Existing nuclear reactors produce incredibly cheap power. The German decision to stop theirs before coal should be considered an environmental crime.

Finns should be super happy with Nuclear since the cost overruns were overwhelmingly born by Areva (majority owned by the French state) which accumulated losses of €5.5 billion and went bust!

As a nuclear weapons power the UK has a national security interest to keep its nuclear industry around. It needs to build some reactors to do that, but given the prices of new nuclear I don't expect it to build more than the minimum necessary.

Hinkley Point C comes in at £92.50/MWh in 2012 prices (£128.90 in 2024 prices). At the last auction wind prices were £54.23/MWh in 2012 prices (£75.68/MWh 2024 prices).

Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas but that is still much cheaper than nuclear.

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Mawr 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas

Yes, let's just handwave those concerns away, it's not like the grid needs power 100% of the time or anything. Two weeks without wind? No problem, just burn gas :) It's so cheap, independent of foreign supply, doesn't leak out of pipes and isn't a huge environmental hazard at all.

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hvb2 2 days ago | parent [-]

But then also be honest that nuclear can't solve that problem either. It's extremely slow to ramp up and down so it cannot keep the grid stable either.

So the only way to power your grid with all nuclear is to produce at the daily peak load + margin all day. Every day

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mpweiher 2 days ago | parent [-]

This is completely false. Nuclear plants can and do ramp up quickly, thought not from/to 0, but that's generally not necessary.

And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.

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hvb2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I disagree.

My point was that, just like with renewables, a 100% nuclear grid doesn't work either.

They can adjust power but they're typically used as he load with some other source dealing with the peak load needed a short time a day. Typical peak capacity can be off in the middle of the night for example. Nuclear doesn't like that.

I'm not saying you can't. I'm saying it's typically not used for that because it's not flexible enough. Wikipedia seems to agree with that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant

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ViewTrick1002 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.

We already have grids operating without traditional baseload. This is a 2015 talking point.

See for example South Australia keeping either 40 MWe or 80 MWe fossil gas in standby (I would presume this is the lowest possible hot standby power level for said plants). They are aiming to phase this out in the near future as storage comes online.

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...

Inertia is trivially solved in 2025. Either through grid forming inverters which today are available off-the-shelf or the old boring solution of synchronous condensers like the Baltic states used to have enough grid strength to decouple from the Russian grid.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/baltic-power-grid

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mpweiher 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Tell that to the Spaniards.

	▲	adrianN 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Both the government and Redeia said renewable energy sources were not responsible for the blackout. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-caused-iberian-...
	▲	ViewTrick1002 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This truly shows your ignorance. Please show curiosity rather than redditesque comments like this. First. The final report of the Iberian blackout is not completed yet. It is taking longer than expected due to how complex the situation was. They did release an interim factual report in which they specify the facts. The full root cause analysis and recommendations on how to prevent similar events is coming in Q1 2026. From the factual report we learn that: 1. The cause was a lack of voltage control. Do you see inertia here? 2. They did expect traditional power plants to provide this, without verifying. 3. They did not expect renewable power plants to provide this, therefore they did not. In about all other grids like, like for example the US, renewable plants are expected to provide voltage control. It is trivially done by extremely cheap off-the-shelf components. But if the expectation does not exist then it will not be provided since the cost is non-zero. https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib...