It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.

I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?

I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar.

Solar is 15% - a lot but not yet dominated. Solar works at day and demand is also highest during the day so solar should not be an enemy of nuclear.

It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.

This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.

We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?

Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.

To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.

I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

upgrade civilization to the next level

Why?

Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?

I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams.

Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.

Getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue.

Star Trek is a socialist society.

Getting the tech without the social change first (e.g. what Musk et al are going for) gets you a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a post-scarcity utopia.

You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.

It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.

I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged.

I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.

You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.

I would not want to walk in pajamas on a sterile spacecraft and deal with new aliens every week.

Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.

Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.

The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.

My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.

It isn't about space travel. The AI boosters use it as a pretext for powering more data centers.

This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.

certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.

Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.

How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.

Conspiracy hat time: I think this is the main reason it's being pushed so hard. The US and Russia feel threatened by the rise of renewables and will do anything to get countries dependent on them again.

This isn't right, in fact one of the main reasons for building nuclear power plants is independence from politically unstable places like Russia and the Mideast.

From where does uranium come?

it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.

The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).

So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.

Nuclear fuel rods get used for 1-2 years before they need to be replaced. This is much longer than it takes to burn a shipload of liquefied natural gas, though it's much shorter than it takes for solar panels or grid scale batteries to need replacement. Both nuclear energy and renewable energy are less sensitive to supply shocks than fossil energy, even if Europe doesn't reduce the percentage of its energy needs that depend on imports.

Yes, but the parent was implying 50+ years of nothing to worry about once a plant is built.

Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.

It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.

To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.

Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment

... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)

Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,

That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.

The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.

Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.

t's that or buying gas from Russia.

Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.

And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?

Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.

The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident. Pollution from coal plants running normally causes 1 million premature deaths per year. The deepwater horizon spill was a $100 billion disaster with an environmental impact greater than any nuclear incident. The Centralia fires in PA are still burning after over 60 years and lead to a town being abandoned. Nuclear is not uniquely risky by any rational metric.

Oh it has tons of cons:

1. It's the most expensive form of electricity;

2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;

3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);

4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;

5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;

6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;

7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;

8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;

9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";

10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and

11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.

It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.

For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.

People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.

That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.

And nuclear has still sat there being too expensive and solving nothing, proving the point, but apparently this is evidence of the opposite.

My argument was that while waiting for renewables to become cheap, we could have built nuclear instead of fossil capacity and avoided a shitton of emissions. The Messmer plan being an existence proof that such a thing would have been possible.

Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.

The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.

Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.

I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?

I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.

It will reliably cost only 10x, and it theory it will roll of a production line.

The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle were explicitly marked for the modular construction as a key selling feature, which would reduce time and cost. It came out 20B over budget and 7 years late.

Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements

AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.

Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.

Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.

Look at the proposed EPR2 subsidies. It is interest free loans and €100 per MWh on top of that, while assuming large learning effects.

They are admitting Flamanville 3 like costs before they have even started building.

Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units.

Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C

Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late.

These are terrible results.

That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun.

The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.

Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too.

Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that.

France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.

You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.

New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs

France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer.

That's because French nuclear power plants are designed to be directly cooled by river water instead of using cooling towers.

The biggest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona) is cooled by evaporating the treated wastewater, in the desert.

All these extra methods of preserving water adds cost, to a technology where paid off plants are struggling. Let alone ruinously expensive new builds.

They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them.

You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.

If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Evidently they are not free.

We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.

We could have standardized the old reactors too.

Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.

Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.

Wright’s law is the only way to reduce costs. It’s a generalization of Moore’s law. The more of anything you build the cheaper it gets. Most products get 10% - 20% cheaper every time total production volume doubles. The most obvious example right now is rockets - launch costs are going down exponentially because we (SpaceX mostly) are doing so much of it we are finally getting economies of scale. SMRs will too, but only if they become popular. It’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but the economics are clear. If lots of people start using SMRs they WILL get cheap. And it’s a form factor where it’s plausible lots of people will.

after voters *twice* rejected it in national referendums

Democracy is just lovely.

Have your citizens answer to a straightforward question on a topic twice, have them reject it, both times.

And the government will still go its way.

I'm not against nuclear per se, I'm just baffled at the "democratic" process.

The referendums were in 1987 and 2011, respectively. Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.

It’s much less frequent than the usual democratic election cycle, where people are also allowed to reevaluate their positions.

Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.

But nobody asked, there hasn't been a third referendum.

The government was elected by the people - if they disagree with this decision it will have consequences in the next election.

I think the public opinion and sentiment has changed quite significantly since 2011 when the last referendum was held.

The current Italian government is massively populist so they wouldn’t do this if they thought people would disagree.

I don’t see any problem with the democratic process here - sure it’s a flawed system but I believe it’s still the best we came up with so far

I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.

I'm Italian and I'm super happy with this.

The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.

Curiously enough, some Italian town signs still have a small sub-sign reading "denuclearized municipality" (example: https://live.staticflickr.com/1421/712461235_e46a2c7db5_z.jp... )

As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?

Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?

It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"

"as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill.

US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.

It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se.

The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x.

For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.

About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.

Fair - but using new (unproven) technology imo only increases the cost/time/risk overall?

The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.

Aren’t SMRs essentially unproven? I think only Russia and China built some working facilities, and the rest is still under construction.

I mean anything could happen but seems like a long shot

They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.

In a nutshell, yes.

The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.

What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.

I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.

That doesn’t mean they won’t have a use.

Yeah, the issue isn't knowing how to build small reactors, it's whether you can do so with enough economy of scale and learning to make it cheaper than conventional nuclear.

And I personally have switched from bull to bear on that. I was rooting for NuScale but they're hitting the same thing as everyone else.

Meanwhile, battery storage has been on an insane cost reduction curve.

This is a key point to many things. Need to identify the difference between technically viable and economically viable.

It is the same argument I make for Starship. Technically, yeah it should work. The economics of of going to Mars, not so sure about that.

It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.

We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.

Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:

Some recent ones:

Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.

Because what is true for these 3 countries is not true for all countries. There are counter-examples where nuclear is cheaper.

In most countries which don't have the advantages of Australia or Finland, you do need a mix as the OP was saying

What is Italy lacking? Sun? Wind?

I didn't downvote but it's nonsense, nobody can sustain a winter with batteries and other storage.

I only checked the first paper and it doesn't seem talk about what would happen if a 3 weeks bad wind event would happen in winter, and a rough look at the figures makes me think it just wouldn't work at all. I didn't check the other papers.

And the proof is in the pudding anyways, if it's that cheap and feasible to do, well let's see who's doing it.

It is Simon Michaux that throws out the figure that you need 2TWH of storage to make it through he worse of Winter.

https://www.ecoshock.org/2024/02/why-renewables-cannot-power...

I think he points to a valid point but completely over plays his hand. Everyone that has argued these kinds of points have brought valid arguments but have completely under estimated the pace of change.

Do keep in mind that Michaux is a fan of being a little contrarian. He likes the attention it being to him.

He might be right, and him pointing to the issues may actually be something that helps us avoid these issues. Generally, knowing about a problem is a much better position than being slammed by something you didn't anticipate.

I tend to think long term we are going to a much lower energy world, that we made the mistake of building a world and our expectations to the paradigm of fossil fuels. But I also think that we are not going back to the stone age and that renewables will do better than the pessimists. Good chance we will hit a reasonable mid-ground even if it means living standards change, possibly a smaller, slower but more intentional world. It may be nice even if it means you can no longer get a slab of Coke for an hours wage.

I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power.

And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).

Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.

My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.

I love renewables, especially solar with batteries, but I definitely see the tail risks of not having some amount of independent base load, for which nuclear seems like the best fit. The tail risk could materialize from different sources; could be an asteroid, nuclear war, weird weather patterns etc. nuclear would chug along in most of these conditions. So if I would be a policy maker or decision maker, I would definitely invest in nuclear and maintain an industry regardless of the initial cost. I would try to make it as cheap as possible.

This is having decided that we must waste money and resources on new nuclear, and trying to rationalize it.

We fix tail risks when we encounter them. Not by envisioning your pet ones to make your solution fit.

Until one day a volcano wakes up and decides no one can have sunlight for a few months.

Edit to add: heh, the CSIRO eh? That bastion of truth.

Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues? Or the majority of the Eastern European due too hot or low rivers? Or half the Swedish fleet multiple times the last couple of years?

Please do tell what is wrong with the CSIRO GenCost.

There are scenarios where either can fail, that’s why it’s smart to have a multi pronged energy strategy. Maintain strong industries for being able to do both renewables and nuclear in house so you can hedge the tail risks of either of them. Not everything needs to have the most economically efficient model. As we’ve seen with the supply chain problems they happened during Covid, some things are more important than absolute cost.

Valcoe paper is written by the founder of antinuclear movement in Denmark(which led at ti becoming one of the highest coal burners), has wild assumptions about hydrogen getting basically free for firming

Australia's weather is different from what we got in Europe. And let's not pretend many of aemos estimations are already obsolete due to increased costs of transmission and hydro storage that are huilt.

Dk still has worse emissions vs france/sweden, just like SA

If you don't like nuclear, you'll have gas peakers, like Germany

Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

Thanks for sharing those links, very interesting.

I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.

Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh

Two words: base load

And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)

base load is a myth

If it's actually inefficient, there's no need to have laws against it.

we had a referendum in 2011

Right after Fukushima

Where in Italy would you put reactors?

https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-i...

Sardinia?

I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.

I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.

That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.

China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…

…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.

People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder.

If not, reading a list of this helps:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...

But sure, oil leaks can be bad as well. Solar leaks on the other hand seem bearable.

I am someone who knows, hence my disgust. Time to learn about the radioactivity of coal fly ash and how carefully that’s managed.

I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did. Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.

Did I imply anywhere anyhow that I am a fan of coal?

I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong.

Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).

Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories.

We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.

China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market.

They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.

You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.

Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments.

Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.

China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).

They’ve been building out every form of power generation they can. Nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. It’s all skyrocketing.

The talking point that they’re going green doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

That link is out of date. China's coal share fell under 50% this year (your link says 58%), and their CO2 emissions dropped 1% the first half of 2026.

So yes, it can be reasonably claimed that China is greening. "greening", not "green" -- 49.7% coal is still a lot of CO2.

https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/china-pushes-coal-...

Maybe emissions fell because industrial activity fell instead? Maybe oil and gas have been used less because the cost has risen. Maybe that explains coal as well depending on how it is used. I’m speculating coal might be used in the production of steel - what if that product is highly tariffed in the US and EU so China had to cut back?

China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal. If it was they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.

China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal

Why does the "why" matter? Tons of carbon are tons of carbon, right? That's what people say when you tell them about per-capita emissions.

they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.

You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled.

What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.

To add to this, China’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have been flat or declining for a couple of years now: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

That's 50% of electricity, but not 50% of energy. Coal still provides ~80% of energy IIRC (roughly 10% is carbon-free and growing faster than the US). China burns so, so much coal, while much of the world has shifted to natural gas, which has much less carbon per energy.

Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?

Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.

Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.

Many countries do not have the raw materials to build solar, wind turbines, and batteries so it doesn't solve the sovereignty issue.

Once you have a solar panel you can't be cut off from using it. It's not like oil where you need regular deliveries forever.

Sure, but when your existing ones break or you need more you can have issues.

when your existing ones break

They last 25 years. Enough time to spin up domestic manufacturing if you're really paranoid.

or you need more

Lots of countries manufacture them today.

That's like saying oil-producing countries aren't sovereign unless they also manufacture oil drills and pumps and pipes and tanks.

The sun is an oil well. Panels are drills or pumps. Batteries are oil tanks.

Not having oil drill and oil tank factories in your country isn't a critical energy sovereignty issue.

They don't need to make things themselves, they just need to have the capability to make it themselves to be sovereign.

If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil? If you want sovereignty then it is critical to have the ability to make drills, tankers, etc in your country if you rely on oil.

This is no different than solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc when it comes to renewables. If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go. If you do, then you need to be able to handle everything yourself otherwise you are always going to be reliant on other countries.

If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil?

Your existing drills and pumps might work long enough for you to stand up a domestic drill manufacturing industry.

Same for solar, except that panels and batteries operate for way longer than drills and pumps.

If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go

If no one is sovereign then sovereignty is meaningless. Who cares.

An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors

I am not talking about manufacturing but the resources necessary to build them.

But they have the resources to build nuke plants?

I don’t understand the point

And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.

I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.

In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.

There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.

I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.

I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries

I actually do since I'm Italian lol

Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant

This was at the Ospedale San Carlo di Nancy in Rome.

I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.

I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.

So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.

In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance

The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?

A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me.

Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff's incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.

My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.

Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.

The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?

My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.

And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.

The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to the cost of living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.

I’d rather be in the hole financially

You don't have the slightest clue what it means to be poor and in a financial hole. Like, it's impossible to explain to you.

What exactly does it mean for a powerplan in china or russia to be profitable?

Profit is not everything.

That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.

Spot on. That, plus... peak oil.

Peak oil was supposed to have happened decades ago but current projections put it well past 2050. Demand for oil is going to fall due to electrification long before we run out of sufficient oil production capacity.

It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.

This is wrong. The peak of conventional oil is documented around 2007. Since then, Europe's economy has been slowing down (if you look at physical indicators like how much is transported by trucks or what surface is being built each year, not artificial ones like the GDP).

Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).

But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.

Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.

Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia

FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)

Why? Isn’t it in the national interest of a government to preferentially use foreign sources of uranium to preserve domestic sources?

there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision

Mining uranium in Spain would destroy environment and involve legal slavery?

canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too

has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it

Wrong uranium you can easily stock for 10years inadvance

That... doesn't seem true?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.

Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.

Yes, thank you. Eroi ist the only thing which matters from a hard physics stand point.

That’s just not true.

An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.

30 years is generally the guarantee for some minimum output so it's the floor too... could still be outputting 60-70% of original spec for 50 years

It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.

Sure labor amount is strongly correlated with EROI

Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!

There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.

Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."

Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.

Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...

The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.

Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.

And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.

It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.

Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.

Those arguments typically assume Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage, which is a completely clown argument.

He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.

None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.

If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.

But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.

The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.

[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...

This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever

Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.

This must at least partly be region-dependent right?

In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).

From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?

Most of Finnish wind capacity was built without subsidies. The demand was saturated at ~25% of total generation, after which the market started building solar. Wind power is more cost-effective at these latitudes, but solar generation is currently more valuable, as it correlates less with existing renewables.

That only makes sense if you're burning hydrocarbons to heat your homes; about 1/3 of total energy use is space heating. Shifting to heat pumps and more wind before wasting money on solar panels at high latitudes is better ROI on energy independence and carbon reduction.

Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage?

Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.

SA is at 168 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly

France is at 32 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.

So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.

SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.

It is really ideal for solar.

But the emissions are still much higher than France.

Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.

But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.

Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...

This is despite increasing solar.

Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).

The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.

The reliability of french electricity

Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.

Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.

So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens. And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.

Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.

That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable

There were also issues recently where low river water levels forced reactors to reduce output and even shut down.