[remarkEon]

Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.

[geden]

What is the solution?

Where are the free nuclear plants?

Sizewell C = £40 billion

That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.

[subscribed]

You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar.

Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.

Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.

[bjourne]

Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.

[remarkEon]

This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …

… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.

[bjourne]

Plain false. The "economics" never got bad. They were always bad to begin with, hidden under layers of government subsidies.

[herewulf]

The fossil fuel industry quietly funneled money to these groups to discredit nuclear which competes with gas/coal for base load. Solar/wind only partially compete because at times they produce nothing so the grid still needs base load (usually "natural" gas these days).

Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!

[throwthrowuknow]

Ask why it suddenly got so expensive and why delays were introduced. Hint, it happened more in some countries than others.

[bjourne]

Hint, being snarky on HN is not as cool as you think.

Nuclear "became expensive" because state subsidies declined, labor costs increased, and environmental regulations across all industries tightened.

[Moldoteck]

this is nonsense. Take german plants - zero subsidies for operation, plants were built mostly by private sector. In France - no CFD's for existing units, plants were constructed by govt for about 150bn. In comparison Germany spent on EEG subsidies double of that and you can see the result in emissions...

[Mawr]

Yeah, the efficient coal plants displaced the inefficient nuclear ones. Efficiency all the way!

Climate change? Pollution? Nah, who cares, efficiency!

[int_19h]

And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.

[lukan]

Source needed, a quick search if mine showed very different numbers:

"China aims to reach 110 gigawatts (GWe) of nuclear capacity by 2030."

"China installed over 430 GW of renewables in 2025"

In other words china installed last year alone 5x the energy capacity in solar and wind, what the are planning to have in 2030

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

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

[Moldoteck]

what has installed capacity to do with price? Check recent chinese solar parks prices and power. Normalize that power with chineze weather capacity factor. Do the same for their nuclear which is roughly 2.5bn/unit

China does expand ren more than nuclear but the reason is not economics but the capacity to scale (as well as inland ban)

[SJC_Hacker]

110 GW at a 90% capacity factor vs 430 GW at maybe 20% capacity factor

[ViewTrick1002]

Vastly slower. China is on one hand building enough renewables to soak up the entire grid expansion and displace fossil fuels.

On the other hand their nuclear share is declining. It peaked at 4.7% in 2021 and is today down to 4.3%. Entirely irrelevant.

For each plan they put out they lower their nuclear targets and push them further into the future.

Going from a French like buildout 10-15 years ago to having it as a token investment today.

[nazgul17]

Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?

A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?

Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.

[Filligree]

What does the linear no-threshold model say about air pollution from coal plants, anyway?

[Gibbon1]

Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.

[Moldoteck]

I do see how France and Sweden have lowest GHG emissions in EU by building both nuclear and renewables. I see other countries like Denmark/Germany who decided to go with ren alone. Germany spent on EEG double than entire french nuclear fleet. We can see the results. There's no race here. There's no imagine if. We already have historical data. We already have results on hand

[sehansen]

I don't see that?

France: 4.12 tons CO2 per capita Denmark: 4.34 tons CO2 per capita

and the electricity price for industrial costumers is also close to identical:

France: 0.153 EUR/kWh (0.130 EUR/kWh without taxes) Denmark 0.122 EUR/kWh (0.121 EUR/kWh without taxes)

CO2 data from EUs EDGAR: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025?vis=co2pop#emissi...

Price data from: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[remarkEon]

Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.

[lukan]

Maybe have a look at that by now old old image. Notice the red square. It is a bit larger today, but the principle stays the same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DESERTEC-Map_large.jpg

There are enough roofs and waste lands for solar.

But out of curiosity, would you like to live next to a nuclear plant/uran mining/radioactive waste deposit?

[remarkEon]

Sorry is the idea here that we’d cover the Sahara in PVs? The Sahara desert, in Africa, the most dysfunctional continent on the planet. And, what, we’d lay a billion miles of transmission lines? You can’t keep reliable electricity running in those countries today because of how frequent copper theft is. You think building a solar farm is going to work?

This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.

[ars]

The solution is nuclear fuel reprocessing + breeder reactors.

You end up burning all of the uranium, leaving being only short lived isotopes.

[Moldoteck]

Will solar + bess supply power with the same pattern in UK or will they require gas firming on top?

[lukan]

"We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity"

Did you ever handled radioactive material yourself?

Or watched how Uranium mining works and what gets left behind?

I doubt that.

[Moldoteck]

Uranium mining nowadays is pretty environmentally friendly. More than half of global production is in situ mining. Nuclear also requires least amount of mining per kwh vs alternatives https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...

[NamlchakKhandro]

Have you?

[lukan]

Yes. I was born and live close to a site where Uranium was extensively mined and cannot confirm clean nor safe.