[adev_]

> This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts.

It is not only the oil shock.

Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y.

The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.

The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'.

Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power.

The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.

[dmix]

Yep even before the war German industry was ringing alarm bells about how their high energy costs made it very difficult to compete against China.

They should be adopting every sort of energy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme...

> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.

[selfmodruntime]

Germany has one of the world's highest energy costs because taxes on electricity are astronomical. This is a selfmade problem.

[Moldoteck]

taxes are needed to fund infrastructure or pay curtailment

[dalyons]

Building _new_ nuclear is not going to make their energy costs cheaper. It is the most expensive form of generation

[flakeoil]

You probably have to look at the whole picture. Having part of the energy generation from nuclear probably makes the total cheaper than having no nuclear. Even if nuclear maybe is the most expensive.

Not having enough energy or having it cut off by a neighbour is very expensive.

[ViewTrick1002]

That is not the case. Grid modelers always land on renewables being cheaper. Except for the cases when the studies start with "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...

[vince14]

That is not the case. There are LCOLC, LFSCOE and others which land on renewables being way more expensive. Even without your made up claim about "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".

[ViewTrick1002]

Which are extremely simplified metrics.

Like the LFSCOE study is only using one source of renewables through all weather together with 2020 data on battery costs.

Which is why I linked a recent full system analysis. With Danish data so a vastly harder problem than a place with abundant solar. So tell me what they missed.

They even tilted the study heavily towards nuclear power and assumed that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive.

Still finding that renewables are vastly cheaper when it comes to meeting a real grid load.

[716dpl]

While this is true, we don't have a good solution for long term energy storage. Even with plummeting costs and new technologies like sodium ion, batteries still only get you maybe ~12 hours of discharge. Pumped hydro give you longer storage, but there are limited places where you can build it. Unless geothermal becomes competitive, nuclear is still the best solution for carbon-free baseload.

[nicoburns]

~12 hours storage + overbuilt solar + load shifing seems like it could probably be a complete solution for the vast majority of the world (everywhere that's vaguely close the equator).

[dalyons]

I agree storage is a problem.

But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.

The only way you can make it work is state subsidies and/or forcing people to buy the more expensive nuke power. Which will be unpopular. But maybe you can sell it as a “grid backup fee” or something.

[vince14]

Storage is not just 'a problem', it doesn't exist and won't for many many decades.

The planned solution is hydrogen power plants, but no one wants to build them because the infrastructure, including electrolysers, is way too economically unfeasible.

Therefore, Germany is and will continue to be dependent on coal and gas, as these are the main producers every night. That's your 'grid backup fee' for you.

[dalyons]

Long term storage is a problem. Nightly will be solved soon by batteries. California is well on the way, down to 25% fossil in 2025 from 45% in 2022, due to batteries. And they just keep getting built. Australia is on the same track.

If we have to burn some gas to cover the occasional long term weather issue, I’m ok with that , if we’re at 90+% decarbonized at that point it’s still a huge win.

[citrin_ru]

May be base-load is not the best term but in case if batteries and other storages will run out during long cloudy stretch with weak winds nuclear will at least allow to power critical infrastructure. It’s bad that some consumers will loose power but less bad than total apocalypses when the storage is empty and you have no unintermittent power source in the grid.

[dalyons]

for the foreseeable future that weather-anomoly backup role is going to be filled by gas. Spins up very fast, nearly zero marginal cost while sitting idle. And yes, it creates emissions, but if you're only using it for rare weather events, you're probably talking >5% of the supply annual total that produces emissions. Which is fine.

[adrian_b]

There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons. This is a solution that has been proven for billions of years.

We can already capture solar energy at a much better energy efficiency than living beings. Making hydrocarbons with hydrogen extracted from water by electrolysis and concentrated carbon dioxide has acceptable efficiency and already almost one century ago it was possible to do this at a large scale where fossil oil was not available.

The step that has the least efficiency for now is concentrating the dilute carbon dioxide from air, which plants do much better.

There is no doubt that the global efficiency of such a process could have been greatly improved if only a small fraction of the resources allocated to much more frivolous goals had been allocated to this purpose.

While other alternatives are speculative, it is enough to look outside to see plenty of PoCs that this is feasible.

[Moldoteck]

There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons - that'll cost you in the end much more than throwing some nuclear in

[Neikius]

This.

And alternatively just making hydrogen but storage is a problem with that.

So simple with negative peak energy prices...

[cassepipe]

Apart from the fact the round-trip efficiency is abysmal, hydrogen is so small and lightweight, it leaks through everywhere unless you have some specialized (read, expensive) equipment. I'd say why not if we could just repurpose gas infrastructure for it but turns out, no. I know people like to accuse each other's favorite energy sources of being fossil industry shills but hydrogen truly look like an attempt at stalling by big fossil. Hydrogen sounds good to politicians who don't understand energy, only understand fuel and just want a new clean fuel.

[dmix]

Then why is China building 30 new reactors on top of the 60 they already have, if it's not competitive?

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i...

The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.

[j16sdiz]

The way China building new reactor is not typical.

Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification.

China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type.

If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.

[marcosdumay]

They have a huge number of people that can specialize in many different things.

But their government has actually explained it. They purposely diversify any tech that doesn't have a clear winner, so in the long term a winner appears and they can focus on it.

[dalyons]

They also, most importantly, don’t have to care if any of their reactors make economic sense. It is a single party state, and the incentive structure is very different.

[mpweiher]

Actually the way China builds nuclear reactors is very typical of the way western countries built reactors back when we still did it well: standardize, build a bunch in overlapping batches. Keep building.

That shouldn't be surprising, because they learned it from us.

We stopped doing it that way because we effectively stopped building.

China is building enough reactors that they can do this with several standardized designs. Which is smart.

The EPR has basically failed, so in the west we currently have 3 standardized generation III(+) designs: The Westinghouse AP-1000, the South Korean APR-1400 and the Japanese ABWR.

Of these, both the ABWR and the APR-1400 have been built quickly and cheaply, with the ABWR holding the record for fastest build times: under 4 years.

The AP-1000 had some very rough initial builds, because the design wasn't actually finished and it turned out what they had "finished" wasn't actually buildable. Ooops. These issues appear to have been ironed out, and a lot of countries are betting on the AP-1000: the US, Poland, China, and Ukraine. Turkey, Slovakia and Bulgaria have also expressed interest.

The EPR is essentially dead, with only the UK wanting to build two more UK-EPRs at Sitwell-C. Hopefully the EPR2 will be better, what I've seen of the specs suggests it has a good chance.

Anyway, one point I want to come back to is the "keep building".

This is actually crucial, and one of the reasons many western projects in recent years went so badly. We had forgotten how to build, no longer building a bunch in overlapping bunches, but single units decades apart.

And there comes to rub: in order to "keep building", you have to build slowly. Slow is smooth and smooth fast my guitar teacher used to say. The French built out far too quickly, constructing 55 reactors in just 15 years. Then they were done. Nothing to build until that initial batch wears out. Reactors last a long time, easily 60-80 years.

Ooops.

The key to this comes from queueing theory, Little's Law:

    L = ƛW

"the long-term average number of customers (L) in a stationary system is equal to the long-term average effective arrival rate (λ) multiplied by the average time that a customer spends in the system (W)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law

So if you have a desired fleet size of 80 units and they last 80 years, you should be completing 1 unit per year. China is currently permitting 15 per year. If they keep that up throughout the construction phase, this would imply a steady-state fleet size of 1200 reactors.

That's a lot of reactors.

If you build more quickly, you won't be in steady state. Of course you can still do better than going full tilt and then stopping, smoothly modulating the build-rate.

For France, this would have meant a fleet size of 320 reactors at the rate they were going. Alternatively, the build rate for the fleet size they have would have been around one reactor every two years.

Something to keep in mind for the "not a lot of nuclear is being built"-crowd.

[Moldoteck]

most of chinese units are hualongs now

[nikanj]

China can build ten reactors for the cost of Germany running the appeals, environmental studies and neighborhood consultations for one

[dalyons]

And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper.

And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.

[mpweiher]

No it's not.

You actually have to build out intermittent renewables much faster than nuclear even for comparable generating capacity due to the much shorter lifetime of the equipment. See Little's Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law

China recently signed up to the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear generation. In the same time period, worldwide electricity generation is predicted to rise by 50-100%, so the nuclear share will grow by 50% - 100%.

[dalyons]

Are you referring to the debunked idea that solar panels only last 20 years? Because yeah, bunk.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...

[Moldoteck]

china wants nuclear to provide 10-20% of their needs. If china wants that, they'll achieve it. Nuclear is extremely competitive in china.

[dalyons]

competitive is the wrong word. It does not have to compete on price or all in lifecycle cost, because its single party state that owns everything and cant be voted out. But i do agree that if they want it, they'll make it happen.

[Moldoteck]

its expensive if it takes 20y. It's cheap if it takes under 6-8, like Barakah or China

[mpweiher]

Citation needed.

(Narrator: yes it will, and no it's not).

[spixy]

Austria is also trying to block nuclear, at least in Czechia and Slovakia.

[selfmodruntime]

> The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.

Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.

[txdv]

Can we get one in Lithuania?

[afh1]

German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.

[fnordian_slip]

>German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century,

The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.

Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me

[Moldoteck]

phaseout was adopted by redgreens in 2000 and continued by cdu in 2011. THat's a fact German solar was just not competitive - labor, electricity and coal were more expensive in germany. Solar industry was showing problems even before cfd's reduction (which applied to chinese ones too but they endured since costs were lower)

[peterfirefly]

> continued by cdu in 2011.

because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public.

The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).

[selfmodruntime]

Not only that, aggressive cuts to the EEG subsidies killed dogfooding their own solar industry in the country.

[selfmodruntime]

> It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.

Now that is a lie. The anti-nuclear push came from the Greens in the 90s. Conservatives just used it for a quick win once that policy became very popular in Germany.

[croes]

And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.

[Moldoteck]

germany has highest prices in eu without any nuclear. It spent on eeg double the cost of entire french fleet. and that fleet wasnt even very cheap looking at what china does now. Germany also needs gas firming per fraunhofer ise report since bess is not sufficient

[adev_]

> And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.

It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice.

Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation.

A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view.

Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore.

In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent.

(1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation.

(2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around.

(3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent.

Like often: there is no silver bullet.

The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1].

[1]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...

[dalyons]

I think it is actually the pro nuke case that often has misconceptions of how a modern grid works, repeating terms like “base load” etc

Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.

Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.

[pu_pe]

What happens in days where renewables can't produce enough energy? Or the evenings where we don't have enough batteries (all evenings so far and for the next decade at least)? You can call it base load or whatever you want, but that energy is coming either from hydro, nuclear or a carbon-based source. And those carbons are hard to come by these days, so even if nuclear power is expensive, at least it is reliable.

[dalyons]

It takes a decade at least for any new nuclear starting today to come online in the west. In that decade you’ve built an awful lot of batteries for the same amount of money.

No one wants to bet $10s of billions of nuke capex against the relentless progress of batteries and other tech over the next 10 years, and then the 30+ years of plant operations. It’s a suckers bet , so the only ones who can take it are nation states.

[selfmodruntime]

How about you answer his question?

[pu_pe]

So now the discussion is not about whether base load is a thing or not, it is that you firmly believe that batteries are the answer to everything.

First it should be said that this thread is primarily about decomissioning existing nuclear power plants. It makes enormous sense to keep operating those plants until we have a world like the one you describe, regardless of how much newer plants would cost.

But more importantly, your assumptions about the future are very optimistic. I'm sure the Germans also thought they were being very smart when they decided that nuke capex was not worth it because gas was so cheap and easily available, and then now we are finding out that this decision crippled their economy because it caused a dependency. In my opinion throwing all your chips into a technology that requires materials and production capacity you don't have, and in some cases doesn't even exist yet, is a real sucker's bet. All your rosy scenarios would fall apart in one second if China decides to stop selling batteries to you.

[adev_]

> Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.

No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y.

Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1]

> The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical.

Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost.

But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one.

In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks.

[1]: https://www.iea.org/countries/china/electricity

[dalyons]

A lot has changed since the 2023 data in your link.

Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth.

1 https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...

Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed

[adev_]

> Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed

That is just economics.

The intermittent nature of renewable means that overcapacity is structurally required to arrive to match partially the demand.

As an example, Germany has > 100GW of Solar installed capacity for a country where the average power demand is around ~60GW *total*.

Overcapacity means that the price of electricity naturally goes to zero (or even to negative) as soon as the sun shine. And this is very visible on the EU electricity market currently [1].

It is (obviously) terrible for the profitability of the means of production and it is not sustainable: No investor sane of mind would put money on the table for a system that sell at negative price when it produces...

To compensate that, most EU countries created the CfDs (Contract for difference) system. A minimum price is guaranteed by contract to the investor and the State pay the difference when the price are too low. The UK did it (and it costs billions) [2], France did it (and it costs billions) [3] and Germany is doing it [4].

So we are subsidizing and using public money to create an artificial profitability on top of an industry that we know is not profitable due to overcapacity caused by bad public policies.

Considering that this overcapacity is also reducing the profitability of nuclear powerplants in the first place (because nuclear is CAPEX based).

The pain is triple: The final consumer pays (1) the cost of the Grid restructuring for renewable (2) the cost of the Cfds to maintain the system alive due to overcapacity (3) the additional €/MWh to the now reduced profitability of the historical production means.

So yes, at the end, the price increase.

And it is what we see currently everywhere in Europe: Electricity price are increasing continuously even if Solar/Wind LCOE is lower than ever.

[1]: https://ibb.co/6cf99PfZ

[2]: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/another-record-year-cfd-s...

[3]: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/euro...

[4]: https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/germany-to-reset-gove...

[selfmodruntime]

What is that storage you speak of?