[Kon5ole]

>we cannot build them anywere in Europe due to plain stupidity.

Economics I think. Nuclear power has gone bankrupt in France already (arguably more than once) and gotten bailed out. Now they produce electricity at a price that's often above market price, with losses covered by the taxpayers.

This despite relying on cheap cooling from rivers. Adding more expensive cooling won't help.

We've quite recently reached mass production economies of scale for both solar panels and batteries. The implications are that the price of electricity is set to drop even more in the years to come.

[leonidasrup]

The bad financial shape of EDF had multiple reasons:

1. Cost overruns in construction of the new EPR reactors. The EPR is a extremely safe and as a result extremely overengineered and expensive design. The aim was to merge the French N4 design and German Konvoi design and have a standard design which would satisfy nuclear regulators in all countries. France wants now to simplify EPR and build cheaper and simpler EPR2.

2. EDF was mandated to sell large part of it's electricity production at bellow the market value. The ARENH mechanism.

"The ARENH (which in French means “regulated access to historic nuclear energy”) was created in 2011 in the context of the opening of the electricity market to competition. The law that provided a framework for this opening-up had the main objective of enabling all consumers to benefit from the competitiveness of the French nuclear fleet. Before the ARENH, EDF was the main electricity supplier, covering 95% of the French territory (the rest being covered by local distribution companies). Under the ARENH, so-called alternative suppliers (i.e. other than EDF) obtained access to a regulated price (€42/MWh) for the electricity produced by EDF’s historic nuclear fleet within a volume limit of 100 TWh per year. This is equivalent to almost a third (27.64%) of 2024 French nuclear production (361.7 TWh)."

https://hayaenergy.com/blog-end-of-french-nuclear-procuremen...

[skrellm]

> Now they produce electricity at a price that's often above market price

Do you have any source? I'm not french and all I can hear from the news is that France's nuclear electricity is cheap, for example:

https://thenextweb.com/news/france-energy-advantage-ai-data-...

Now I'm curious what the truth is. Are these articles just fake-news trying to ride the AI wave? (not suggesting, just asking)

[Kon5ole]

>Do you have any source?

There are many sources and it's of course complicated, but around 6 eurocents per kWh seems to be an accepted semi-official figure.

"The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh"

(https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...)

One can also deduce that it's somewhere between the old ARENH price of 4 cents (which is known to be unsustainable) and the new price of 7 cents.

Prices for wholesale electricity in the FR region have dipped below 5 cents (monthly average) several times in recent years. (Source: Nordpool).

[inigyou]

At this point in time it can be assumed that 90% of everything on the internet is a lie.

French nuclear electricity is cheap because the government subsidizes it to keep it afloat. And because continental European electricity is generally expensive. It probably wouldn't survive in a free market.

[wookmaster]

Free market probably means they rely on Russian gas or coal from other countries ? Sometimes it’s worth paying a bit more to be independent

[TitaRusell]

Solar panels keep getting better and cheaper every year. Can't say the same for nuclear.

[chermi]

A nice way to guarantee that is not not try.

[inigyou]

I believe this is why the USA recently declared that it's no longer going to follow the "linear no-threshold model" and "as low as reasonable achievable" principle of radiation exposure. In other words they're declaring that a small amount of radiation is good for you. Building a reactor without shielding and with a single open-cycle water loop should reduce costs, right?

(Do you know what else reduces costs? Apparently, putting a foot of graphite at the bottom of your control rods and not paying close attention to a dangerously unstable reactor during an unusual experiment. These aren't official American policy yet.)

Also, the USA's recent ban on solar electricity equipment should help make other forms more competitive.

[rcxdude]

Linear no-threshold and ALARA are pretty objectively overly conservative, to the point of potentially doing more harm than good (Fukushima is mentioned down below. More people died as a result of the evacuation than would have resulted from the radiation) as well as making many things obscenely expensive. It's a little absurd that nuclear plants obsess over radiation doses smaller than a short-haul flight.

Linear no-threshold being false doesn't necessarily mean a little bit of radiation is good for you, though there is some shaky data to suggest that might be true, just that small amounts of radiation are not as proportionally bad as large amounts.

[Hammershaft]

The harms of radiation are massively overhyped.

Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.

Meanwhile the nuclear industry has been drowning for 50+ years from egregious layers of overregulation.

It costed NuScale $500+ Million just to write the documents required for regulatory approval for a new reactor design.

Microsoft is spending $60 Million a year to build an LLM whose only purpose is to automate writing nuclear regulatory documents.

I don't support the Trump admin one iota, but I'm also saddened that democrats tend to be too safetyist to do an honest cost benefit evaluation of some of these insane regulations.

[Kon5ole]

>The harms of radiation are massively overhyped.

>Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.

You say these two things as if the second statement supports the first, but it doesn't.

The dangers of radiation are very well known and don't change at all based on what happened at Fukushima. If you fire a gun and miss, the gun is still dangerous.

>Meanwhile the nuclear industry has been drowning for 50+ years from egregious layers of overregulation.

Here's an account of two gruesome deaths caused by poor regulation of nuclear materials in Japan. It happened 12 years before Fukushima.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/hisashi-ouchi.htm

[herewulf]

Interesting but people die (or are severely injured) in all kinds of industrial accidents all the time. Unfortunately, with or without regulation it comes with the territory of a modern industrial society.

[Kon5ole]

>Interesting but people die (or are severely injured) in all kinds of industrial accidents all the time.

Very few other industrial accidents cause effects that have to be dealt with for decades over 1000 miles away, even across oceans.

Nuclear power really is in a league of its own when it comes to risk. I am not aware of anything that comes close. Dam accidents have killed many more people and devastated towns, but the day after that happens, the area can be reused and the risk is entirely gone. The risks of nuclear power remain for decades or even centuries.

Finding ways to deal with that risk is fine, arguing that it can be managed is fine, but pretending that the risk is exaggerated based on the accidents that have happened so far is a mistake.

The risk is things that could happen, not what has actually happened.

[Georgelemental]

> Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.

There has actually been 1 radiation death

[inigyou]

How can writing documents possibly cost $500,000,000?

[rcxdude]

How could writing code possibly cost that much? And yet tech companies spend significantly more than that per year on it. You need a lot of highly paid, experienced people to do it (negotiating regulatory frameworks is pretty much its own profession).

[a34729t]

Country of lawers vs country of engineers