| ▲ | yawaramin 14 hours ago |
| Failure scenario in modern fission reactors is also benign. Reactors are designed to lock down to prevent any leaks. We deploy solar PV capacity, this doesn't mean we actually get that much power from the deployments. Nuclear fission provides reliable, baseload power, and doesn't require huge battery arrays to compensate for the sun setting or winds calming. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Enough renewables are deployed annually to replace the global nuclear fission fleet, year after year, even when accounting for capacity factor derating (to make a like for like comparison). The race is over, and renewables (with batteries) won. If you can find someone unsophisticated to invest in a fission reactor that takes billions of dollars and 10-15 years to build, more power to you. There will be no need for it by 2035-2040 when it prepares to send its first kwh to the grid. (and to stay on topic for this thread, geothermal is a component of this when geothermal potential exists, cost is competitive, and dispatachability is a requirement to push out fossil generation in concert with renewables, hydro, legacy nuclear, battery storage discharge, and demand response) https://www.google.com/search?q=baseload+is+a+myth https://cleantechnica.com/2025/11/15/coal-killing-sodium-ion... https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/q3-global-power-rep... https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec... https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44513185 (lfp battery storage cost citation in 2025) |
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| ▲ | yawaramin 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If you can find someone unsophisticated to invest in a fission reactor that takes billions of dollars and 10-15 years to build Unsophisticated investors like the Chinese government? 'Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less.' https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-... | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | They dabble in nuclear, but it is not their focus. China can do what the developed world cannot because they are a command economy with less expensive labor, which will only last for a bit longer due to their structural demographics. Unless the developed world no longer has labor regulations, developed world wages, and capital based allocation systems, my statement stands with regards to investment. If capital and labor does not matter, certainly, anything is possible (Paraoh demanding pyramids, for example). Your citation comes from an organization with pro nuclear bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Institute Can China Break Nuclear Power’s Cost Curse—and What Can the US Learn? - https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/can-china-break-nuclear-... - September 17th, 2025 China built more solar power in the last 8 months than all the nuclear power built in the entire world in the entire history of human civilisation. And even if you adjust for utilisation rate to compare against nuclear utilisation China built more solar power generated per hour than all the nuclear power currently in operation generate in an hour - and did so in 12-18 months - https://bsky.app/profile/climatenews.bsky.social/post/3lggqu... - January 23, 2025 China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week - https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa... - July 15th, 2024 Nuclear Continues To Lag Far Behind Renewables In China Deployments - https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la... - January 12th, 2024 Nuclear Energy & Free Market Capitalism Aren’t Compatible - https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/06/nuclear-energy-free-mar... - November 6th, 2023 https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1910780131318374524 | https://archive.today/iu9jx (China demographics citation) | | |
| ▲ | yawaramin 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If France–a country known for its strong labour laws and unions–could transition to nuclear in the '70s, any Western country can do it. Even if the Western world lags behind due to labour regulations, the cost still pays off in the long run due to overall less complex infrastructure and stable, AC baseload power. You are thinking only about the cost of building. What about the cost of maintaining all that infrastructure? Huge solar and wind farms spread out over vast areas, essentially destroying the local ecology? NPPs have a relatively tiny footprint. Every cited source has a bias. You think 'Clean Technica' is unbiased? Come on. | | |
| ▲ | nagisa 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The options in the '70s were much different from those of today. And for France specifically what they have underground (lots of uranium, no oil, no gas & no coal) strongly suggested exactly one way forward. | | |
| ▲ | cbmuser 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wind and solar existed in the 70s as well. Plus, Germany invested 500 billion Euros in its energy transition and is STILL heavily dependent on coal. | | |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If France–a country known for its strong labour laws and unions–could transition to nuclear in the '70s, any Western country can do it. France had to nationalize EDF because they could not afford the costs associated with their nuclear fleet. The 70s are 50 years in the past, and are not what the future will look like. This is also why Spain plans to retire its remaining nuclear generators, and go all in on renewables. EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-fleet-upkeep-wil... - November 17th, 2025 French utility EDF lifts cost estimate for new reactors to 67 billion euros - Les Echos - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l... - March 4th, 2024 Explainer-Why a French plan to take full control of EDF is no cure-all - https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/07/edf-nationalistion - July 7th, 2022 Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~1GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~28-36 months; per Electricity Maps, only 17.25% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear) Tangentially, Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, for scale. |
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| ▲ | cbmuser 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | »Your citation comes from an organization with pro nuclear bias.« Go and throw all your money into renewables stocks and ETFs if you’re so convinced. I bet you’re not doing that because you realize that the industry isn’t doing well and it’s nuclear power nowadays where all the money goes. | | |
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| ▲ | cbmuser 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | »Enough renewables are deployed annually to replace the global nuclear fission fleet, year after year, even when accounting for capacity factor derating (to make a like for like comparison).« Wind and solar do not replace conventional power plants and never will. Heck, Germany tried that on the small island of Pellworm and failed and yet some people think this will work out for the whole country. It does not work. |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Nuclear is great, but it does require wheelbarrows of cash, and we don’t have a solution for waste products. |
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| ▲ | yawaramin 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Things are more expensive when we keep reinventing the wheel and trying to do new things instead of just reusing proven designs. Remember that solar power also used to cost wheelbarrows of cash back in the day. When you do something repeatedly, it becomes less expensive over time. Nuclear is actually the leader in waste management. No other energy source has as complete a story. Eg what happens to solar panels when they EOL in 25 years? They go into landfills and leach toxic chemicals into the ground. These chemicals, like lead and cadmium are toxic forever. They have no 'half-life' in which their toxicity reduces. | | |
| ▲ | kragen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Solar panels do not become useless in 25 years and need to be discarded, do not leach toxic chemicals, and do not contain cadmium. They do contain small amounts of lead, but leaching metallic lead out of landfills is very difficult and probably does not ever happen unintentionally. | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A nuclear plant about 50 miles from my house was closed 15 years ago. The spent fuel rods will be stored there indefinitely until a federal facility is built. | | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials. Redwood Materials (founded by Tesla's former CTO) has already established a supply chain to ingest and recycle EV and stationary storage batteries at scale. The problem is that the hardware is lasting longer than expected, and meaningful recycling volume does not yet exist. Conversely, ~95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions, as of this comment, and there is no plan for long term storage or recycling. Nuclear generation is experiencing a negative learning curve; we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it. (solar PV panels have a 25-30 year service life, at which point they will still produce power at ~80-85% initial rating, batteries have a 15-20 year service life, with sodium ion chemistries estimated to have up to 50 year service life assuming once daily cycling) https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/beyond-recycling-... https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/09/nuclear-power-energy-radioac... https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-all... (nuclear power accounts for about 10% of electricity generation globally, as of this comment) | | |
| ▲ | yawaramin 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials. That's very clever wording. If someone glances at this sentence they might interpret it to mean that almost all solar panels are recycled. But your own citation tells a different story: https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling > Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them. Let's compare to spent nuclear fuel, which we know for sure does not end up in landfills. I am talking about today, not some hypothetical utopian future. Today, NPP spent fuel is safely sequestered while solar panels are dumped into landfills. > nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions It does, it's just not built yet because it doesn't make sense to do it now. In a few decades, maybe a century we will have commercialized fusion reactors. Once we do, we switch to fusion completely and build the deep geological repositories or whatever other solution makes sense then. Or we can even recycle the spent fuel–the only thing stopping us from doing that now is misguided US politics (as usual). > we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it. It's capex. We are investing in nuclear technology. If you have a proven design and build the reactors at scale, the costs will flatten or decline, which is obvious to anyone who knows about economies of scale. |
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