This still has to pass with the people in a referendum.
The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.
Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.
We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.
Switzerland is not in the EU.
While it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.
Just the opposite. It's literally not in the EU. It's literally in Europe but not in the EU.
OP was making a geometric observation.
By that light, the UK is still in the EU. I bet they would disagree though.
The UK is not enclosed by the EU.
To be pedantic: neither is Switzerland because of Liechtenstein...
I like that you ignore that “in” means “inside” in one sentence and then use that exact meaning of the word in the following sentence
You can escape Switzerland by going straight up into space. It's only "in" the EU in 2 dimensions, maybe 2.5 since you can't dig your way out.
Ah, that's what they're building the power plants for. Blasting things into space.
Maybe Tim Curry should move there.
It's not and that's fine, but it's very much part of the European economic area, and we have a great relationship as well as a lot of alignments with standards and so on. The EU wouldn't have no issues taking notes from the Swiss.
Switzerland is not part of the European economic area, aka EEA.
It formally isn't but for (almost) all intents and purposes it is.
You're correct to point it out. Officially not. But basically yes. We have a free trade and they're part of our Schengen area, so for all intents and purposes there's almost no barriers to trade. I should have been more clear.
It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1].
At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...
Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap?
They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.
Process works if you keep building, expanding and making it safer. If you don’t build it for decades, you’re basically starting from scratch.
It is a hard sell when you have to front a good chunk of money, without a track record of successful build ups. It applies to other infrastructure stuff like HSR.
So let’s learn from that lesson and rebuild nuclear power in Europe?
Let’s hope Switzerland takes the lead here, Sweden are already building.
The political will is there. Let’s do it?
1. Nuclear has a negative learning curve. It’s gotten more expensive with time. Part of the reason is increasing geopolitical risks (the U.S. just launched a war on Iran because of the possibility it may upgrade nuclear material to weapon capabilities), lost knowledge and expertise, and also the increasing relative cost of financing in the cost of energy projects.
2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were much more likely to directly invest in energy projects. It didn’t have to compete with Labubus for private dollars.
3. Its current competition didn’t exist, given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten, and how much cheaper battery tech has gotten with signs all of them will only get even cheaper. And on the non renewable side, natural gas has become incredibly cheaper as well.
1. I personally believe the “lost knowledge “ is overstated. Europe knows very well how to manage large scale infrastructure projects. It still has a healthy nuclear industry.
2. Once the vote is there(Switzerland is a direct democracy), the public funds will be there. Sweden has recently chosen to invest ~40B Euro.
3. Solar, really? In Switzerland? Many parts of the industrialised world receive very little sun, especially in winter, where coincidentally, energy usage peaks.
And intermittent power generation like wind is no competition to nuclear.
These are very weak arguments. Good luck replacing Oskarshamn with solar panels…
> given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten
In a world with a lot of oil. How does that evolve when we don't have enough oil anymore?
Feels like renewables are extremely distributed, which sounds like it may be harder to manage without the happy globalisation brought by accessible oil.
To be clear, I believe we also need renewables. But I also believe that we won't remotely replace oil, so we need absolutely everything we can imagine, and that includes nuclear energy.
What counts as "fast and cheap" ?
For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.
Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.
The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.
Utility-scale solar projects in California are experiencing interconnection delays averaging 3 to 5 years, primarily due to grid congestion, slow utility study pipelines, and aging substation equipment.
It took 5 years from construction start to grid connection for Oskarshamn R3, at the time the reactor with the world’s highest rated output. Since it began operating it has produced 350TWh.
That nuclear power must take forever is a myth and is only due to dysfunctional politics.
That “you get a permit in the winter and it’s done by summer” is a totally bogus claim. Perhaps for some tiny installation compared to a power plant with 1.5GW output.
https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/o...
And now France target 2038 at the earliest for the first reactor in the EPR2 fleet. With a 11 cent per kWh CFD and interest free loans, summing to over 20 cents per kWh.
It is easy to dream about what could have been half a century ago, but that doesn’t change reality today.
Fellow Swede here, what is crazy is I also learned this from this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
SVT or SR has never shown me this, wonder why...
And what is crazy is we, in Europe, act and talk as if we cannot do anything without sucking up to USA or China.
We also have massive Hydro in Sweden. We can see what is currently giving us electricity.
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/
oh and dont get us started on the electricity zones and germany...
Turn on Barsebäck again... absolute asenine they shut it down. Will never happen, been too long, also owned by Uniper... (Germans)
And sadly S+MP+V will win this election it looks like. Say goodbye to any new nuclear power. Also it will be 2015 all over again but that is off topic...
The same way that France did it; by building quite safe nuclear in series with massive government subsidies. A bit like China today.
After the accidents showed that these designs where just not quite safe enough, redundancy in the safety systems were added. The thing is; as soon as those reactor designs got a bit more safe, they got much more expensive quite quickly. Just look at France's history of nuclear reactor development.CP0, CP1 and CP2 were somewhat cheap and they were able to churn out the things in quite a number.P4 and P'4 were already much more complex, more expensive and it just wasn't possible to mass produce these things like before. By N4 the economy of scale had broken down almost completely.
That's the problem with nuclear reactors. They are simple in principle, but fiendishly difficult in practice and enormously complex. So complex indeed that the learning curve doesn't yield any compounding returns. That's what we've seen play out in the last 50 years.
I don't know how things evolved in Sweden, but I assume that Swedish reactors don't have all the safety features of modern reactors. I guess that's what made them cheap, just like the CP-series in France.
It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.
>environmentalists have choked it to death.
Those regulations you despise were written in blood.
Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it.
Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.
> If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent.
I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
The effect environmentalists have on adoption is a rounding error compared to the humongous cost of nuclear power.
Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically.
Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.
I agree, I also believe the overall startup cost and low ROI is more relevant than the occasional tree-hugger’s limited political influence.
Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal.
But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
A country can do things that are not financially viable.
Because it was paid for by the taxpayer.
Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?
Winning arguments on the internet is more important than ideological consistency.
Or alternatively a reasonable person will accept the observation that sufficiently large problems with sufficiently bad consequences need to be socialized. However even then there is still going to be disagreement about where exactly to draw the line. That nuclear and climate change falls far to one side of it should not be a surprise.
Ask rayiner if they observe that large problems need to be socialized.
> Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
No need to run the world: in the last decades, some environmentalists have been lobbying against nuclear energy and in the end, the people in many countries have become opposed to it by fear of it. And that feared is fuelled (among others) by environmentalists for sure.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
If it's about comparing energies financially (and many other dimensions actually), nothing gets remotely close to oil. But oil is limited and oil is destroying the world.
Also not to forget: everything nowadays depends on globalisation and therefore oil. We like to compare renewables to oil, but we forget that they totally depend on oil at the moment. Without oil, we don't build much renewables anywhere. So an important question is: without oil, do we need nuclear energy or not? I believe we do. I believe we also need renewables, to be clear.
Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists." Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.
(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)
Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.
France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
> Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.
Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I mostly agree with your larger point, but the anti-nuclear movement predates the 70s by quite a bit.
I'm not sure I agree but lets set that aside for now. Are you seriously suggesting that $50 billion per France equivalent over half a century would have been an unreasonable price to pay to avert climate change? It's just not a logically consistent or even remotely sensible position. The environmentalist movement undeniably got this one wrong and I say that as someone with views that would generally be categorized as such.
These €50 billion is just what EDF is in debt, not what building and operating these reactors actually cost. Just in the next 10 years EDF will have in invest about €150-200 billion to replace and refurbish their reactors. That's just to keep the current capacity, not to expand it.
Unfortunately "the environmentalist movement" didn't have the information regarding the dangers of climate change and the information about the near-zero threat from low level nuclear radiation in 1970ies. Hindsight is 20/20.
That said; planning and construction of new nuclear reactors peaked in the early 1970ies, before large scale accidents (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) really mobilized civil society against nuclear power.
The reason the West stopped building is because even with state support, it's not such a financially attractive investment. That's why "the East" continued building more and more reactors until the big incident. (Arguably their reactors were also much less safe and thus probably cheaper by quite a bit.)
So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive. I'm certain there's ZERO correlation between regulations that make it expensive and regulations making it safe....................
So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?
> The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety.
https://www.nr-ha.org/history
> ... which has adversely affected public health or safety.
Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.
>Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity
None of the theories put forward about the loss of the USS Scorpion have involved the reactor. Maybe they didn't discuss it because it wasn't relevant?
> Would not trust them as a source.
Ok
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Bo...
The program led to the Three Mile Island accident, which is one of the largest releases of radioactivity in US history.
Naval reactors are inherently safer due to their small size and unlimited supply of cooling water. A meltdown is virtually impossible, worst-case scenario you could always use a firehose and a diesel pump to inject sea water into the reactor. On the other hand: you really don't want to overfill the reactor: a naval reactor "going solid" rips itself apart, killing the ship.
Commercial reactors are the exact opposite. Overfilling them is not a huge deal as there are plenty of ways to relieve pressure, but underfilling them can easily lead to a meltdown. Even after shutdown it needs active cooling for a decent while to prevent residual decay from overheating it.
The TMI reactor operators were trained on naval reactors, but they were operating a commercial reactor. During the incident they were too busy trying to prevent it from overfilling to notice that it was actually cooking itself dry - so they intentionally shut down the emergency cooling system!
So no, saying that the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program has led to zero accidents is both wrong, and completely irrelevant to the subject here.
> So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive
Yes, with extra steps.
Regulations, more so than their impact on price, cost calendar time.
Time, especially for already-lengthy and complicated infrastructure projects, costs volume.
And low volume means high prices and a slow pace of improvement.
Henry Ford wouldn't have built many automobiles, or improved them as quickly as he did, if every one needed to be individually permitted by multiple government agencies.
The failure of nuclear is that it never standardized and scaled to industrially-efficient volumes (outside of arguably France) at exactly the point that it could have technologically done so (~1970s). Had Offshore Power Systems^ begun producing floating reactors at volume in Jacksonville, FL in the late 70s, we'd be having a very different conversation about cheap American nuclear power today.
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems
there are regulations that make it safe and the ones that make it expensive. its two different groups. radiation limits and design safety with meltdown prevention is one thing but then you get rules like radiation needs to be as low as possible until you run into a cost limit. that basically means setting a price floor for the whole project.
nuclear being expensive is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. the costs for certified equipment are high because the market is small and not competitive, because nobodys building nuclear, because everyone knows its too expensive to build and not worth it.
the only solution i see is massive state investment like what france was doing in the 70s. that would upset the market purists but its more practical than trying to push the industry with a neoliberal hands off approach.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death
How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?
Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies.
(also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)
I'm not asking where they got funding. I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone. You don't find that strange at all?
The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it.
Environmentalists weren't just useful idiots then (and I hesitate to call people acting in good faith, without any self-interest, "idiots"). They're convenient fall guys today. The fossil fuel industry killed nuclear power and pinned it on the environmental movement. That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
> I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone
First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.
> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.
> And money gets their message out much stronger
And yet you blame the messenger more than the money. If environmentalists didn't exist do you think fossil fuel wouldn't have found a different way to get the message out there? When money talks, people listen.
They weren't able to prevent solar, wind, and EV subsidies.
They're doing that this very moment in the US.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/trump-administration...
And they've been working steadily against solar and wind the whole time.
This is just one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra#Aftermath
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Prosperity#Fundi...
The fact that solar and wind are rolling out at unprecedented speed despite these headwinds is proof that its economics are better than nuclear, which could not overcome the same headwinds.
Environmentalists did have the nuclear industry's help with a few high profile disasters. Plus the lingering connection to nuclear weapons. That makes it easier for people to take the threat seriously.
But that's still insufficient to explain it. If the fossil fuel industry had wanted nuclear power we'd have it. They could use lobbying to reduce the push for nuclear, and then blame it on the environmentalists. Who were happy to take a rare win.
It’s easy to make the general public fearful of nuclear because they have no direct experience with it in daily life.
Right, because the general public has direct daily experience with... whaling?
People have more experience with hunting and with wildlife than they do with nuclear power. Though I’m not sure why whaling is included since commercial whaling is banned by most countries as a result of anti-whaling protests.
People take on dangers all the time if the benefit (perceived or otherwise) outweighs the risk. That just tells me nuclear's economics didn't make it a clear winner over fossil fuels.
It's just weird to me that environmentalists get blamed for killing nuclear more than the group that actually made it happen and had something to gain - the fossil fuel industry. They funded the environmentalists to protest against it, and they funded the politicians to write laws against it.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death.
The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.
Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.
That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.
"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
This is so shortsighted. We'd still have the nuclear waste problem and - more importantly - the cost. Germany alone is facing a bill of €26B to €45B for nuclear waste management, decomissioning and cleanup. All of that goes into your electricity bill, because the government pays only 25% of it: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-cos...
Nobody said it would be as cheap as solar. But "renewables" can't fulfill ALL power needs ALL the time.
When you actually need to generate electricity rather than gather it, what's better than nuclear?
Renewables don't need to fulfill everything all the time. If they need assistance from fossil fuels 10% of the time, that's a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions. The last 10% won't be the biggest issue to deal with.
So you can build expensive nuclear plants for that small fraction of the time, or you can continue to use existing fossil fuel plants for free. The difference to the carbon bottom line is small.
German Greens have managed the feat of presiding over extending strip coal while closing nuclear power plants. But hey, they fought for it since the 70s, and finally won; we all lost.
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2025...
On the spectrum from "cheap" to expensive, where would that fall?
For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
Now Ontario wants to double the electricity bills to finance its nuclear refurbs and new builds.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/ontario-utility-wants-to-double-...
Ontario's Financial Accountability Office, which reports to provincial parliament and is independent of the government, concluded that at least for the refurbs:
> * The FAO estimates that the Plan will result in nuclear generation supplying a significant proportion of Ontario electricity demand from 2016 to 2064 at an average price of $80.7/MWh in 2017 dollars. (For reference, the 2017 Nuclear Price is $69/MWh and the current price of electricity for most residential and small business ratepayers is $114.9/MWh.)
> * The Nuclear Price will be higher than the average price of $80.7/MWh during the majority of the time that the reactors are being refurbished from 2016 to 2033. Post refurbishment, ratepayers will benefit from a lower than average Nuclear Price.
> * Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
> * OPG will realize a financial return from the operation of the DNGS and PNGS. OPG is owned by the Province and any return would improve the Province’s fiscal position. There is no significant fiscal impact to the Province from the refurbishment of reactors at the BNGS as it is operated by Bruce Power, a private sector organization.
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
I was not able to find a similar report (pro or con) for new build, though I think the current plan with some SMRs in Ontario is dumb: if we decide on more nuclear, we should stick with big(ger) CANDU, as there's little point in small reactors in a large grid like Ontario.
Renewable programs have also cost Ontario ratepayers quite a bit of money, for not a lot of electricity generated:
* https://ospe.on.ca/advocacy/green-energy-contracts-fao-repor...
Last time Ontario built CANDU’s the utility went into bankruptcy and the taxpayers still haven’t paid off that debt.
Ontario Hydro did not go bankrupt.
It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).
Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.
The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.
It was a government owned utility, it couldn’t go bankrupt in the traditional sense since it has taxpayer backing.
But its finances were completely underwater with no way out due to the debt from nuclear construction.
After the breakup the public were left with $38B in debt from nuclear construction. Which the subsequent nuclear company was unable to pay off, or it would of course not have been restructured.
> But its finances were completely underwater with no way out due to the debt from nuclear construction.
The debt from nuclear construction was being paid off then, just like it is being paid off right now: OEFC holds the debt and has revenue to pay it off. An article from someone who is not a fan of nuclear, but is also not a fan of Harris's non-sense:
> Harris claimed Hydro was so badly in debt as to be bankrupt. This claim was proven false by the final Ontario Hydro financial report in March of 1999 which showed that $1 billion of Hydro’s debt had been paid down and was on track to be paid off in 20 years. At the time critics said: “wouldn’t we all like to have a 20-year mortgage on our home because then you have an asset that serves you well!”
* https://rabble.ca/environment/the-nuclear-power-lie/
That’s an extremely rosy picture not aligned with reality.
You can’t compare it with a house mortgage.
They had X in earning potential in a set time frame.
The debt accumulated was X + Y.
After the restructuring the public were left as bagholders of the ”+ Y” since it would be impossible to pay it off reasonably under the current framework.
A new framework was created where this stranded debt was paid off as a forced separate line item on everyone’s bills.
In other words. They were bankrupt, if the state hadn’t stepped in then they would not have been able to amortize the debt in the expected timeframe.
> That’s an extremely rosy picture not aligned with reality.
"Chart 1- History of Residual Stranded Debt & Unfunded Liability of OEFC" seems to show a decreasing number:
* https://www.breckenhill.com/blogg.php
There is of course a lot of political history (OPC, LPC, etc) that makes the whole situation messy.
> A new framework was created where this stranded debt was paid off as a forced separate line item on everyone’s bills.
The Debt Retirement Charge was $0.007 or 0.7¢ per kWh.
Why are you this entire time avoiding official sources? Is it because you know the narrative you push is revionist history?
https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports...
A near 1 cent per kWh levy on every single kWh produced, across all sources, is a massive expense.
And that is after the maximum possible had already been extracted from the market.
Why are you so afraid of admitting that the nuclear construction in Ontario was an absolute economic shit show?
> In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
The website does not open for me. Are the quoted prices consumer prices including tax or wholesale prices before tax?
If it’s the latter, 8 cents is not that cheap and comparable to the average price per kWh (all sources) in Germany. In most cases in most places, the lion’s share of electricity costs is tax and infrastructure refinancing, not actual production. Levellized cost of PV+storage is well below new nuclear virtually in every deployment scenario.
> For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
Because NG is one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity, if you are not producing NG yourself locally AND don’t have to pay for environmental costs.
That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt.
Nuclear is cheap to operate. It's expensive to build and expensive to decommission. Any analysis that doesn't include those two costs is highly misleading.
> That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt.
Ontario Hydro did not go bankrupt.
It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).
Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.
The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.
Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.
No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive.
It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition".
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
> the systems were just too expensive.
Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.
I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".
"safe" is a spectrum. While coal is allowed to kill millions of people a year, the safety level of nuclear in the US was raised to "no matter whatever happens no one ever anywhere must have harm come to them" and that's not realistic. Solar kills orders of magnitude more people than nuclear! But we haven't regulated rooftop solar out of existence, plus that wasn't even an option 50 years ago. That's 40 years we didn't have to be poisoning the Earth with coal.
Thankfully the US has now removed the linear no threshold model and the As Low As Reasonably Achievable radioactive emissions goal which were irrational and made nuclear much more expensive than it should be.
> No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.
Ontario's Bruce A site (Units 1-4) have an age of ~45 years, and has just finished refurbishment (ahead of schedule and under budget) to run for another few decades:
* https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/refurbishment-of-bruce...
Ontario's Pickering B nuclear site (Units 5-8) have an age of ~40 years, and are about to be refurbished to run another 30+ years:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...
So while the 60-80 years has not been hit, it is probably less on the "speculative" side of spectrum and more on the "probable" side.
The American regime has recently solved this problem by removing safety requirements - they have de-recognized the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage, which means the official fact is that there is a threshold of radiation that's safe to receive. That threshold is, of course, just above whatever one of the nuclear reactors they're about to build will emit. They removed the "as low as reasonably possible" design goal which means it's now allowed to dump radioactive waste into a river to save money
The linear no threshold model is not supported by actual evidence. More accurate models include
Linear-Quadratic (LQ) Model
Threshold Model
Hormesis model
The linear no-threshold model is less realistic than threshold or hormesis-based models: An evolutionary perspective
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000927971...
"They removed the "as low as reasonably possible" design goal which means it's now allowed to dump radioactive waste into a river to save money"
This is just an incredibly stupid lie that completely destroys your credibility.
The ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principle paired with hyper-sensitive detection technology requires nuclear operators to spend billions on redundant safety features and extensive permitting for infinitesimal health benefits. This regulatory burden prices nuclear energy out of the market.
Sounds like it wasn't reasonably possible?
It wasn't reasonably affordable!
Georgia nuclear power plant cleared for 80-year operating life
https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/georgia-nuclear-powe...
Your link says increased modulation adds 1.5-3.75 million euros/year in maintenance costs. That's utterly insignificant for the electricity supply to a nation of 70 million.
> It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years.
Renewables are not remotely displacing fossil fuels. Look at fossil fuel consumption.
Political will is not the actual bottleneck.
Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sense to invest the money in something else.
China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base.
Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...
In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.
You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.
Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
> we paid dearly for that
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
> We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!
> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?
> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.
> then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base. Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.
> Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base.
It does because 1. they're both fighting for now-expensive imported natural gas 2. rates go up for everybody to pay for the malinvestment in solar
> Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.
I meant "for Germany". Those are a problem for others.
Germany shouldn’t have dismantled those nuclear power plants dumb…
Just a couple years before the first invasion of Ukraine. Wouldn't it have been nice in 2022 when the Nordstream pipelines stopped?
AFAIK Germany got the majority of the fissile fuel from Russia..
First, you can trivially store years of nuclear fuel, which you can't with fossil fuels.
Maybe this is already complete, but at one point of lot of it was from decommissioning nuclear weapons, so it wasn't "we need them for fuel", it was "lets make use of this waste material and provide a financial disincentive for nuclear proliferation".
Finally, the West has plenty of sources for Uranium, and given plants already have years of fuel onsite, it is never a pressing problem.
> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
Spain and Finland are not part of the same grid. Spain is in the CESA, Finland is in the NSA.
Being part of the same grid doesn't matter so much as the amount of interconnection available. Finland has a higher proportion than Spain since France has stalled on building more interconnection capacity as this will likely reduce the amount they can sell their excess nuclear generation to Germany.
> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
> The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing. > It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
It doesn’t take 20 years to build a nuclear power plant or Thorium reactor, which is coming online soon in China, it also doesn’t take that long to build high speed rail system either.
> You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.
>They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun.
Virtually nowhere gets zero sun.
Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
As well as a very low population density.
It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disaster of recent projects (e.g. EDF cost overruns).
Everywhere gets zero sun at night.
And at high latitudes, the night can be very long. And even when the sun does appear for a bit, it doesn't provide a lot of energy.
And you might want to ask the Fins how they feel about nuclear power: around two thirds of the population are for it as well as pretty much the entire political establishment, including the Green Party.
> Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
Where did you get that idea from? This isn't Norway; we don't have any mountains. The country is mostly flat and most of the suitable locations already have a hydropower plant since the 1970s.
I am very pessimistic about the economics of nuclear power but Finland is basically the best case scenario for it.
Last year, we had (depending on location) 0 to 25 hours of sunlight total in the entire month of December.
Low sun angle plus very heavy cloud cover means that even midday looks like a gloomy sunset.
Finland is the definition of an outlier, and folks in similar situations make up a tiny percentage of the world population. They can burn gas for the next 50 years, and we can still be good.
The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
Can you share where those numbers are from? I'd like to run a similar calculation on my own country.
Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).
Solar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage.
Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly.
The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.
I don’t know if it’s that much cheaper, but they have the well to execute on infrastructure. does Japan for that matter and Taiwan.
One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies.
China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
That's a fair point. It's a difficult sell to say you have to pay more to help out your fellow citizens, in most countries.
"we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people"
isn't this proven to be true? better for the country, worse for a small amount of directly affected people?
It was good... for a while. And it was a "small amount of directly affected people". I mean, so long as you ignore places like St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Camden, etc., and the powers-that-be seemed to be okay with doing that. It's a major part of why the center of the country turned out the way it did politically, but whatever. What's done is done.
But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.
Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).
Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.
They are cheaper cars. Not at all sure they're better.
BYDs are certainly better than VWs, Fiats, Citroens and Renaults. The only problem is getting parts - you'll have to wait at least a month or so for the part to arrive from China if it isn't locally available (which often is the case).
European cars are opaque surveillance machines just as well, so why bother?
Honestly, VW spent years developing the ID line which was just too expensive, buggy, and constanly positioned as an alternative to much cheaper and better equipped Golf/Polo lines - it's like they were afraid to canibalize their own products. I don't know a single person who owned an ID.3 and was actually happy with it.
Or Mercedes, where they decided to build extremely expensive EVs that departed from their core design so much their core audience didn't want to buy them, then they were surprised EVs don't sell.
Or Audi who were probably a masterclass in offering the worst possible value for money you could imagine with their EVs - £50k Q4 that still had manual seats, like what are you competing with exactly?
Only Skoda could really kinda buck the trend with the Enyaq, which proves that VW could be competive if they wanted to, but they actively decided not to.
And don't start me on the Peugeot/Renault/Opel cars, which initially looked incredibly interesting and actually competitive, but I can only guess that Stellantis told them to tone it down because again - have to protect their core business of ICE cars, can't be too good.
And then MG came in with very well specced working EVs, and then other Chinese brands moved in, and big european manufacturers are crying that they are eating their lunch. Like, you guys had literally years to address this, but you decided to protect your legacy product over investing in the future = you're reaping the results now.
Well see the problem is we'd get the reactor hardware and we'd have to write the control software ourselves ha ha.
In practice though Westinghouse still bids lowest out of the politically viable options these days. Korean and French reactors are rather expensive.
There is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.
How much per kW?
China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service.
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.
You think this is a modern American problem?
What if I told you Europeans used to throw people in jail (or worse ) for claiming the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun?
This is a forever problem.
> Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium
I think the larger concern is containment breach via sabotage and the resulting material release, definitely less than ideal if these things are put under random buildings where you have little perimeter control.
And I already can imagine that prompt "Mythos, create a design for ..."
> You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_e...
"Unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as Th-231), which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Additional fissile material or another neutron source is necessary to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fuelled reactor, Th-232 absorbs neutrons to produce U-233. Depending on the design of the reactor and fuel cycle, the generated U-233 either fissions in situ or is chemically separated from the used nuclear fuel and formed into new nuclear fuel."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material
Hahaha, uninformed comment right here.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
You don’t have to make a nuclear bomb for highly effective terrorism. Just blow up the reactor
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down because:
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor#Fuel_repro...
Please read Directive (EU) 2022/2557 and then tell me how a disgruntled office worker is supposed to do anything they aren't supposed to, given full compliance with the directive. I've seen some preliminary national implementation efforts and it's really serious stuff physical security wise.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
> full compliance with the directive
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
But again:
>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.
There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that.
Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.
Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
>> impossible to get to by a normal employee
No, it's the normal that does the heavy lifting. A radiation therapy machine does not allow for an easy removal of the source, not without hours of work with specialized machinery. Again, how does a disgruntled office worker do this without immediate attention of security?
>>There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that
Well, it's really unfortunate, but we have multiple reports from people who have accidentally walked into a room with an open Cesium source at various irradiation facilities - they all reported that they felt incredibly sick in less than a minute. And that's "just" an irradiation source, not an active nuclear reactor. Again, I'm struggling to imagine how a "disgruntled worker" gets anywhere near the actual radiactive material within it.
The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project)
The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.
They don't need to build reactors just to retain a military nuclear program. They specifically maintain a nuclear deterrent by policy, they don't need an excuse. They build reactors because they need more power. They have 60+ reactors and will have more nuclear the US by the end of the decade. They're also heavily investing in next-gen reactors which they wouldn't need to do if they just wanted a weapons program.
Yes it's subsidized, everything in China is subsidized, that's the best part of a planned-capitalist economy. But it's actually becoming more market driven so they can reduce financial pressure and force efficiency from competition. In 10 years those subsidies are gonna be a lot smaller
it is worth noting that if you were to measure by degree of subsidy, the planned output for nuclear has not really budged, but wind and solar are exploding in China in comparison.
> Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.
> Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Global-report-confirms-an...
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
Meaning the solution for cheap nuclear power is cheating a corruption.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
> One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns.
Areva underbid on the fixed price contract to win against the ABWR, IIRC. Admittedly the Fins were not pleased at the time overrun, but the construction cost was historically not so bad given it was FOAK in a country without recent construction experience .
All of the EPR builds in Finland/France/UK have seen enormous construction cost (3-4x) and time (decade+) overruns. France expects its EPR2 builds to cost about 30% less but even if they manage to hit that target it will still be extremely expensive.
Indeed, it might be said that they underestimated the cost and timescales to get the project off the ground. But this is generally the case with mega-projects. Guess we shall see how the construction of Sizewell C goes.
Isn't Sizewell c already delayed?
Hopefully not how the yet unfinished Hinkley Point C is going.
Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.
Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that.
There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.
What should one do then? Just shut everything down?
Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days.
That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.
Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.
You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.
> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days
Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.
That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built.
> That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built
No, it can’t. We’re already building solar as fast as we can, the economics drive that. The marginal supply will come from something else. That margin is what we’re talking about, not the bulk. Most of the new energy will come from solar. But we can’t manufacture and install PVs quickly enough, particularly over the next 20 years, to close the gap.
So how do you propose the energy is supplied in the 20 years it would take for the first nuclear reactors to become offline? Let me guess: gas turbines?
So we either fully rely on gas turbines for the base load for the next 20 years, orrrr we rely on gas turbines during the few days it is both dark and wind-less for the next 20 years.
We have statistics on solar performance at the huge countries levels. And it shows that, in reality, we're talking about 20x overbuild. Not 3x and not even 10x. And there is no way around it.
Wind and solar anti-correlation does not lowering this number. Number is still 20x, just it's more rare now, but it is still there.
Whether or not that's the case, the problem is that if you put together all the nuclear, solar, wind and hydro we can manage, we will still have less energy than what we get easily with oil.
I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.
You can only spend a dollar once, so any money going into nuclear won't go into solar, wind, or hydro - which have far better payoff when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions.
And in terms of sovereignty? Most solar panels come from China, don't they?
Those are all less safe than nuclear. It's a simple fact, look it up.
All the places that can use hydro already do. Oh, and it's pretty damaging to the environment, it turns out.
Wind and solar are pretty cool, but also unreliable, so it's not so clear that they're really cheaper after you account for overprovisioning and storage costs.
If only there was a safe and reliable source of energy we could use to complement them...
Did waste management become a solved problem?
In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.
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”.
What is the solution?
Where are the free nuclear plants?
Sizewell C = £40 billion
That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.
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.
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.
Ask why it suddenly got so expensive and why delays were introduced. Hint, it happened more in some countries than others.
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.
Yeah, the efficient coal plants displaced the inefficient nuclear ones. Efficiency all the way!
Climate change? Pollution? Nah, who cares, efficiency!
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.
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!
Plain false. The "economics" never got bad. They were always bad to begin with, hidden under layers of government subsidies.
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.
What does the linear no-threshold model say about air pollution from coal plants, anyway?
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.
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
110 GW at a 90% capacity factor vs 430 GW at maybe 20% capacity factor
430 GW a year on 20% (which it is not, as china has lots of desserts with no clouds) would still be a way bigger number than 110 GW that are planned to be reached in a few years.
Yeah my bd, the capacity factor was mor like 15% for solar PV (utility scale), according to their own data
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/china-bui...
Then here I might stand corrected, but it does not change the basic equation nore the invalidation of the claim above, that china is building nuclear like it builds solar and wind. It does not. Not even close.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The solution is nuclear fuel reprocessing + breeder reactors.
You end up burning all of the uranium, leaving being only short lived isotopes.
"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.
Have you?
Yes. I was born and live close to a site where Uranium was extensively mined and cannot confirm clean nor safe.
Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
My understanding has been that an additional reason breeder reactors have been discouraged is due to nuclear proliferation fears; the neccessary reprocessing of the fuel also produces weapons-grade plutonium.
Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.
In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons that will make the widespread use of nuclear energy possible: once your neighbor have built a reactor, you begin to share with them all the risks associated with nuclear energy, but you receive none of the benefits. This makes building a nuclear reactor more attractive to you, since you're already bearing the risks.
From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.
The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.
Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.
Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown?
It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.
Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.
Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.
If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.
Do you know it will still be properly monitored in 100 years?
What about 1000?
How would you know if there are even people left who know what it is??
May be societal collapse isn't a problem. Maybe we're having a nice new beginning but someone finds some nice, warm stuff?
In 100 years: sure.
Unless we have civilizational collapse in which case a bit of nuclear waste will be the least of our problems.
It won't have to be monitored for a 1000 years. First, by that time the level of radioactivity is very low, and when it's in a deep-geological repository (like the ones we already use for vastly greater amounts of highly toxic chemicals that never decay) it is gone. We know enough about how geology works.
We know enough about how geology works.
We also know how a BLU-122 works. Can you be sure the US wouldn't use one on its allies in yet another moment of irrational tantrum? What about Russia?
How does the BLU-122 relate to a deep geological repository, in your esteemed opinion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
It won't be "the least of our problems", it would be an additional problem.
The fuel and related will have to be monitored for 1000 years and more.
Yes, we know how geology works, which is why we have found a single place where it might be safe. ONE.
Being an additional problem is not a contradiction of it being the least of those problems.
No it won't.
That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.
For example: "The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
> Being an additional problem is not a contradiction of it being the least of those problems.
How does this even help your argument?
Yeah, we have a nuclear winter. 80% of the civilisation is dead. "Hey look, we've found warm stuff". A few years later: 10% of the population died of cancer.
Are you kidding?
> No it won't.
Spent nuclear fuel stays a radiation hazard for extended periods of time with half-lifes as high as 24,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
> That isn't true. There are lots of suitable places. The problems are purely political, not geological.
The fact that your single example is Yucca mountain and even the US wasn't able to come up with another place and is still discussing this one, shows that there is not an abundance of places you can put it. Even in such a huge country like the USA.
Other countries have the same issues and they are geological.
Germany had a spot a few decades ago. Everybody thought it would be safe. It has to be evacuated now. An evacuation which will cost the taxpayer millions of Euros.
Please explain how people in the midst of a nuclear winter aren’t going to be aware of what a radiation hazard is? Come on, just think for a moment before you say something.
Loss of knowledge in disasters so wide is not something which is hard to imagine. How come you have so much trouble with it? And nuclear winter is just one catastrophic scenario. Will you come for every one I list?
Nice new beginning my foot. Go live in the woods without power, petrochemical fuel or modern technology for a year and then tell me what you think.
Why should I when there are cheap solar panels and batteries out there?
Good luck making a solar panel without an industrial base.
Again, destroy a dam and you get a catastrophe. Don't do anything in particular and watch how many people die in the mid-term due to climate change.
It's all about risk management.
The most deadly industrial accident was the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
The dam is built to protect from floods.
Is this a Katrina reference?
Yeah but the risk management of a dam is ridiculously small compared to waste which will be dangerous so far into future that we might not know if people will even know what it is.
A dam damming water at a hill is obvious.
Some warm stuff set up like something really special, is not.
Yet dams have killed more people than nuclear plants.
You realize we're literally dispersing coal, gas & gasoline fumes into the atmosphere that we all breathe, right? 24/7?
Yeah, small amounts of solid waste sitting somewhere is as much of a non issue as can be.
Yeah I know this Shillenberger tactic of playing "you love coal because you hate nuclear".
It is no argument or discussion happening in real life now.
It is nuclear vs. renewables and nuclear is losing.
...also those are not small amounts. The fuel may be a small amount but there is much much more that needs to disappear in holes we don't have.
Correct as long as we still have Geiger counters.. I’m not sure what kind of apocalypse you’re planning for. Maybe get a radon detection kit for your basement.
I'm not planning for anything because you can't plan for the next decade atm. How would you plan for 100s and 1000s of years?
We should REDUCE the danger to those generations and not make it larger for no sane reason.
Nuclear is REDUCING the overall danger.
Because the alternatives are much more dangerous.
How are renewables more dangerous?
"How" is not really a relevant question in this context. They are, empirically.
Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe, meaning it doesn't really matter that much which of these you use, the overall risk is always going to be very low, and the relative numbers are going to be very sensitive to small changes or variations in analyses.
Hydro is significantly more dangerous, and all the fossil fuels are tremendously more dangerous.
Due to the fact that intermittent renewables usually require fossil backup for that majority of countries that don't have abundant hydro, you have to take that into account.
A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html
A 2019 study shows that reduced use of nuclear energy post-Fukushima cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
https://columbia.edu/~mhs119/Kharecha.Sato_Jpn.Ger_post.Fuku...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Whereas the WHO predicts that there will be no measurable health effects on the general Japanese public from Fukushima, and the majority of negative health consequences were from the unnecessary evacuations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
Radiophobia kills!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
> Though it has to be said that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe
Who said that?
What are you talking about? How is a solar panel even on the same safety-shelf with nuclear material??
What are you talking about??
> A 2013 paper by NASA showed that nuclear power had saved around 1.84 million lives by 2011.
Which is again related to the Astroturf tactic of playing nuclear vs. coal and is not related to today's calculations where it is renewables vs. nuclear.
Would you please stop derailing the discussion with this?
Nuclear peaked in the 90 and is being overtaken by renewables in certain countries as well as probably worldwide this year: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
It is actually renewables which lead to coal being removed from the mix. Not nuclear:
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
> Who said [that solar/wind and nuclear are all extremely safe]?
Not "who". "What". And the answer is "the data". The data say that.
Empirically. Completely independent of whether you understand how.
And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year, 2025 was another record production year, the number of states adopting nuclear power is rising, the number of reactors is rising, the number of builds is rising, the rate of the increase in number of builds is rising.
Empirically.
And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels. Which is why almost all industrialized nations are doing nuclear AND renewables.
Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
In the real world they are complementary. Here's the Finnish environment minister:
"If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines.</i>
https://yle.fi/a/74-20136905
> Not "who". "What". And the answer is "the data". The data say that.
Why don't you link to "the data" then?
> And nuclear did not peak in the 90s. 2024 was a record production year,
I just gave you a source which proves my statement and shows that yours is a lie. Just like everything else you added to it.
> And intermittent renewables are ... intermittent ... and therefore cannot actually completely replace fossil fuels.
Weird how they can't but already do. Must be some kind of magic eh?
> Only in the renewbro-bubble are nuclear and renewables mutually exclusive.
Nope. This is a lie also :)
Nuclear clogs up transmission ways when it's not necessary. This is a fact and happens today.
> Here's the Finnish environment minister:
Why not add the French environment minister also? You can add as many ministers as you want, the world doesn't care. The money goes into renewables and they're the future.
Here is the source again: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Good grief.
Your source shows exactly that what I said is the truth, and that you are lying.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
The highest number for nuclear electricity production are 2024 and 2025, with 2025 being slightly higher than 2024.
Well presumably you are not aware that you are spreading falsehoods, so it's not technically a lie. Though it's so egregious that it might just be.
> Nuclear clogs up transmission ways when it's not necessary.
Haven't heard that joke in a long time. Good one!
I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know) in a way that depends on a social solution that doesn't seem to exist. Pro-nuke people will handwave it away, ignoring the total failure to secure storage sites in most places, and the anti-nuclear people treat it as a fatal flaw in the technology (which it isn't).
That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!
The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2432/ML24320A014.pdf
If you are looking in tritium leaks, I would encourage to look into leaks from coal power plants, which are gigantic in comparison to nuclear power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10...
This is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Yes coal power is worse! I know that and clearly you know that. What are we even talking about?
So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.
I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.
Because obviously(yes this should be obvious right?)...
The more we dance around nuclear, the longer we're still pumping coal by product into the atmosphere... a non storage solution.
Move to nuclear faster. Do it now. You want your EVs right?
Coal plant waste is visibly a nightmare, mountains of toxic dust, only "mildly" radioactive but also chemically toxic and physically dangerous. If that was the other option you'd have my support for a nuclear plant - but it isn't the other option.
Today the alternate project might well be renewables and BESS, and even if it's fossil fuels it will be natural gas. Natural gas waste isn't roses and kittens, but on every measure it's less bad than coal, and it doesn't have such viceral "this a bad idea" vibes. No heaps of toxic ash, no clouds of smoke, the pollution is too abstract.
Several UK solar projects which bid for AR6 in 2024 are live today, when it was daylight earlier those projects helped power the country. They paid us handsomely to do so, because the market price was almost £100 per MWh even at midday but they bid about £75 at the CfD auction back in 2024 so that (adjusted for inflation) is all they get.
Nuclear is the other option, and cherry picking the most generous data from a deindustrialised economy is a far less meaningful metric than you seem to think.
I wish people like you, who care genuinely about this topic, would engage with it in a more holistic way.
* Removing fossil fuels requires massively increasing the grid capacity by electrifying a vast range of extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes. The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy * That extra load is almost entirely baseload - running large smelters, furnaces, etc intermittently is infeasible and would use even more energy * This real energy economy is hidden in deindustrialised western countries, where the people depend on energy consuming processes in faraway lands - energy is 'imported' in the form of finished products like cheap building materials. It never shows up in grid usage * The reality is that the countries where energy is consumed will use as much renewable energy as possible, when it is cheaper to do so, but will rely on fossil fuels to supply the bulk of the baseload demand * The UK 's energy policy will be a rounding error in this decision-making process
Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
> The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
It's weird for somebody who says they want nuclear power to bring this up - have you been playing too much Fallout ?
The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport and heating, which not only are being electrified already, they're also places where electrification is a net energy win, so that diesel or natural gas power translates into less than half as much electricity for the same results.
For heat it just comes down to heat pumps, since we don't actually want to make more heat we can instead move the heat that already exists and avoid that high price, easy with electricity, impractical otherwise.
But for transport it's even more fundamental, efficient fossil fuel power is about scale and regularity, but for transport you want tiny engines and bursty usage. A transition shrinks the overall energy budget while improving the outcomes, that's why this is such an obvious economic step.
> Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
The vast majority of UK consumers do not have a wholesale tracked price for electricity, so in fact that lower immediate wholesale price is just profits for the retail electricity companies.
Long term price trends matter more, but notice the CfD strike price for the new nuclear power station in the UK was a lot higher (IIRC) £92.50. If, of course, that station ever supplies actual power. So whether the headline price is £60 or £600, the price actually paid was £92.50 and somehow or another that's what you're paying for that electricity even if you were told it was £60.
£92.50 isn't bad for a novel technology. If you were going to deploy it next year and in five years you'd be bidding £80 or less for another new plant I'd have enthusiasm for this concept. But in fact you're going to come back in five years, still without a finished plant but now pitching for £110 per MWh instead of £92.50 -- we have seen this story before.
I've never played fallout, and this isn't a game for me. I do have an electrical engineering degree, have read dozens of textbooks on (renewable) power generation, thermodynamics and manufacturing, and have spent significant time helping a research group with simulations of solar hybridised biomass gasification (mostly for Fischer Tropsch biofuels). The scale of electrification is huge, make no mistake, and we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.
> The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport ..
A large fraction of transport is not amenable to electrification in this manner; however transport is the low hanging fruit and I support the rapid electrification of transport where possible. Unlike batteries for cars, generation of biofuels/hydrogen for airplanes/ships/heavy trucks will not be significantly more efficient than fossil fuels - it likely will consume more energy, not less. The fossil fuel technologies are already very efficient (50%+) and renewable alternatives are very inefficient. It is possible to electrify/solarise these processes in the long term, but also complicated and capital intensive. I have worked on technoeconomic simulations of such processes, where I learned first-hand from expert researchers in this field (though I am not a chemical engineer).
> .. and heating. For heat it just comes down to heat pumps
This is not true at all, and you've likely misunderstood what heating means in energy breakdowns.
Heat pumps are most suitable for low temperature heat - municipal heating, (industrial) cooking, etc. Things which are already largely electrified in developed countries. But low temperature heat is widely available as a downstream by-product of higher temperature processes (including power generation as in CHP), and it is there a low priority in the scheme of things.
Heat pumps are not feasible (nor are they even theoretically very efficient) for high temperature industrial processes, of which there are a great many (concrete, bricks, metal processing, plastics and other chemical processing, etc). Many of these processes are already practically 100% efficient, so electrification will use at least the same amount of energy. A factory may use for example a steam turbine with a mere 5% electrical efficiency - the high temp steam is used to heat a chemical reactor, and the small electrical output is used for pumps, etc.
Finally, the direct combustion of fuels, (often bundled under 'heating' in stats), also includes the use of fossil fuels as a chemical reagent, primarily carbothermal reduction of metals (plus many petrochemical processing reactions). This usage is highly efficient, and cannot be replaced with electricity directly. Alternative processes will likely consume more energy not less - there will be additional intermediate processes, separations, and so on, likely requiring melting/dissolving/reacting the materials at high temperatures.
> we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.
No. Things change. To understand how stupid this model of the world is you need some historical perspective
In the UK for Q4 2000, twenty five year ago, there was 33.95TWh of electricity produced from coal power, Q4 2025 that was zero. All gone. In Q4 2000 wind and solar is making 0.25TWh, in Q4 2025 that was 30.72 TWh
So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special". So lets look at another historical example to which I happen to have a connection.
In 1954, the SS Shieldhall was built for Glasgow, her main job was to take (treated) sewage and dump it into the ocean although she'd also have transported passengers (usually at low cost) because hey, why not. Shieldhall is a triple expansion oil fired steam ship, at the time she was a reasonable though slightly dated, design. Some of the aspects of her that make her desirable as a working museum piece today were deliberate (like I said passengers weren't her primary purpose but the buyers knew they existed) because they look cool, but a ship optimized for purpose in 1954 wouldn't have been that different, we don't have any because the restoration team could only afford one and this one is cool.
In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic and if not for a preservation trust which operates her today she'd have been scrapped and I wouldn't have mentioned her, but that's not fifty years it's just thirty and yet the entire notion of steamships went from "Obviously" to "This belongs in a museum" in that time.
At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified because it just makes too much economic sense. What counts as "short" will gradually creep up, there are several electric ferries doing 30-40 minute hops today, it would be silly to imagine nobody is offering say a Channel crossing with batteries by 2050.
So then the question only comes up for the freighters. The crude carriers won't exist, if we're not digging up fossil fuels in order to burn them then they cease to be attractive for other purposes too, but both bulk carriers (e.g. moving cereals or ore) and container ships still make sense. The "luxury" cruise market also ceases to make sense though. For those bulk carriers with perishables aboard and for jet liners you would need synthetic fuel which will be expensive, but for everything else get used to going a lot slower to avoid needing fuel.
> I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know)
It's not a 10k year problem, it's a ~300 year problem, after which most of it is at the same level as natural uranium ore; and the stuff that isn't can be blocked via aluminium foil (to stop beta particles).
The first 10-20 years post-removal are the most dangerous, and why the fuel is kept in cooling ponds. From 10-300 you still have danger, but that is manageable with concrete casts:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
* https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
Once you're past the ~300 year mark, all the most dangerous isotopes have burned away, and you're at point where the main ways of getting ill from what remains is by either eating the pellets or grinding them up and snorting the powder like cocaine.
That's fair and I'll admit to using a bit of hyperbole with that number. My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.
> My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.
The design life spans of bridges are 50-75, with some going towards 75-150. But once a bridge is EOL, the need for it doesn't just go away: it needs to be replaced. And in the intervening years it needs to be maintained.
So we have finite-but-overlapping life spans of infrastructure with the implicit assumption that society/civilization will continue on existing to deal with repair, renewal, and updating said infrastructure. Used-fuel storage is no different.
And if you want to reduce the total volume, spend money on reprocessing (which is currently more expensive than digging new fuel out of the ground; only France makes an effort to do this).
If you assume a continuous chain of custody for the next 10000 years, it's pretty trivial, but how do you make that happen? It's beyond all known technology. So you can't.
When Russia bombs that facility, how big will the exclusion zone be? At some point in the next 10000 years, it's not unlikely, it's not likely, it's guaranteed that there will be a war, and the facility will be bombed, or the custodians will be drafted or will just move to the city looking for work, and the nuclear post will be left abandoned (remember Russia's RTGs?), or the descendants will pass the wrong care instructions on to their descendants, and then the containers will rust and start leaching into the water supply. As long as you have a country with operating nuclear reactors you probably have all the infrastructure to keep waste safe. What when you don't?
Imagine that literally, not metaphorically, the devil came to earth in the time of the Neanderthals, destroyed almost everything, and some heroic Neanderthals managed to seal him in a box. If the box isn't taken care of the devil can break out again. Do we still have those care instructions? Is anyone executing them? There are religions from hundreds of years ago (not as long as needed!) which say you must do something or the world ends. We consider them all fairy stories, and they probably are. What if one wasn't? Then we'd be fucked because we wouldn't be following the instructions, right? Nuclear waste storage would be in that bucket.
At least the fallout will be localized. You're not destroying the world with careless handling of nuclear waste. You may make a limited region uninhabitable for thousands of years, and detectably reduce global lifespans by a few years and increase cancer rates by a few percent.
I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.
This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
Sure, you need the right place, but it's not like there's a shortage of space far away from everything.
What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?
Neither concrete nor steel have the lifespans we're discussing thousands, or tens of thousands of years.
And. Bacteria.
When sealed several hundred meters underground in nonporous rock they do have such long lifespans. It's like observing that corn doesn't have a 10 year lifespan when left out on the counter and then objecting to canning it on that basis.
It's non porous right up until an earthquake or some movement of the area makes it not
So just to be clear the concern here is that something buried 2+ miles underground, in a secure container, encased along with other secure containers in a concrete vault, all homed in nonporous rock, in a geologically stable area, is suddenly going to be subjected to an earthquake, against all odds a fault is going to open right through the waste storage area, again against all odds groundwater will appear, the reinforced vault will be weathered to the point of failure (over what timespan I wonder?), and the resulting leak of radioactive material that is multiple miles underground will then somehow affect humans living, what, somewhere within a few hundred miles? Does that really sound like a reasonable scenario to you? Because as far as I'm concerned it's pure concern trolling.
So, just to be clear, you're demanding that I re-answer every concern that I've already addressed otherwise you're going to label me a troll
Sounds like abuse to me.
No? I don't see where you addressed these points in context? I am saying that I don't find what you're saying to be at all convincing but am of course open to reasoned debate if you think I've got something wrong. Being concerned about the scenario I outlined above truly seems absurd to me.
Do you see an obvious issue with the sequence of events I posed?
I do see you instantly reaching for threats of accusations, which i do view as abuse
Bye.
Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick...
I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".
It's concern trolling at its worst.
Until we find the Rosetta stone hieroglyphs were unintelligible, and that language only stopped being used 2000 years ago.
I guess they won’t have Geiger counters in the future
We don't have a lot of technology that we knew existed in earlier civilisations - the Aztecs, Mayans, pueblo peoples, the Easter islanders, to name just a few were doing things we have no idea how to do
Ridiculous, not knowing exactly how stoneage peoples carved and moved rocks and dirt around doesn’t mean we don’t know how to move rocks and dirt.
We cannot carve and move rocks and dirt like they did: https://odysee.com/@hiddenincatours:3/megalithic-saqsaywaman...
What do pre-pottery people B have to do with an advanced civilization collectively forgetting how to make a giger counter?
"Advanced civilization"
Every civilisation for the last million years has categorised itself thus, and, yet, here we are without their technology.
We still don't know how the Romans made a concrete that is as durable as it is (and nothing we have is nearly as good)
An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.
It doesn't need to - all that needs to happen is for water to suddenly have a course to where the materials are being stored.
And yet we had a natural nuclear reactor that's been self contained for 2 billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
Yeah, i know about that one and it kind of proves my point, it's been active as a nuclear reactor for roughly a billion years if i recall correctly - every time water seeped into the rock it slowed the neutrons down and the reactor started up, created steam, which then evaporated and stopped the reaction
Dangerous the whole time.
If only there had been some kind of geological steam turbine to go with it... :)
Would have made a nice steamed ham
Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too.
For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?
Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.
> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened?
Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit.
The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.
"At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think."
Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.
Sure but the limited volume really puts an upper bound on the expense. You could package it in containers small enough for a single person to carry and then have people individually walk them down to the bottom of the mponeng mine and it would still be reasonably affordable.
Have people walk with radioactive material sealed in lead containers down some km into a mine and back up?
It's an absurd thought experiment to illustrate that even when taken to an extreme the volume is small enough that a solution broadly remains feasible.
No, it really does not seem feasible to me.
In germany alone, 500 000 m³ of radioactive material is to be disposed somehow by 2050. Having people carry that underground sounds insane. There is more to waste than fuel rods. And even they .. amount to a really high number if you factor in shielding.
I think you have a serious misconception. The long term storage we're talking about here is for the spent fuel rods (or alternatively the byproducts extracted from them if they are reprocessed). It's known as high level waste and there isn't very much of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
> As a general rule, short-lived waste (mainly non-fuel materials from reactors) is buried in shallow repositories, while long-lived waste (from fuel and fuel reprocessing) is deposited in geological repository.
> Overall, the 60-year-long nuclear program in the UK up until 2019 produced 2150 m3 of HLW.
You should read up on the Asse II mine in Germany. They tried exactly this kind of naïve "just throw it in an old mine" approach, and it has turned into a giant headache as it is now slowly collapsing and trying to leak into the surrounding groundwater - if chemical reactions don't cause it to explode first.
Newer reactors produce much less long-lasting waste. A half-life of only 100 or 200 years makes a tremendous difference to the old reactors where half-life was measured in 1000s of years
Mythical Gen IV reactors? Without even existing prototypes?
Waste management has been solved problem.
"A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico, US, is a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
But for political reasons it's used only for military nuclear high level waste.
For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository. High level nuclear waste is very small and French nuclear waste from light water reactors is no different from Swiss nuclear waste or Swedish, German, Spanish. (U.K. Magnox fuel rods are different and have special storage requirements). Single waste repository in Finland, Sweden or Norway would be enough, they have lot of old granite and very stable geology.
"For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository."
Because apparently no country wants to be the dumpster for the radioactive waste of the others?
I wonder why that is, when it is a solved problem.
Because it’s not a solved problem and people saying so are repeating propaganda
In many cases disposing of it isn't really a good idea as we can reuse the fuel in the future.
Thus spake the fossil fuel lobby.
I don't think people appreciate how much power comes from such a small amount of waste. The largest plant near me has been operating for > 50 years and the waste is still kept on site though I believe they are working on another solution.
Most plants don't need anything special for waste management. They just put it in dry cask storage and leave those in the outside.
Ironically, there's less background radiation around the casks than away from them, since they are so shielded you also get shielded from part of the background radiation too.
In Netherlands there is a nuclear energy museum where you can literally walk around spent fuel casks.
It not like everyone can walk in and out as he wants. But a tour can be arranged in advance. This are controled facilities.
https://prinsfrank.nl/2022/09/12/Visiting-the-only-nuclear-w...
Every time someone mentions a year where nuclear started being "safe," I find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment, plus plenty of near misses. Broader than waste though.
Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes into the air.
While there are problems, I think that you should compare with alternative technologies to be fair. For instance, coal used in Germany and China actually releases more radioactive material than nuclear!
A great perk of nuclear waste s that it's so small compared to the power produced, it's way easier to dispose and manage, than, say, expired wind turbines (which aren't recycled currently and take a massive amount of space).
If automotive was regulated like nuclear, then any car crash would result in all cars being sent to the scrap heap forever.
If nuclear were regulated like automotive, they'd let me run a reactor with minimal training at age 16, and the emissions inspector would be bribeable with $500. Well same with coal.
> find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment
That is what safe looks like, nobody said perfect. It's like how cars are death traps but people can still reasonably call them "safe". You could do the same thing for solar panels but for the fact it isn't newsworthy if there is some toxic sludge in some dump somewhere is associated with solar panels.
There might not be any material that we produce on an industrial scale that doesn't leak hazardous or toxic chemicals. I looked up concrete [0] to find out what it's problem was, and it turns out concrete leaks toxic and radioactive materials into the environment because turns out natural rock is sometimes radioactive. Concrete is nonetheless pretty safe stuff.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...
They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing. Different people are taking on the risk in each scenario too. Despite this, I'd be fine with a reactor next to my city if I got something like cheap power in return.
> They're not really comparable because one is a slow and certain leak, the other is all or nothing.
Would "they" rather we just dumped the nuclear waste off in some corner somewhere? Then it'd be a slow and certain leak too. If they want slow and certain rather than probably-nothing then that can be arranged. It'd still be less damaging than business as usual.
I mean, I get that people are scared but they are scared of their own imaginations as opposed to anything that can be engineered. I still think I'd be much better off having lived through a Class 7 nuclear disaster rather than my actual experience of spending years near a coal mine. Policy made for and by people who just live in fear for no obvious reason is never going to work. They're still going to be scared whatever the actual policy is and the rest of us are going to be forced to do stupid things in the real world.
Most of the incidents are less about waste storage and more about accidental draining of something, usually contaminated water. Or like, San Onofre got its reactor installed backwards, which yeah does raise some questions that can only be answered with imagination.
So what? Occasional leaks are no big deal. Very few people die.
No technology is 100% safe, so that is a straw man.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of electricity generation we have.
"Solved problem" was what the parent comment said. Tell me instead that it's going to leak like everything else.
"Solved problem" does not imply it is 100% safe.
Because no technology is 100% safe.
You would be surprised how much toxic industrial waste is been currently stored in deep geological repositories in Europe.
https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-man...
For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025):
690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
So nuclear waste is not a technical problem, mostly political problem.
And it's not very much talk about, but the real issue is geopolitics. Each nuclear trans-uranium waste repository (spend nuclear fuel) could in future be mined to retrieve the stored plutonium for nuclear weapons. And even better, over centuries the most radioactive short lived isotopes are transmuted into more stable isotopes, so the mining and handling of this material is much easier. And even even better over millennia, the undesirable isotope Plutonium-240 (with half-life 6561 year, much shorter then Plutionium-239 half-life 24110 years) will decay away and the reactor-grade Plutonium waste will itself transform, without any external action, into very usable weapon-grade Plutonium.
Therefor spend nuclear fuel and storage of spend nuclear fuel in non-weapon countries is subject to monitoring by the enhanced verification measures of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Additional Protocol.
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07lyman.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation#Addition...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_grade_plutonium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_plutonium
U.S. goes to great lengths to prevent other countries from acquiring material usable for nuclear weapons. Like, for example retrieving plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-...
"The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium (enough for 20,000 warheads) into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants."
"The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
It really never was that big of a problem. People make a big deal that it lasts 30,000 years, but there are many other types of waste, such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, etc, that will literally never go away, but we don't make people put those types of wastes in repositories that will last forever. Basically you just want to put it in a very remote place with a lot of earth over it. The good thing about nuclear waste is that it's so energy dense that there really isn't even that much of it.
> Did waste management become a solved problem?
Yes? Just have them sit in concrete casks? It's safe enough to do a 'maternity photoshoot' with:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
The volumes of "waste" that is generated, given the electricity produced, is not a lot. The entirety of the US' waste created, over the course of multiple decades, can fit on single football field/pitch, ten yards/metres high (that's the actual fuel bundles: the dry casks they're stored in would increase the volume).
France is just across the border, so Orano can do reprocessing with the "waste" to reduce its volume even further if desired, and extract the unused fuel from the waste.
Any country that does not use nuclear using less energy dense alternatives. Compressing controllable energy production should be considered one of our top priorities.
> Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though
France got there first.
They built out such a massive infrastructure of Nuclear that they are a net provider of energy in Europe. They are also the only country to date that has officially pushed back on old safety models like LNT.
Switzerland is also working jointly with Denmark on a Thorium reactor and I’m sure in light of the continuing situation with Russia/Ukraine, and the fact that the Chinese have already built two Thorium reactors (a small one to work the kinks a much larger one that will go on line in 2029-2030) Danes/Swiss will be stepping up their efforts in this area.
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-refuels-thorium-react...
I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build. Are we in the west gonna wait for the Chinese to build out Thorium Reactors, are we also gonna wait for high-speed rail to be built out by the Chinese too if it wasn’t for the war with Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese probably would have built out high-speed rail, all all the way to Europe, by the way, they’ve already built a rail system all the way to Tehran.
And the Chinese have built out a high speed rail system all the way to Ürümqi, China just east of Kazakhstan in western China. (They aren’t messing around).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/9e4...
There are some european success stories in high speed rail too (France). China doesn’t let itself entangled in planning restrictions. US and European countries love over regulation and litigations. That’s a choice, and it comes with a steep cost.
> Nuclear is cheap at scale
Citation needed. We saw at-scale buildout during the 1970s and 1980, did it result in result in order-of-magnitude cost reductions back then?
VS the cost today yes. Nuclear wasn’t seen as a prohibitively expensive form of energy, quite the opposite. South korea and China are making it work. But if you build a new prototype every time and get bogged down in decades of environmental surveys, lawsuits and ever changing over regulations, any infrastructure project becomes prohibitive, whether it is nuclear, high speed rail, or anything else.
> The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days
I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.
These are not opposites. Both can be true.
Yes but I would say one trumps the other.
> I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.
Japan was able to start construction on a new nuclear reactor and have its construction (and start commercial service) with-in five years, and did so every year from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
The first unit you build will be expensive, the second less so, the third even less. Economies of scale work just as well for nuclear plants as they do for widgets: Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, Unit 4 cost 30% less.
Turns out if you don't know what you're doing, things can get be expensive because you're learning lessons along the way, but if/once you do know what you're doing costs drop.
It's not 2004 anymore.
The 5 years of construction is the fast part. How many years of planning and permits did it take before they broke ground?
If you have a site that's approved for a nuclear power, there is overhead in getting that approval, but once you have a site you can roll through multiple reactors.
It's similar to the housing crisis: all this talk about pre-built components to make building homes/mid-rises/etc faster ignores all the planning approval and NIMBY objections that need to be ploughed through first.
Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?
Do you trust today's politicians with tall buildings, or bridges, or chemical plants, or guns, or fighter gets, or ammunition production?
No? That's exactly the point.
Today's politicians can't even be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure, leading to things like the Ponte Morandi collapse, or the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, or the Carola Bridge collapse, and so on and so on.
They can't even properly maintain fairly trivial infrastructure, routinely leading to at most a few dozen deaths per incident. Why would you assume they'd do any better with nuclear reactors - where a second Chernobyl is the potential result of an incident?
No, but they aren't the ones designing them. Politicians normally aren't engineers.
Do you trust today's politicians to hire competent engineers?
Do you trust today's politicians to provide all the money the engineers ask for?
Besides an engineering problem, they are also a political problem for as long as they exist, and even longer. Remember how Russia bombed Chernobyl in the Ukraine war?
> Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where 50% of all electricity currently comes from nuclear power:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply
I have no problem with getting more CANDU reactors (which is the current plan).
As an Ontarian, I love CANDU.
As an Ontarian, the thought of spending $500B on a couple of reactors makes me furious. Ontario is not going to become competitive again with the most expensive electricity in the world.
Ontario nuclear is cheaper than Ontario solar and wind (Table 2):
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
Until a few years ago it was cheaper than methane/natural gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
At least when it comes to refurbishment, the independent (reports to provincial parliament) FAO found:
> Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
Their projections go to 2064.
New-nuclear is worthy of discussion, but given we have stood up supply chains via the refurbishment process, there's a lot of knowledge out there. My current largest complaint with the new-nuclear plans is the SMRs.
That's some impressive financial engineering to go from $500B for a few gigawatts of power to "reasonably priced".
Can you provide a citation for the $500B? Because Carney has mentioned federal money in that amount for projects Canada-wide that include "energy" generally, but not nuclear specifically.
I did find this (potential?) $100B number on Ontario nuclear energy:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...
but if you take that number and 'ammortize' it over the average 40-year life span of reactors, it comes to $2.5B/year (in capex), which is about ~1% of the provincial budget. I'm not sure how much raw GW capacity that would add, or how many GWh would be generated annually, to do the math on the per-kWh (capex?) cost.
The article goes over the pros and cons of various points in the energy mix debate.
It was "only" $400B:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...
Your documents are from 2017. The numbers for solar will be almost an order of magnitude wrong.
I'll never feel comfortable with it. Especially after after humans proved they will even attack nuclear power plants in a war. You can only design for so much.
Switzerland is not in the EU.
Setting a standard in Europe? What’s France doing then?
"The technology is so unbelievably safe". Absolutely! Chernobyl and Fukushima are post card holiday resort destinations ...
There's nothing to fear about these locations unless you are heavily disturbing the soil
Also not in the EU.
> All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear.
It's crazy that the left and green parties are against cheap, sustainable and clean energy for the masses.
If it wasn‘t for the European Greens’ (partially oil lobby funded) anti-nuclear propaganda starting in the 60s, carbon emissions today would be much lower than they are.
I've become increasingly disillusioned with the modern environmental movement. I support efforts to reduce CO2 production, and nuclear is one of the best ways to do that. This is an absolute no-brainer. Instead, when I talk with activists, they have a much greater focus on people using less energy. As though that will have no human impact.
Well. It is not cheap. Each new built large scale reactor needs tens of billions in subsidies. Money which could have multiple times larger effect, in a fraction of the time, if invested in renewables and storage.
I really hope Swiss people learned a lesson from Germany and vote to build nuclear power plant. We need more investment in research on how to build safe, efficient power plants and ways of re-using spent nuclear fuel
One thing I want to mention about "safe" nuclear plants: dams are very, very big risks. Destroy a dam and see the result...
People are scared of nuclear plants in the same irrational way they are scared of terrorism. It doesn't kill much, but it is very scary.
> We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
Actually, why not ? I mean this as a serious question.
Just like Oregon or New Mexico do not have problems getting (possibly nuclear) energy from California.
You just have to believe in the concept of Europe hard enough.
It's a foreign country with its own interests. Switzerland is not part of the EU.
What kind of environmental impact does hydro have in Switzerland? I’d expect it’s less because they are in the mountains.
I’m against a lot of Hydro power in the US because the environmental damage is high. Plus I like to fish and they have huge impacts on the ecosystems. But these are relatively flat places compared to Switzerland.
Many of the dams in Switzerland have been built before the fifties and sixties, when environmental concerns were much lower. While most of the dams have been built high up in the mountains, a few villages have been buried by the dams.
Today, it would be infeasible creating new dams. The only thing we can do, is raise the height of some existing dams, adds pumping stations and optimise water flow between the dams.
I didn't think about seasonality of hydro power. You might want french design then, they are the most effective as starting/shutting down.
They should look into what Brazil is doing to store energy long term:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/849994733672039/posts/136230...
Your link is to a random Facebook group, and the source isn't a link. I tried looking for more information in both English and Portuguese and found nothing.
Seems like this is fake news.
I agree with you that you can't rely on hydro alone to power your country. It also seems like you're trying to be reasonable and suggest that any new nuclear production in your country needs to be done as ethically and environmentally friendly as possible.
Your statement about "We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time" really stood out to me.
Are Swiss folks maybe acting a bit NIMBY by not allowing nuclear in their own country, but are fine with buying French nuclear power? It seems a tad hypocritical to be against nuclear, while simultaneously using it as long as it's "not in my country".
Switzerland has nuclear reactors. They just stopped building new ones.
I wouldn’t pin the irrational discourse on the left. Pro nuclear people are just as k=1 thinkers as well. We just need long term policy not short term panic.
Why not replenish with solar i.e. pump it back up into a dam-battery?
If there is any country that can safely build nuclear power plants, it is Switzerland.
Unless you drill holes into the outer containment hull.
What if you destroy a dam? It would be catastrophic too... but nobody votes against dams for some reason.
Whoosh. Holes -> Swiss Cheese.
Some construction workers really did drill into the primary containtainment in one of Switzerlands NPPs though.
https://ensi.admin.ch/de/2014/07/07/bohrloecher-im-primaerco...
> The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland
Does discourse from neighboring countries leak in as well? For example, German and Italian media's anti-nuclear sentiment versus French media's neutral to vaguely positive sentiment about nuclear.
French part of Switzerland is much more left leaning, so I can expect more anti-nuclear sentiment on this side. But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
But, Germany's decision after Fukushima to close down all nuclear reactors has had a strong impact on the 2017 votation that banned nuclear in Switzerland. So I guess the influence is there.
So French Swiss or German Swiss aren't going to be consuming French or German news media? If so that's refreshing compared to Canadians and Brits who constantly try to butt into American media and culture wars (eg. Rebel News, UnHerd) and vice versa (eg. X)
We have national media (German: srf, French/Italian: rts, Romanche: rtr), people consume that, and a few medias that have multiple language versions like 20minutes.
We also have a few language specific medias (German: NZZ, Tagesanzeiger, Blick, ..., French: Le Temps, 24 heures, La Liberté, ...), but I think most people consume Swiss media, especially when Swiss politics and local afairs are absolutely not covered by French and German medias.
The funny thing is that people know more about what is happening in the neighbouring countries than in the other parts of Switzerland. The "national" media is very divided and only covers French-speaking regions in French, German-speaking in German, etc. as if they were local media.
Switzerland is like that. I remember asking (in my best German) the person manning a ticket counter at Zurich train station if they spoke French once, if a look could kill I'd be dead, lol.
It gives the strange feeling that although they decided to create a country together they don't want to interact with each others unless absolutely necessary.
That's not it. Everyone in Zurich studies French at school, if you speak slowly to them in French, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (if they are familiar with the context of course). Similarly, if you speak slowly in German to a French-speaking Swiss, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (again, if they are familiar with the context).
It's just harder to speak in another language than to understand it, so if you ask someone to speak...
Next time, ask them if they understand French :-).
"En Suisse, on s'entend bien parce qu'on ne se comprend pas".
Switzerland's multilingual situation might look primed for a balkanized culture war, especially if you are coming from a place where that is common. But 1) it's a country of 10m people and 2) the national identity is centered around being unified despite language differences.
Of course people make jokes and remarks about "those people" who speak a different language. But "those people" are probably 1h away by train, are probably coworkers, and their language was taught in your school (even if some didn't bother to learn).
I'd see a lot more "nuclear no thanks" stickers in swiss German side than Romandie.
I'd expect the strong anti movement from Germany to have some impact.
> the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for
Unless you personally agree with whatever your preferred party's line is on everything and generalize that sentiment, I'm not sure how to get to that conclusion.
I am member of the SP in Switzerland and I am pro nuclear.
I don’t know why we put people in political buckets. It’s good to disagree. I am probably the weird guy but so be it.
> But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
People aren't really partisan like that in Switzerland. They'll happily elect people from one party then vote against the party on specific issues in referendums or initiatives.
For something like nuclear, people who vote for green party might be mostly aligned with the party because it's a key issue for them while people who vote for center or right parties won't really care what the party recommends.
Its bizarre that nuclear power is a left/right thing. It's clean, safe, and immediately displaces carbon emissions elsewhere. It doesn't require decades of storage and transmission improvements that may or may not come. It just works. Today.
One day nuclear will no longer be neasessary. Until that day comes it is essential. Anyone who disagrees is confusing wishful that being for physics.
It is also extremely expensive if you include the cost of decomission, waste management into the overall cost per KWh https://www.smartreability.com/nuclear-energy-price-per-kwh/
No, it's only expensive compared to every other generation source that is not expected to price in externalities. When I get to vent my waste product into the open air my mwh is way cheaper!! Who could have guessed? How much does a natural gas plant that captures all waste output cost?
The fact that so many European green parties have been so strongly anti-nuclear was always a bit of a head-scratcher for me. It seems so dumb on so many different fronts. Goes to show the power of uninformed public, wildly misleading or actively lying stereotypes and scaremongering.
You could build the reactors inside the mountains to improve the security and effects of things like meltdowns.
Funny thing you mention that.
We had a nuclear meltdown in an experimental reactor in Lucens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor).
It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
> there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
That's going to depend on the geology.
As if construction cost wasn't the biggest expense already.
Sure, but it makes cooling extremely difficult. And due to the confined environment any kind of incident response is needlessly difficult.
1. Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?
2. The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years - what's the plan for managing it?
Yes energy generation (and independence) is important, no nuclear ain't it.
No country is going to bomb Switzerland because they all have money stashed here.
I like that answer, but never say never
by your logic, then what's preventing another country just nuking Switzerland?
By your logic there are no wars.
> Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?
This makes no sense. Russia has actual nuclear weapons, it can "obliterate" Ukraine (or Switzerland) on a whim with them, if they decide to. Also, as you can verify by looking at the containment zone of Chernobyl catastrophe, full blown meltdown/explosion of a nuclear reactor doesn't really "obliterate" a country size of Ukraine.
> The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years
No, it is not hazardous for "tens of thousands of years".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
"All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear"
This is like firefighters opposing using water.
The time for nuclear power was 50 years ago. And it's sad due to unfounded fears and coal interests there weren't more built. I would love if historically we had build more nuclear power plants. I am against it now because we have other safer, cheaper, and more sustainable options.
" I am against it now because we have other safer, cheaper, and more sustainable options."
Not if you want 100% reliable power with no CO2 emissions.
If you start a plant today, it's probably a decade before it comes online. At this point, solar is more than enough for most places if we invested in it and subsidized it like we do for coal and oil. Batteries are improving rapidly and another decade will be a massive difference. I just don't see it making sense to start a new plant.