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by _aavaa_
17 days ago
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To say that paid off nuclear is profitable without subsidies and then mention France is deeply funny. Putting aside the actual subsidies, there’s the uncomfortable truth that nuclear operators are not on the hook for long tail risks and costs. The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning if the company goes under, and it will foot the bill for accidents. To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop. |
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Care to elaborate on what you find funny?
France's energy regulator (CRE) puts the actual cost of running its nuclear fleet at about ~€61/MWh for 2026-2028. EDF's (Électricité de France) own revenue estimate for 2026 nuclear generation is around €66/MWh. They are currently earning a profit on their power generation, the fleet pulls in over €5 billion annually just from selling the surplus to its neighbors. If that's the punchline of your joke I'm not seeing it.
French industrial electricity runs about €69/MWh vs £168/MWh in the UK, as an example.
> The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning
What better use is there of taxes than the running and decommissioning of power plants, nuclear or not? I'd much rather my tax money go to covering all the costs involved with nuclear, from initial construction and everything else involved than pretty much anything else most gov'ts waste their money on.
Who should be paying for it, in your mind?
> To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
Again, I fail to see how or why this is actually a problem. Power generation is probably the poster child for what governments should be handling and backstopping with tax money. You're also talking as if the large majority of power plants, and I mean coal, natural gas and even renewables aren't also covered by the exact same kind of government backstop.
In the US, nuclear's liability for an accident is capped around $16.3 Billion under the Price-Anderson Act, split across private insurance and an industry-funded pool.
Offshore oil liability is capped by law at $75 million (Yes, only MILLION) per incident, funded by a tiny per-barrel tax, and cleanup costs blow through that number constantly, which is why e.g. Deepwater Horizon needed a special one-off arrangement to handle at all. TVA's 2008 coal ash spill cost over a billion dollars to clean up and got passed straight onto ratepayers because TVA hit its own debt ceiling. And right now, in 2026, the EPA is actively proposing to weaken coal ash cleanup rules, meaning the backstop on coal's mess is getting worse, not better, while it's still being burned at scale.
So no, nuclear doesn't get some unique golden treatment here. Every energy source with real catastrophic tail risk gets a government backstop, because no private insurer on earth prices genuinely catastrophic low-probability events without one. The only difference is nuclear's cap is a known, bounded number attached to an industry with an extremely good actual safety record in reality, while coal's backstop is open-ended and attached to something that poisons rivers and drinking water on a rolling basis without needing a single accident to do it.