure overprovision factor of 200x is still cheaper? This is when looking at the peak generation. From what I understand solar has about 30-40% capacity factor in summer. Just to panels (I'm not sure about total cost of grid-scale solar) seem to be about $300k per rated 1MW or $750k per 1MW during peak. $150M per 1MW during December. OL3 cost about 11B € for 1.44GW (assuming 90% capacity factor) or 7M € per MW.
Unless there has been some huge overnight exchange rate change 7M € seems much cheaper than $150M. Latter of course would actually be much higher when you factor in rest of the equipment, labor etc. Some numbers I found say that it's probably 5x higher.
1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night.
2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Overprovision to cover the night is only 2-3x, not a big deal. Storage (batteries, hydro, heated sand/whatever new thing you can come-up with) for night use is also much easier.
The real problem is seasonal variation: The total amount of stored energy is much larger (~100x) and you cycle it (and, hence, pay for storage) once a year, not 365x.
Wind + long range power transfer should help. At the cost of today's overpriced nuclear powerplants you can fund a lot of storage research and installation.
Perhaps you can use overprovisioned solar to eletrolyse water and use captured C02 (ideally from air) to generate methane or more complex hydrocarbons, for use in applications where electric power just won't work (e.g. long-range flight), or for long term power storage. Yes, there are significant conversion losses, but overall it is still in the low multiplies, not 200x.
Land use per kWh is almost completely unimportant. Here in Denmark solar farms take up 0.09% of the land area and produce 7% of our electricity or ~2.5% of our energy use. That means 4% of our land area would be enough to cover all our energy needs.
The issue with them in addition to time is a huge capital expense that needs to be amortized. Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete.
For commercialization, solar makes more sense as there is a much better return on capital.
If I were king, I’d do socialized power and have the government capitalize and own the nuclear plants, and bid out the operations to private entities. Government has better debt economics and doesn’t care about return in monetary means.
Even then, relatively small tweaks to tax law and some grid investment would create a solar boom at lower cost. Every Walmart parking lot and some road infrastructure should be covered with solar. Interstates could be utility and generating corridors - they aren’t because federal law makes any multimodal use very difficult.
> Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete.
There isn't really an "obsolete" after it comes online because things get built when expected revenue exceeds construction costs + operating costs, but once built (or close enough to completion) they continue to operate as long as revenue exceeds only operating costs because by then the construction cost is in the past. When the construction cost is large, the amount the price of electricity would have to decline to fall below operating costs is equally large. And investing in something where you expected a positive ROI and you ended up with a slightly negative ROI clearly isn't what you'd have preferred, but it isn't nearly as bad as the -100% ROI you'd get from shutting down the plant instead of selling it for slightly less than what you put in. There's a reason the US is not only continuing to operate 20th century nuclear plants but even looking to reactivate some of the ones that have already been decommissioned.
Moreover, solar has the same problem. You invest in a solar farm because you're expecting to profitably sell power at current prices, but if e.g. the AI thing turns out to be a bubble then there will be oversupply and current prices won't stick. Solar also has the added "everybody is doing it" risk. If you and everybody else add solar then the price at times when solar output is highest is going to be lowest and vice versa, i.e. if too many people invest in the same type of generation then your output gets inversely correlated with the market price, which is bad for ROI.
I think you’re misunderstanding the economics at a fairly basic level. The cost to build is funded through debt that’s paid off over time. The construction costs aren’t in the past; they’re in the present, and in the future, in the form of debt payments.
Think of it this way: if you buy a house, the “operating cost” is fairly small: upkeep and painting, mostly. Does that mean you can buy a house, move out of your apartment, and quit your job, because your cost of living has just dropped a few thousand a month?
No, of course not. Upkeep isn’t the real cost of buying a house. The real cost is the monthly mortgage payment. Unless you were already independently wealthy, you have to keep your job. Sorry.
The cost of energy for a nuclear plant is the cost of paying back the loans. As other forms of power generation get cheaper, those loans stay the same, making it harder and harder for nuclear to compete. As they get squeezed out of the energy market, they have to raise their per-watt prices in order to continuing to service the loans.
Think of it like this. You rent your house to your cousin, who pays you enough to cover the mortgage. But then your cousin finds a sweet deal couch-surfing in the tropics in the summer. He stops paying you for June, July, and August. You can’t get anybody else in your house during that time, so you say, “Sorry dude, you have to pay more for the rest of the year. I’ve got bills to pay.” That works great until your cousin gets tired of your high prices and moves out, and now you’re left with a mortgage to pay and no one renting it.
> The cost to build is funded through debt that’s paid off over time. The construction costs aren’t in the past; they’re in the present, and in the future, in the form of debt payments.
That isn't a future cost, it's a past cost with a future payment date. It's like taking out a mortgage on a piece of land to buy some lumber and build a house on it. The past cost is buying the lumber; the hardware store isn't going to give you a refund six months after you already paid them and used the lumber to build the house. What you have now is a house instead of money and separately a mortgage against the house.
What do you think happens if you don't pay the loan? Is the bank going to get a refund from the hardware store? No, they're going to take the house, sell it to someone else for whatever they can get for it and apply the money to the loan. And then the house continues to operate as a house.
The same thing happens with a power plant. If the plant company itself has a bank loan and isn't making enough to pay it, the bank is going to foreclose, sell the plant to someone else, possibly take a partial loss, and the new owner -- who might have gotten the plant for a lower price than it originally cost to build -- is going to continue to operate it as long as its revenue exceeds its operating costs.
And that's assuming the plant was funded with a bank loan. If it had investors then there is no loan payment; the "loan payment" is when the company pays the owners dividends. If they were expecting the plant to pay enough dividends to recover their initial investment plus interest and its operations only generate enough revenue to repay most of the original investment but no interest, then they continue to operate the plant (or sell it to someone who does) because "recover 90% of the original money instead of the expected 200% of the original money" is still significantly more than "recover 0% of the original money by closing the plant".
What happens if the operating company can't pay the debt? The bank repossesses the facility. Now what does the bank do with a solar facility? Does it (A) let it rot, losing massive value, (B) run a bulldozer through it, destroying massive value or (C) find a way to operate it, receiving profit from doing so?
I think HVDC is a more important component in smoothing out demand/supply than you give it credit for, especially if you add wind into the mix.
In terms of security - one of the reasons nuclear power stations are so expensive is they have to survive a targeted plane crash etc - they are expensive high profile targets.
In the end the renewables model is a much more distributed model of generation, storage and consumption ( rather than a few massive power stations ) - so with a proper grid you could argue you would have fewer single points of failure, and increased resilence.
Nuclear power plants are not expensive per unit of power delivered.
"distributed" sounds good as long as you don't think about it too much, because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation: all these "distributed" plants produce very much in lockstep due to external factors (day/night, weather, seasons) that are extremely correlated, much more than any set of nuclear power plants ever could be.
Intermittent renewables do not increase resilience, they massively reduce resilience. In Germany, redispatch has increased more than tenfold in order to keep the grid stable in light of the destabilizing influence of intermittents that have been introduced. Spain just suffered their blackout last year with over a hundred deaths due to this destabilization (though the PR is trying everything to deflect the blame).
> because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation
It does it if your interconnects make the grid scale large enough, and it does if you consider distributed generation and storage as part of the overall system.
Sure if you take a grid designed for centralised on-demand generation, and apply that to renewable generation then you'll have problems. However I'm not suggesting that.
I'm also not suggesting something that has no emergency on-demand generation capacity.
> they massively reduce resilience.
I'm not talking about renewables alone - but in tandem with a grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones, multiple layers of distributed generation and storage.
Note nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline.
> grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones,
"Night" reaches across more time-zones than you can build your grid across.
Never mind "winter".
> nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline.
Define "often".
They are actually a lot more reliably than you seem to think: the capacity factor of the US fleet, for example, was >90% for the last decade(s). And that <10% offline time includes the planned refueling/inspection/maintenance times.
How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.
The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.
The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers).
In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000!
I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.
> The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.
What would your definition of a "major incident" be for photovoltaics?
> I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants.
If we only tolerated the same long term risk level for food, you wouldn't be be eating anything but organic vegetables. The fact that we put a sarcophagus to prevent material from leaking is just the reflection of the accepted limits. Flint water crisis was much more dangerous than leaving Chernobyl without the latest sarcophagus but nobody cared for a decade.
> The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion
The stories of acute radiation poisoning have been debunked repeatedly, there simply isn't enough radioactive material left there to cause such symptoms (it's still a very bad idea to eat mushrooms or the meat of wild animals living there, you'd risk long term cancer, but nothing close to acute radiation poisoning, it's simply not possible from a physics standpoint).
And again, we're talking about an accident that happened in Soviet Union on a reactor absolutely not designed with safety in mind and with a Soviet party member who threatened the engineers into bypassing safety mechanism in order to operate outside of the design domain of the plant. And the resulting accident was nowhere near close to the Bhopal catastrophe.
Chemical site have deadly accidents every other years and nobody seems to care but they'll obsess about nuclear ones even when they barely kill anyone. And chemical plants accident do leave long lasting pollution with durable health effect, but we don't permanently evacuate the places because we tolerate the risk.
Your "large area" is actually tiny, and the solution is to... not go there. Yeah, all you have to do is not go to a very specific tiny area in Ukraine. I think that's quite easily manageable.
As usual, when such things are mentioned, you lack any and all sense of scale and statistics. Just pure fearmongering.
Look at the number of all nuclear plants over their entire lifetime and divide their benefits by the cost of what, the two or three major incidents you can think of? This simple calculation alone makes your arguments utterly ridiculous. We accept 1000x the risk and cost of that on a daily basis, in e.g. driving, gas and coal plants.
Go ahead and evacuate to get away from the negative effects of soot, tire dust, CO2, and all the other fun pollution that's spread out over the entire atmosphere. Good luck living on Mars.
Are you rhetorically or actually asking? I'd guess significantly lower than coal and gas, and in the ballpark of (but still higher than) solar and wind combined (in the expected value, i.e. probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster times the death toll of that).
No member of the public has died from civilian nuclear power in the US. Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
Tiring with arbitrary limitations to exclude major accidents of a fleet in the hundreds.
The difference between renewables and nuclear power is who gets harmed.
When dealing with nuclear accidents entire populations are forced into life changing evacuations, if all goes well.
For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry. And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
Which of them resulted in "entire populations [] forced into life changing evacuations"? Which ones were the implied something worse than that and what happened then?
> For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry.
Solar panels are essentially semiconductors. "Silicon valley" is called that because they used to actually make such things there. You can tell from the number of superfund sites.
"The newer ones are safer" has a certain symmetry to it, right?
> And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
Those things are actually the dangerous things though? There were no fatalities from Three Mile Island but a plant worker at a nuclear power plant in Arkansas was killed and several others injured when a crane collapsed and a generator fell on them. Power company line workers have a worse-than-average fatality rate from getting electrocuted.
MIT actually measured this, and the conclusion might surprise you:
> Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators “required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material.” Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects.
> But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.
> By contrast, R&D-related expenses, which included both regulatory changes and things like the identification of better materials or designs, accounted for the other third of the increases. Often, a single change met several R&D goals, so assigning the full third to regulatory changes is probably an over-estimate.
> So, while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima.
France is all-in on nuclear. Their reactors are still pretty expensive. Worth it, but expensive. Each reactor is a huge piece of infrastructure where small mistakes compound. No matter how little regulation you have reworking these giant buildings takes a lot of work, if only from the physics of it all.
If there's magic that makes em massively cheaper someone should tell France.
Actually France knows how to build them cheaper and quicker.
Their whole nuclear industry (reactors and all) cost just €228 billion. And they built 50+ reactors in just 15 years.
They know how this works, and so do we: standardize a design, build lots of them, in overlapping lots so experience accumulates and knowledge gained from earlier builds can be passed on and applied to newer builds. This also worked for Germany with the Konvois, even though only 3 got built and the same technique is now working for the Chinese, who copied it from us.
With Flamanville 3, the French did none of these things. Why not?
They weren't allowed to do so. Politically. France actually was on a long-term nuclear exit trajectory. The Mitterand government put a law in place that not just demanded reduction of the nuclear share to 50% of total electricity production, it also capped the total permitted capacity to what was installed at the time: exactly 63.2 GW.
So they could not build any additional nuclear power plants, meaning they could only build new plants (to retain the know-how of how to build them) if they turned equivalent existing capacity off.
Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.
But in order to retain their industrial capacity, they did just that idiotic thing, knowing that it would be idiotic. The 2 reactors at Fessenheim were turned off to allow exactly 1 new EPR to be built at Flamanville.
Not a standardized design, a brand new design. And a design that was also troubled, see:
And not a lot of them, just a single one. And with a single one, obviously also no overlaps.
So that went about as well as one might expect: not at all.
Now the law has been removed, they have 14 EPR2 reactors of a new simplified design planned, with a first batch of 6 in lots of 2 each at 3 sites coming up.
I was a bit confused about the Mitterand gov't claim, that seems to be a Hollande gov't thing from 2014. In particular after 2011 (with Fukushima on the minds of Europeans... not to debate how much those concerns made sense), and part of policy alignments with the socialist party and the greens
Found this 2023 article with Hollande not feeling the need to apologize for this policy[0]. I would like to point out that here Hollande at least points out the following:
- at the time polling showed 65-80% of people wanting an off-ramp
- this was kinda premised on the idea of leaning into renewables, which feels fine. If you can build a wind farm or solar in some spots might as well! There's not much morally wrong with the tech
There's definitely an argument to saying that its the responsibility of politicians and gov'ts to convince people to make the right decisions, but if 80% of people are like "we want to move our electricity grid to rely more on renewables" it's hard to argue to _not_ do it. And 50% is still 50%!
> Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.
This is the thing I'm not quite sure about. Like Fessenheim (which, IIRC, was the oldest) ended up working for 40+ years. Now... I'm not sure but if this plant was the oldest, then France was decomissioning older plants right? So either all of these politicians are being too "scared" to run the plant for 80 years.... or the lifetime of these plants really are less than 50 years.
I don't know how much of the reduction of nuclear share played a role in everything. We're talking about Hollande, a one-term president, establishing this in the wake of Fukushima. It wasn't the state of things in 2010, right?
I do get the argument of "don't lose the muscle memory" for cost control cases alone. I don't think that "build some renewables because wind is also quite nice when you can use it" is an unreasonable ask either (don't need water to cool wind turbines!).
I do appreciate the color on EPR though. I knew EPR was a bit of a mess but I get what you're saying about building 14 of the same thing vs just one of em.
And yes, of course they wanted to replace nuclear with renewables, what else were they going to replace it with?
But that doesn't work. See Germany. Which is why that plan has now been laid to rest.
Without shutting off Fessenheim, Flamanville 3 would have been illegal under the Hollande law:
"On 9 April 2017, the plant was ordered to close after the Flamanville 3 unit comes online, expected to begin operation in late 2018, later reported to 2019, keeping the French nuclear generation capacity below the legal limit of 63.2 GWe." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant...
And there was also strong political opposition to Fessenheim. The Fessenheim closure was not technical.
The French reactors are based on Westinghouse designs, and those reactors are currently being extended to 80 year lifespan in the US. So I don't see why they shouldn't be capable of the same lifetime in France, though the French do drive them a bit harder.
It's not the regulations, it's the financing scheme: if it's not state backed with a long investment horizon, it's very expensive because private investors expect 10% yields in the middle of a ZIRP to cover from the possible political reversal.
The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.
It's not just political reversal risk; there's the risk of technological obsolescence. It's very much a stretch to assume a nuclear plant will remain operationally viable (in the sense of being competitive) for 40 years, never mind the 60 or 80 years sometimes mentioned, because the competition isn't standing still.
The only credible competition against a state funded nuclear plant is hypothetical next gen geothermal power though.
Nuclear won't save the planet, as few countries can develop a nuclear industry. But for countries that have one, it should be a no brainer if not for irrational nuclear bomb fears.
> The only credible competition against a state funded nuclear plant is hypothetical next gen geothermal power though.
If we extend renewables and batteries on historical experience curves they could become incredibly cheap, with solar well below $0.01/kWh. Nuclear couldn't even make an operating profit in an environment with solar that cheap.
looking at the current Geopolitical Climate this does not seem like an Irrational Fear. And I do not mean the fear of a reactor meltdown. But if you refine Uranium for a Powerplant you can also Refine it for a bomb.
If risk and disposal is factored into coal, gas, solar power, what would be cheaper? Nuclear has recyclable fuel processes and fail safe systems available.
Building dams is not without environmental costs especially in water stressed regions. Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has long been a source of tension between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.
Motuo Hydropower Station - will overtake the Three Gorges dam as the world's largest. The project has attracted criticism for its potential impact on millions of Indians and Bangladeshis living downriver, as well as the surrounding environment and local Tibetans.
I can see this makes sense especially for medium term storage. A lot full of batteries is great for the next ten seconds, next ten minutes, even to some extent the next ten hours, but it surely doesn't make much sense to store ten days of electricity that way compared to just keeping the water behind a dam. We know that many of the world's large dams are capturing snow melt or other seasonal flows, running them only when solar or wind can't provide the power you need lets you make more effective use of the same resource.
Except that in many cases there's people living downstream doing agriculture using that water for irrigation. There's just this tiny dispute about that in the nile delta between Egypt and Ethiopia
Except for very short term peaks (less than 15 minutes-ish) it doesn't make any sense at all to use hydro to charge batteries. You've got a dam, you might as well let water through later than incur the losses of a round trip to batteries and back to the grid.
There are two types of hydro - run of river, and ones with large lake storage. You need the ones with large lake storage, rather that the ones with a lake to build a head.
Pumped hydro storage only holds about 8-12 hours of power. To be economically viable to build you need to cycle it daily.
It uses enormous amounts of land and capital to build, and is ongoingly dangerous in a unique way. If LiFePO4 can do 4 hours at full output already, and be placed anywhere using volume manufacturing to expand, then batteries are straight up better.
Each way you move the energy costs you 50% in efficiency. Which is why pumped hydro has to have a 4x different in the price of energy in vs energy out to make it economically viable. That's why PG&E almost never uses their pumped storage. Only on days where the mid day price of power is very low does it make sense. And keep in mind that California is the ideal place for pumped storage. I seriously doubt that NZ has a 3x duck curve in its energy demand.
It's nowhere close to 50%. Round-trip (so that's after both ways) efficiency is about 70-80% for a pumped storage scheme. Buy 10MW to pump the water, and get back 7-8MW when you release it. Contrast that with a reality here in the UK where the gas dominated spot price this morning when I woke up was about £180 per MWh, yet yesterday afternoon solar and wind had it down to £25 per MWh, so you could buy 100MWh of energy for £2500 but sell it less than a day later and make 400% on your investment in under 24 hours despite the efficiency loss. Very silly to insist this can't be profitable.
For the cost and expense of building a pumped hydro plant though, you could just deploy batteries which will do the same thing for a much lower capital and management investment and vastly simplified engineering. And a higher round-trip efficiency.
LiFePO4 works to demand shift on a daily cycle just fine and scales better to solar input (where you need much higher power handling so you can charge it on limited sunlight - a pumped hydro system is limited to charging at about half its discharge rate).
Like you wrote you can use nuclear as a base load. It's not really useful as a short-term backup for when other plants don't work. If you need batteries and excess power for backup, you might as well create the excess power without nuclear if you can.
Nuclear doesn't really solve this particular problem - solar is already cheaper than nuclear, so no one is going to replace their entire solar capacity with nuclear. And nuclear doesn't spin up/down rapidly like natural gas, so its a lousy solution for nighttime.
Now calculate what it costs running a nuclear plant only at night.
You’ll end up at $400 per MWh excluding transmissions costs, taxes etc.
Your state already has coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned because no one wants their expensive electricity during the daytime. Let alone a horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear plant.
But not economically. And it can’t ramp twice. Once is easy.
For the French to do load following they sync their entire fleet to manage it. Letting plants take turns and spread out where they are in their fuel cycle.
According to the current version of the European
Utility Requirements (EUR) the NPP must be capable
of a minimum daily load cycling operation between
50% and 100% Pr, with a rate of change of electric
output of 3-5% Pr /minute.
The problem with integration of solar and wind with nuclear power is that it doesn't make economical sense to build solar and wind in electric grid based on nuclear power generation. Because the fuel costs of nuclear power plants are so low and the capacity factors can be very high (nuclear power plants need only very short pauses for maintenance) building solar and wind in such electric grid doesn't lower the costs for grid customers.
This is big problem for solar and wind investors and manufacturers.
Nuclear power is a big competition also for coal and gas producers. I think coal producers in Australia are quite scary even of the idea for nuclear power production in Australia.
Which of course is why the countries that do that the most have the highest energy costs in the world. And just for fun, they usually have some of the dirtiest grids because of all the drawbacks of renewables.
Base load is an industry term coined by the very engineers who make the grid work. But I'm sure a random poster on an Internet forum knows more than the engineers who actually do the work.
> You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar.
You always need something in the grid that can change the amount of power it generates regardless of what you use in combination with it, because the demand from the grid isn't fixed. All grids need something in the nature of storage/hydro or peaker plants.
The advantage of combining solar with nuclear is that their generation profiles are different. Nuclear can generate power at night and doesn't have lower output during the peak seasonal demand period for heating. Nuclear is baseload; it doesn't make sense to have more of it than the minimum load on the grid, but no one is really proposing to. The minimum load is generally around half of the maximum load.
> It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.
If you actually reprocess the fuel there is no "couple thousand of years". If you instead put it in a dry hole in the desert, you have a desert where nobody wanted to live to begin with that now has a box of hot rocks sealed in it. It's not clear how this is supposed to cost an unforeseeable amount of money.
> Vulnerable to terrorism.
Nuclear plants are kind of a hard target. The stuff inside them isn't any more of a biohazard than what's in a thousand other chemical/industrial plants that aren't surrounded in thick concrete.
> Enabler of nuclear weapons.
The US already has nuclear weapons and would continue to do so regardless of how much electricity is generated from what sources. The argument against building nuclear reactors in Iran is not an argument against building nuclear reactors in Ohio.
> It takes a long time to build and bring online.
Better get started then.
> It doesn't scale down.
Decent argument for not having one in your house; not a great argument for not having one in your state.
> Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?
The country with the largest uranium reserves is Australia. Kazakhstan is #2 and has about the same amount as Canada. Other countries with significant reserves include Russia, India, Brazil, China, Ukraine and several countries in Africa. The US has some itself and plenty of other places to source it. It can also be extracted from seawater.
The US is also in the top 4 for thorium reserves with about 70% as much as the #1 (which is India), and thorium is 3-4 times more abundant overall than uranium.
> The advantage of combining solar with nuclear is that their generation profiles are different.
Nuclear generates a constant amount of power 24/7. If in the near future we generate a lot of power from photovoltaics during the day, we won't need the nuclear base load. We should switch to something that's a better fit: Batteries or perhaps gas turbines.
> > It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.
> If you actually reprocess the fuel there is no "couple thousand of years".
We've had nuclear power for many decades. Ask yourself: Why isn't reprocessing being done at a scale that's sufficient to get rid of the most problematic waste?
> If you instead put it in a dry hole in the desert, you have a desert where nobody wanted to live to begin with that now has a box of hot rocks sealed in it. It's not clear how this is supposed to cost an unforeseeable amount of money.
Again, it's harder than it looks because despite billions of dollars spent all over the world, noone has managed to create a final disposal site yet.
> Partitioning and recycling of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinide content of used nuclear fuel can dramatically reduce this number to around 300 years.
One reason new plastic is so cheap is that we wanted the other parts of the oil to run automobiles and planes. So if we stop doing that suddenly recycling the plastic makes more sense too...