I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it.

Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. We just need to look at Hinkly Point C ("HPC") in the UK. HPC was proposed in 2010, approved in 2016, began construction in 2018 and is scheduled to completion currently somewhere between 2029 and 2031 for the first reactor with the second following 1-3 years after (IIRC). From an initial cost estimate of 15 billion pounds in 2015, it's ballooned to 31-35 billion and may well exceed 50 billion [2][3].

The contracted price per MWh is linked to inflation and currently pushing 140 pounds, about 50% more expensive than offshore wind that could be built in a fraction of the time.

So there is a 35 year contract period for power but HPC has a lifespan of 60 years. What happens after? Market rates. Many will argue it'll get cheaper as the plant is paid off. If that's the case, why hasn't electricity from nuclear sources gotten cheaper as the existing plants have aged?

The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."

And we haven't even touched the negative externalities yet. That is, the uranium fuel cycle. Processing uranium ore produces waste. Using fuel rods produces waste. We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste. There's a lot of hand-waving about "just store it underground and centuries from now we'll hope they've figured it out". Storage, particularly for the first decade or more is not as easy as the hand-waving makes it out to be. It requires cooling ponds because the waste still produces significant heat. So you need infrastructure from that. UF6/UF4 from procesing aren't a solved problem either.

I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...

[3]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/20/hinkley-poin...

> I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.

I don't really get this either. I've come to think that it comes down to two pieces. The easy piece is that some people don't seem to realize just how good renewable power sources have gotten in the last 10-20 years. Nuclear has simply been outcompeted in so many ways. But this happened pretty quickly, so not everyone has gotten the message.

The other one is more subtle. For decades there were a lot of bad attacks on nuclear as a technology. (And a few good criticisms, but for some reason those never seem to get the attention, even though they should -- they're pretty strong arguments!) There's a certain type of person who loves to debunk these bad arguments, and there's plenty of that type of person around here. And that can get you emotionally invested into the thing you've been defending (perhaps rightfully: they were crappy arguments against it), and might keep you promoting it after its natural time has passed.

(To be clear: I don't think nuclear plants are worthless, and I think keeping the ones we've got operating smoothly as base load stations is probably an excellent idea. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be building more of them these days.)

All forms of generation have downsides.

> Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now,

Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsuit-filing laptops right now.

Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Both are actually pretty well understood. If we applied that risk management logic to forms of transport, you wouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere.

> Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1].

The graph actually suggests something different - you can see how coal (a mature and well -understood technology) has basically flat-lining costs that increase very slowly over time as we mine out the easy fuel. That is pretty much what we'd expect for a mature technology.

Gas, Solar and Wind have rapidly decreasing cost curves following some sort of asymptotic pattern which is what we'd expect for new and exciting technologies.

Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU. On a technical basis it is probably going to be cheaper than coal and if allowed to innovate likely much cheaper than solar and wind (the too-cheap-to-meter line is plausible, we've seen that sort of market in networking).

> The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."

That sounds like an extremely reasonable answer? It was different after Chernobyl and Fukushima. We've never seen a plant melt down that was designed & built around the 1970s. And again, project budgeting is mostly about politics not the technology involved. If costs are consistently X the technical estimate, planners will add in a factor of X unless there is a political reason not to.

> We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste.

Seems to be a solved problem? We've been doing this for 50 years now and despite their best efforts the anti-nuclear crowd haven't managed to come up with a concrete example of what the problem is that isn't easily ignored. Society produces a lot of toxic waste already and it really isn't that big of an issue. I did the calcs once a long time ago for a HN post and we're often talking about a few shipping containers worth of material in these conversations; ie nothing.

We haven't figured out how to deal with the toxic byproducts of solar panels either and that is largely a non-issue. Plan A is to dump the waste somewhere and Plan B is to go with a better option if one turns up. Problem solved.

It cuts both ways. Solar and wind are great but intermittent, and the storage issue seems to be treated as a solvable ergo solved problem. Add a sprinkle of "overcapacity", gas peakers and demand shaping and we can have a fully green grid.

So why didn't this happen anywhere - except perhaps two of the sunniest and windiest places in the world, Australia and California, where energy demand (AC) also matches production? Where are the seasonal battery storage facilities that places like Europe or I guess most of NA would need?

My only conclusion is that renewables are also far more expensive than the sticker price, due to the needed grid investment, batteries and frankly unsolved problems of seasonal storage.

I don't mind being wrong, but status quo seems to be, let's not build nuclear because it's too expensive, we're sort of building renewables, but CO2 emmissions, never mind levels, keep on increasing.

It doesn't seem to add up to a coherent story.

>LCOE

Is bunk. You should be using LFSCOE instead.

https://davidturver.substack.com/p/lcoe-levelised-cost-of-en...

>Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now.

Those can both be true. Canada will likely need more power in 15 years too. It's called long term planning.

What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2? There's a lot of places without hydro or geothermal power, and if you needs gobs of power for, say, making aluminum you need as much as you can get power wise.

We can't generate power out of thin air and the coal/natural gas powerplants got shut down what do you propose?

Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.

You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching.

Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.

Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now

Canada won't need new power 15 years from now? Did a time traveler tell you about a coming Dark Age?

China, Canada, Sweden and others, are not stupid. We really don't understand how it is that all the experts say that Nuclear needs to be parts of the equation but all of you "online activist" keep insisting that, they are just idiots and industry shills. It is the same playbook the anti-vaxers use.