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This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and batt

This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclear energy and Germany's decision to fade it out is now driven more by emotion/ignorance than reason.

ch4s3 2mo ago
It depends on how much you value land use and care about the knock on effects of the associated mining. I’d rather figure out how to build out nuclear cheaply like South Korea and China and use more land for wild space. The per hectare land use of nuclear is minuscule.
jrflo 2mo ago
There will always be a need for on-demand power. Renewables are great, but cannot deal with peaks as easily and capacity is dependent on weather.
- grey-area 2mo ago
  That’s why they mentioned batteries.
- throw-the-towel 2mo ago
  But nuclear also can't deal with peaks.
  - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
    Renewables and batteries are great for peaks though. And not very good for base load Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
    - myrmidon 2mo ago
      "Base load" is not an actual demand that needs to be satisfied. Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time). Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).
      - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
        > Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time) The "if you can keep running all of the time" is actually the more important factor of base load than just price. I guess if you want to look at it through purely a price point thing, does the solar price effectively go to infinity when there are clouds out or it's night time? Maybe base load is the wrong term for it, I don't know. All I'm saying is that solar and wind aren't generating all of the time, and building out the storage capacity to completely cover our existing needs seems kind of unfathomable.
- dolmen 2mo ago
  Hydro is renewable, can deal with peaks and not directly dependent on weather. Use its power down when in need of electricity. Bring water up hill when too much electricity is available.
  - ericmay 2mo ago
    Ok... but now we're damaging ecosystems by installing hydroelectric power stations and dams and such in these areas. Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power. Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries. Dogmatism about renewables is self-defeating.
    - riedel 2mo ago
      We should make sure that the indirect cost for CO2 are added to the price of energy and imported products depending on the mix. It is one of the few areas where I think a market can fix things.
      - ericmay 2mo ago
        I’ve always thought that was a decent idea but Americans can’t even stomach higher gas prices because of the Iran war. How are they going to handle $7-$8 per gallon or more?
      - frm88 2mo ago
        That would mean we all pay for the CO2 emissions of the US army since they are the world's largest single institution consumer. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333873233_Hidden_carbon_costs_of_the_everywhere_war_Logistics_geopolitical_ecology_and_the_carbon_boot-print_of_the_US_military https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333873233_Hidden_ca... https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/12/elephant-in-the-room-the-us-militarys-devastating-carbon-footprint https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/12/elephant-in-the-ro...
bluefirebrand 2mo ago
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage. Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose. Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest
boringg 2mo ago
This gets repeated again and again. They are not in conflict with each other - both need to be done in tandem. It is not a this or that strategy - it is an all of the above strategy. Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
- adrianN 2mo ago
  Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
  - palata 2mo ago
    > It doesn’t do well economically Well, economy is fossil fuels. In the world after fossil fuels, we may have to redefine what "economy" means.
    - adrianN 2mo ago
      That seems to have very low chances of success.
      - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
        If it were true there is no point trying to avert climate change. It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset. Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense, so it actually makes sense to try and address this problem.
        palata 2mo ago
        > Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense Is it? The economy is what we produce and consume. The economy grows when we produce and consume more, it shrinks when we produce and consume less. How do we produce stuff nowadays? With fossil fuels. There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point. Economy "does well" when we have easy access to fossil fuels, it doesn't when we don't. We can observe the impact on countries where fossil fuels get harder to get. An example would be Europe, where fossil fuels have been harder and harder to get since 2007 (which corresponds to the global peak of conventional oil). Since then, Europe has been slowing down if you look at physical indicators (like which surface is built or what weight is transported by trucks). GDP is artificial, it's arbitrarily modified to "compensate" for inflation. People in the US love to say that Europe is slowing down because of regulations and laziness and all the smart people moving to the US, but the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels. To stop destroying the climate, we need to stop using fossil fuels, and therefore we need to redefine what we expect from "the economy", because without fossil fuels there is no way we keep producing and consuming more. But that's not all! Even if there was a way (!), it would not resolve the problem of biodiversity loss. We are currently, measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. If we don't get food problems because of climate change, chances are that we will because of the mass extinction. Climate change is just one existential problem we are facing. In Europe, we have lost 80% of insects in the last 20 years, and that has NOTHING to do with climate change. Just loss of habitat, which is a consequence of our economy growing (and humans doing what humans do, like tourism and parking lots and cutting trees and overfishing). Climate change will just make that worse, it's just starting. > It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset. This is a certainty if we don't do anything. Now the more we do, the more we preserve. It will still be bad, make no mistake. But there is no such thing as "it's too late to act". The less we do, the worse it gets.
modo_mario 2mo ago
Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity. Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically. Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime) At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections) But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades. I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
- bryanlarsen 2mo ago
  - nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them. China is not currently experiencing cost price reduction in nuclear. Maybe we'd experience scale reductions in cost if we were to build at a much larger scale than that, but given that the world is already spending hundreds of billions just to build a handful of plants.... - nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands > I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage Which one was that? Lazard has always consistently overestimated the cost of solar and solar+storage.
  - spwa4 2mo ago
    > nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them Let's not pretend price is any concern of the people shutting down nuclear power. That's just not what it's about. Here is their page on the subject, and as you can clearly read: nuclear power "has no future". https://www.gruene-bundestag.de/unsere-politik/was-unsere-politik-fuer-dich-bedeutet/warum-atomkraft-keine-zukunft-hat-und-die-erneuerbaren-schon/ https://www.gruene-bundestag.de/unsere-politik/was-unsere-po... Second, Germany would not have to rebuild nuclear power, as the green party clearly shows. They only need to reopen existing plants. It is STILL the case that reopening the existing plants would lower prices - a bit. But it would make a very large difference for German CO2 production because coal powerplants are doing baseload now and would be displaced by the nuclear plants. And if the Ukraine and Iran wars keep going it will lower prices a lot (or rather it would prevent another large price spike) https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/de/aktuelles/gasverstromung-und-strompreise-im-winter-2022-2023/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/de/aktuelles/gasverstromung-und... > nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands This is not a good argument given that the alternative was to switch to gas for most of the baseload, then lose the gas due to the war in Ukraine, to then switch to coal and LNG (LNG might technically be gas, but due to additional inefficiency it's worse than coal), and now losing all gas supplies (ie. from Qatar) and being forced to use even worse LNG supplies from the US. Hell you'd think the greens would massively sponsor chemical research into LNG, since LNG efficiency is actually worse than what our bodies do to make fat. In other words: turning gas into liquid fuel (not LNG, actual liquid fuel) is possible to do with a catalyst at much higher efficiency than turning it into LNG. We don't know how, despite the fact that your body is probably doing it (to produce fatty acids) right now as you read this. You want to help climate change? Let's figure that one out, that would actually help CO2 output AND lower prices.
foobarian 2mo ago
I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  I'm not so sure about the "no water needed" as batteries require cooling (and sometimes heating). And perhaps batteries are not risky like nuclear waste, but by volume there would me much more battery material than nuclear material, and there is fire risk that must be mitigated. You can't just wire up a big stack of batteries, they need carefully designed separation and fire suppression so that if one battery goes into a thermal runaway it doesn't take out the entire installation.
  - foobarian 2mo ago
    I imagine it wouldn't be nearly in the same ballpark, since one side does not perform the classic mechanical generation from temperature difference, and deal with the associated waste heat.
- wongarsu 2mo ago
  The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant. The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse 1: https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batteriespeicher-am-ehemaligen-AKW-Grohnde-11276677.html https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batt...
iso1631 2mo ago
Of course it would, but there's less profit for capitalists to make with distributed sovereign renewable energy. 30 years ago the answer was nuclear. Not today, it's just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer.
- AlexandrB 2mo ago
  The environmentalists who railed against nuclear for the last 30 years are very much responsible for how many dead dinosaurs we've burnt over that time. Excuse me if I'm skeptical about what they now say about energy policy. To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
  - iso1631 2mo ago
    If you have $1b to spend today, you can generate more energy and more quickly by installing solar or wind than you can by installing nuclear
throw0101d 2mo ago
> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? Recent report on restarting German nuclear: > The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s. * https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-germanys-reactors-feasibility-and-schedule https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german... * PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db590cf5a4ac6a4a0d6812a58ada6.pdf https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...
- OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
  Okay, and how does compare to other options? And do you have sources without an obvious conflict of interest?
- belorn 2mo ago
  That seems very cheap if it means you don't need to build new transmission. The average cost in south of Sweden is much higher than that, which in euro would be around €100 per megawatt-hour. Prices are also expected to further increase as EU has issued regulations that customers should subsidize regions of poor transmission, in order to enable construction of more wind and solar farms where no such transmission exist.
AlexandrB 2mo ago
> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear. [1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-systems-france-and-germany-compared https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
- piva00 2mo ago
  Germany still has expensive thermal power plants which dictate the price of electricity given the bidding system used for pricing it. Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
  German energy prices aren't driven by renewables.
- wolvoleo 2mo ago
  France's nuclear is long paid off, and there were big government investments into building the industry around it because France is a nuclear power. It's not exactly the same tech obviously but when you build nuclear weapons yourself you need a workforce and industry capable of working with the materials. Some of those costs will have found their way under defense headings instead of energy ones. Germany didn't have this incentive and they don't have the luxury of coasting on previous investments of a bygone era. Germany would have to start from scratch with all this and without the defense component (unless they change their stance on that too)
spwa4 2mo ago
I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming. They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023. Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany. European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise. And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere. I think that is what is meant by that question.
- OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
  I'm sorry, but your comment to me just reads like a long rant about the Green party.
  - spwa4 2mo ago
    Sorry, let me put a short rant then. The Green party of Germany forced through the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany and stood by that decision, even when it became clear the already bad impact on climate change it had was made 10x worse by the war in Ukraine (forcing Germany to switch to Coal and LNG). Meanwhile this "Green" party, unwilling to make compromises themselves, is using climate change to demand enormous compromises from everyone else, guaranteeing yet another fight to stop climate change legislation.
    - 2mo ago
markvdb 2mo ago
Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption. A sensible global policy could be: - Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas. - Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want. - Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only. Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots. Our children will be boiling frogs and angry.
- looperhacks 2mo ago
  Jevons paradox is often claimed, but largely irrelevant in this case, imo. If the demand rises, the price rises again, as well. It doesn't force anybody to keep using fossil energy
  - markvdb 2mo ago
    Price elasticity definitely is a thing, but I'd argue not in the way you see it. Have a somewhat competitive energy market and falling production prices like we have for carbon neutral energy. What do you think will happen? The market will gobble up any and all production. Look at what we currently have even with largely fossil energy. The substantial US/EU delta in energy price and energy consumption. Notice how similar the deltas are?
- M95D 2mo ago
  > carbon negative energy consumption There is no carbon negative energy consumtion.
  - markvdb 2mo ago
    CO2 capture can be carbon negative, even if it consumes energy.
    - 2mo ago
palata 2mo ago
One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need? Nuclear is different in that regard.
- OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
  "renewables increase oil dependency" now that is an argument I haven't seen before.
  - palata 2mo ago
    Today, pretty much everything you do increases oil dependency. What's clear is that we will have less and less oil (just because... physics: it's limited) and anyway we need to use less and less oil (because climate change). So the question is: what can we preserve once we don't have oil anymore? And my point was that renewables are piloted with electronics, and we haven't tried building and maintaining that system in a world without oil. People like to extrapolate the growth of renewables, but they tend to forget that the current growth is totally subsidised by oil: your solar panel was built and transported with oil, period. If you are serious about the "after the end of oil", you have to wonder if that system works, at scale, without oil. Don't you?
belorn 2mo ago
The politicians in Germany went to great length to promote natural gas as the green technology to be combined with renewables, a strategy they succeed in the European Parliament and still seem to follow even when the fires roams and the pipelines get blown up. There is no seasonal grid battery storage in central and northern Europe, and outside of a few hundred household sized experiment, no grid storage is being built. Looking at the platforms of political parties who oppose nuclear in a nearby country like Sweden, all of them highlight how thermal power plants are necessary to support further expansion of renewable energy, and those thermal power plants burn some form of fossil fuels. This include the Swedish green party. What EU need is a ban on fossil fuels in the energy grid. Without that natural gas there is no need to buy gas from current war zones and their participants, and it would significantly decrease emissions. As long as people who oppose nuclear also agree to stop using thermal power plants, same as with the ban on ICE cars that will come into action in a few years, then the discussion of nuclear vs renewables + battery will be a fair one with everyone playing by the same rules. Naturally in the south part of EU there is little reason to use nuclear plants. Energy demand correlates with solar production, and the need for seasonal storage is minimal. Sadly the same can not be said about central and northern Europe where wind speeds are the current dominant factor when it come to supply of energy, but seasons dictate demand. The size of storage needed for a harsh winter is magnitudes more expensive currently than reducing the need through nuclear, but that will never be tested since what countries there are actually building right now are more thermal power plants to address the issue of low supply during periods of low energy production from wind.
hamper653 2mo ago
> wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? How about taking the money spent on fossil energies and invest it in both nuclear and renewables?
- OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
  Why not spend it on the most cost efficient option with the best long term prospects?
  - hamper653 2mo ago
    It’s not either/or. We must spend on all options.

ch4s3 2mo ago

It depends on how much you value land use and care about the knock on effects of the associated mining. I’d rather figure out how to build out nuclear cheaply like South Korea and China and use more land for wild space. The per hectare land use of nuclear is minuscule.

jrflo 2mo ago

There will always be a need for on-demand power. Renewables are great, but cannot deal with peaks as easily and capacity is dependent on weather.

grey-area 2mo ago
That’s why they mentioned batteries.
throw-the-towel 2mo ago
But nuclear also can't deal with peaks.
- bluefirebrand 2mo ago
  Renewables and batteries are great for peaks though. And not very good for base load Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
  - myrmidon 2mo ago
    "Base load" is not an actual demand that needs to be satisfied. Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time). Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).
    - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
      > Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time) The "if you can keep running all of the time" is actually the more important factor of base load than just price. I guess if you want to look at it through purely a price point thing, does the solar price effectively go to infinity when there are clouds out or it's night time? Maybe base load is the wrong term for it, I don't know. All I'm saying is that solar and wind aren't generating all of the time, and building out the storage capacity to completely cover our existing needs seems kind of unfathomable.
dolmen 2mo ago
Hydro is renewable, can deal with peaks and not directly dependent on weather. Use its power down when in need of electricity. Bring water up hill when too much electricity is available.
- ericmay 2mo ago
  Ok... but now we're damaging ecosystems by installing hydroelectric power stations and dams and such in these areas. Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power. Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries. Dogmatism about renewables is self-defeating.
  - riedel 2mo ago
    We should make sure that the indirect cost for CO2 are added to the price of energy and imported products depending on the mix. It is one of the few areas where I think a market can fix things.
    - ericmay 2mo ago
      I’ve always thought that was a decent idea but Americans can’t even stomach higher gas prices because of the Iran war. How are they going to handle $7-$8 per gallon or more?
    - frm88 2mo ago
      That would mean we all pay for the CO2 emissions of the US army since they are the world's largest single institution consumer. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333873233_Hidden_carbon_costs_of_the_everywhere_war_Logistics_geopolitical_ecology_and_the_carbon_boot-print_of_the_US_military https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333873233_Hidden_ca... https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/12/elephant-in-the-room-the-us-militarys-devastating-carbon-footprint https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/12/elephant-in-the-ro...

bluefirebrand 2mo ago

> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage. Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose. Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest

boringg 2mo ago

This gets repeated again and again. They are not in conflict with each other - both need to be done in tandem. It is not a this or that strategy - it is an all of the above strategy. Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.

adrianN 2mo ago
Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.
- palata 2mo ago
  > It doesn’t do well economically Well, economy is fossil fuels. In the world after fossil fuels, we may have to redefine what "economy" means.
  - adrianN 2mo ago
    That seems to have very low chances of success.
    - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
      If it were true there is no point trying to avert climate change. It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset. Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense, so it actually makes sense to try and address this problem.
      - palata 2mo ago
        > Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense Is it? The economy is what we produce and consume. The economy grows when we produce and consume more, it shrinks when we produce and consume less. How do we produce stuff nowadays? With fossil fuels. There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point. Economy "does well" when we have easy access to fossil fuels, it doesn't when we don't. We can observe the impact on countries where fossil fuels get harder to get. An example would be Europe, where fossil fuels have been harder and harder to get since 2007 (which corresponds to the global peak of conventional oil). Since then, Europe has been slowing down if you look at physical indicators (like which surface is built or what weight is transported by trucks). GDP is artificial, it's arbitrarily modified to "compensate" for inflation. People in the US love to say that Europe is slowing down because of regulations and laziness and all the smart people moving to the US, but the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels. To stop destroying the climate, we need to stop using fossil fuels, and therefore we need to redefine what we expect from "the economy", because without fossil fuels there is no way we keep producing and consuming more. But that's not all! Even if there was a way (!), it would not resolve the problem of biodiversity loss. We are currently, measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. If we don't get food problems because of climate change, chances are that we will because of the mass extinction. Climate change is just one existential problem we are facing. In Europe, we have lost 80% of insects in the last 20 years, and that has NOTHING to do with climate change. Just loss of habitat, which is a consequence of our economy growing (and humans doing what humans do, like tourism and parking lots and cutting trees and overfishing). Climate change will just make that worse, it's just starting. > It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset. This is a certainty if we don't do anything. Now the more we do, the more we preserve. It will still be bad, make no mistake. But there is no such thing as "it's too late to act". The less we do, the worse it gets.

modo_mario 2mo ago

Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity. Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically. Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime) At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections) But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades. I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.

bryanlarsen 2mo ago
- nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them. China is not currently experiencing cost price reduction in nuclear. Maybe we'd experience scale reductions in cost if we were to build at a much larger scale than that, but given that the world is already spending hundreds of billions just to build a handful of plants.... - nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands > I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage Which one was that? Lazard has always consistently overestimated the cost of solar and solar+storage.
- spwa4 2mo ago
  > nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them Let's not pretend price is any concern of the people shutting down nuclear power. That's just not what it's about. Here is their page on the subject, and as you can clearly read: nuclear power "has no future". https://www.gruene-bundestag.de/unsere-politik/was-unsere-politik-fuer-dich-bedeutet/warum-atomkraft-keine-zukunft-hat-und-die-erneuerbaren-schon/ https://www.gruene-bundestag.de/unsere-politik/was-unsere-po... Second, Germany would not have to rebuild nuclear power, as the green party clearly shows. They only need to reopen existing plants. It is STILL the case that reopening the existing plants would lower prices - a bit. But it would make a very large difference for German CO2 production because coal powerplants are doing baseload now and would be displaced by the nuclear plants. And if the Ukraine and Iran wars keep going it will lower prices a lot (or rather it would prevent another large price spike) https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/de/aktuelles/gasverstromung-und-strompreise-im-winter-2022-2023/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/de/aktuelles/gasverstromung-und... > nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands This is not a good argument given that the alternative was to switch to gas for most of the baseload, then lose the gas due to the war in Ukraine, to then switch to coal and LNG (LNG might technically be gas, but due to additional inefficiency it's worse than coal), and now losing all gas supplies (ie. from Qatar) and being forced to use even worse LNG supplies from the US. Hell you'd think the greens would massively sponsor chemical research into LNG, since LNG efficiency is actually worse than what our bodies do to make fat. In other words: turning gas into liquid fuel (not LNG, actual liquid fuel) is possible to do with a catalyst at much higher efficiency than turning it into LNG. We don't know how, despite the fact that your body is probably doing it (to produce fatty acids) right now as you read this. You want to help climate change? Let's figure that one out, that would actually help CO2 output AND lower prices.

foobarian 2mo ago

I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.

SoftTalker 2mo ago
I'm not so sure about the "no water needed" as batteries require cooling (and sometimes heating). And perhaps batteries are not risky like nuclear waste, but by volume there would me much more battery material than nuclear material, and there is fire risk that must be mitigated. You can't just wire up a big stack of batteries, they need carefully designed separation and fire suppression so that if one battery goes into a thermal runaway it doesn't take out the entire installation.
- foobarian 2mo ago
  I imagine it wouldn't be nearly in the same ballpark, since one side does not perform the classic mechanical generation from temperature difference, and deal with the associated waste heat.
wongarsu 2mo ago
The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant. The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse 1: https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batteriespeicher-am-ehemaligen-AKW-Grohnde-11276677.html https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batt...

iso1631 2mo ago

Of course it would, but there's less profit for capitalists to make with distributed sovereign renewable energy. 30 years ago the answer was nuclear. Not today, it's just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer.

AlexandrB 2mo ago
The environmentalists who railed against nuclear for the last 30 years are very much responsible for how many dead dinosaurs we've burnt over that time. Excuse me if I'm skeptical about what they now say about energy policy. To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
- iso1631 2mo ago
  If you have $1b to spend today, you can generate more energy and more quickly by installing solar or wind than you can by installing nuclear

throw0101d 2mo ago

> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? Recent report on restarting German nuclear: > The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s. * https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-germanys-reactors-feasibility-and-schedule https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german... * PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db590cf5a4ac6a4a0d6812a58ada6.pdf https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...

OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
Okay, and how does compare to other options? And do you have sources without an obvious conflict of interest?
belorn 2mo ago
That seems very cheap if it means you don't need to build new transmission. The average cost in south of Sweden is much higher than that, which in euro would be around €100 per megawatt-hour. Prices are also expected to further increase as EU has issued regulations that customers should subsidize regions of poor transmission, in order to enable construction of more wind and solar farms where no such transmission exist.

AlexandrB 2mo ago

> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear. [1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-systems-france-and-germany-compared https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

piva00 2mo ago
Germany still has expensive thermal power plants which dictate the price of electricity given the bidding system used for pricing it. Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.
- deleted 2mo ago
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OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
German energy prices aren't driven by renewables.
wolvoleo 2mo ago
France's nuclear is long paid off, and there were big government investments into building the industry around it because France is a nuclear power. It's not exactly the same tech obviously but when you build nuclear weapons yourself you need a workforce and industry capable of working with the materials. Some of those costs will have found their way under defense headings instead of energy ones. Germany didn't have this incentive and they don't have the luxury of coasting on previous investments of a bygone era. Germany would have to start from scratch with all this and without the defense component (unless they change their stance on that too)

spwa4 2mo ago

I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming. They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023. Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany. European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise. And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere. I think that is what is meant by that question.

OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
I'm sorry, but your comment to me just reads like a long rant about the Green party.
- spwa4 2mo ago
  Sorry, let me put a short rant then. The Green party of Germany forced through the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany and stood by that decision, even when it became clear the already bad impact on climate change it had was made 10x worse by the war in Ukraine (forcing Germany to switch to Coal and LNG). Meanwhile this "Green" party, unwilling to make compromises themselves, is using climate change to demand enormous compromises from everyone else, guaranteeing yet another fight to stop climate change legislation.
  - 2mo ago

markvdb 2mo ago

Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption. A sensible global policy could be: - Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas. - Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want. - Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only. Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots. Our children will be boiling frogs and angry.

looperhacks 2mo ago
Jevons paradox is often claimed, but largely irrelevant in this case, imo. If the demand rises, the price rises again, as well. It doesn't force anybody to keep using fossil energy
- markvdb 2mo ago
  Price elasticity definitely is a thing, but I'd argue not in the way you see it. Have a somewhat competitive energy market and falling production prices like we have for carbon neutral energy. What do you think will happen? The market will gobble up any and all production. Look at what we currently have even with largely fossil energy. The substantial US/EU delta in energy price and energy consumption. Notice how similar the deltas are?
M95D 2mo ago
> carbon negative energy consumption There is no carbon negative energy consumtion.
- markvdb 2mo ago
  CO2 capture can be carbon negative, even if it consumes energy.
  - 2mo ago

palata 2mo ago

One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need? Nuclear is different in that regard.

OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
"renewables increase oil dependency" now that is an argument I haven't seen before.
- palata 2mo ago
  Today, pretty much everything you do increases oil dependency. What's clear is that we will have less and less oil (just because... physics: it's limited) and anyway we need to use less and less oil (because climate change). So the question is: what can we preserve once we don't have oil anymore? And my point was that renewables are piloted with electronics, and we haven't tried building and maintaining that system in a world without oil. People like to extrapolate the growth of renewables, but they tend to forget that the current growth is totally subsidised by oil: your solar panel was built and transported with oil, period. If you are serious about the "after the end of oil", you have to wonder if that system works, at scale, without oil. Don't you?

belorn 2mo ago

The politicians in Germany went to great length to promote natural gas as the green technology to be combined with renewables, a strategy they succeed in the European Parliament and still seem to follow even when the fires roams and the pipelines get blown up. There is no seasonal grid battery storage in central and northern Europe, and outside of a few hundred household sized experiment, no grid storage is being built. Looking at the platforms of political parties who oppose nuclear in a nearby country like Sweden, all of them highlight how thermal power plants are necessary to support further expansion of renewable energy, and those thermal power plants burn some form of fossil fuels. This include the Swedish green party. What EU need is a ban on fossil fuels in the energy grid. Without that natural gas there is no need to buy gas from current war zones and their participants, and it would significantly decrease emissions. As long as people who oppose nuclear also agree to stop using thermal power plants, same as with the ban on ICE cars that will come into action in a few years, then the discussion of nuclear vs renewables + battery will be a fair one with everyone playing by the same rules. Naturally in the south part of EU there is little reason to use nuclear plants. Energy demand correlates with solar production, and the need for seasonal storage is minimal. Sadly the same can not be said about central and northern Europe where wind speeds are the current dominant factor when it come to supply of energy, but seasons dictate demand. The size of storage needed for a harsh winter is magnitudes more expensive currently than reducing the need through nuclear, but that will never be tested since what countries there are actually building right now are more thermal power plants to address the issue of low supply during periods of low energy production from wind.

hamper653 2mo ago

> wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? How about taking the money spent on fossil energies and invest it in both nuclear and renewables?

OKRainbowKid 2mo ago
Why not spend it on the most cost efficient option with the best long term prospects?
- hamper653 2mo ago
  It’s not either/or. We must spend on all options.