We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad) while doubling down on Russian gas dependency (because trade = peace). Clearly this has gone poorly and it will take Europe a decade to strengthen its energy sovereignty again.
There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc. But killing renewable projects because, uh, farming or whatever?, particularly at a time when the demand for energy is growing faster than ever, seems short sighted at best.
> There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc.
You seem to rely on quite outdated information. Renewables are the cheapest source of energy in human history. The recent explosive growth is fueled by pure economics rather than feelgood.
The same thing is happening with storage with the prices plummeting. With the recent auctions landing at $50-60/MWh.
In many regions unsubsidized renewables + storage are now the cheapest source of energy, undercutting coal and gas. Nuclear power does not even enter the picture due to the absolutely insane costs involved.
I would nothing more than to enjoy those cheap prices. Here in Sweden (and EU in general), while energy prices has drop in response to renewables, grid fees and energy taxes has increased more than to cover any savings. Grid fees are now the wast majority off the bill, which pays for grid stability and transmissions that is required to operate a much more variable energy production. grid stability and transmissions are primarily a government responsibility, and when cost goes up they forward that costs as grid fees and taxes.
To put some numbers down, a quertly bill recent had $1400 usd as grid fees, while the energy consumption came down to $300. Those numbers could be specific to that house, that energy company, but it is a story echoed by more and more people in this region. The consumption cost could be $0/MWh, and the grid fees alone would still be way more expensive compared to the full bill just a couple of years ago.
In Sweden we have recently seen an explosion on costs for ancillary services as new markets has been added which needs to be built out. But they have lowered in cost after a year or two. The same will happen for the most recent markets.
Then Sweden has a problem with low population density, large grid and high wages which makes labor intensive infrastructure like the grid cost more.
We can hope/pray/predict that prices will go down in a year or two. I have yet to see any politician or providers give that promise. The government have approved new grid stability power plants (based on natural gas), and those have both investment costs and operational costs that the government want consumers to pay for in the next decade/s. In addition, the hydro power plants that already exist and was built during the 20th century need to either be refitted or removed in order to comply with EU environmental standards (and prevent mass extinction of several endangered species). That will also increase costs for grid stability for the next several decades. On top there are plans for new transmission to even out the difference between the north and south part of the country, and those are predicted to take a decade or so to build. They are not short term projects with short term price hikes.
Look at the market dynamics and volumes. It is like everyone rushing in with home based storage for the ancillary markets being promised a ROI within months.
That lasted... months...
What is your suggestion? Nuclear power does not solve it, and won't be online until the 2040s either way.
There are no easy solutions or free lunch, only true costs. Nuclear has its benefits and drawbacks (most which don't need to be repeated). Hydro power is a great natural resource, except for that extinction aspect and flooding risks. Solar and wind is great for use cases where that production variation matches the consumption and human behavior. Natural gas and other fossil fuels should just not be used in the grid, and the arguments in favor of continued use are simply wishful thinking or malicious.
What is simple is that the energy bill is going up in a speed that is much faster than inflation, while the cost of production of energy is going down. As such, the production cost of energy is a poor indicator for the price that users of energy is paying. If we want cheap energy than what we need to care about is the true cost of energy delivering, since that is what the energy bill will reflect. That include the cost of production, the time and place of production, the cost of maintaining grid stability, transportation, and market inefficiencies.
Home storage works, but gatekeeps reliable power to the relatively wealthy. You need days of it at minimum for any reasonable long term plan. Seasonal storage is the problem, nightly storage is pointless to discuss.
Just dumping external costs onto the grid as a whole is not where I want to see society going - said as someone who could easily fill an entire shed full of whole home battery storage.
A reliable and cheap power grid is so much taken for granted in developed areas of the world it astounds me. Dismantling it in favor of everyone being their own little power generation and storage island is just going to continue to create have and have nots.
Of course no one really seems to bring forth the costs to industry when they talk about this stuff. Cheap power inputs are the wealth of a society. You don’t get to be rich without it. Asking every factory to co-locate generation to their metal stamping fab or whatever is ridiculous.
At this point I think many places have gone so many decades putting their head into the sand and making this an ideology that there is actually no solution. I fully expect to see wide scale rolling blackouts in many developed economies in the next 20 years.
When I see some actual numbers that are not just financial engineering or parasitism I will start to change my views on the subject. It’s fraud and grifters all the way down the stack.
Renewables really aren't that cheap unless you view them entirely in isolation. Sun doesn't shine all night and wind doesn't blow continuously, it needs to be viewed with storage to represent a complete picture. Rooftop solar is more expensive than nuclear due to the zero economies of scale, residential storage is staggeringly expensive, and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.
Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidized so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China. Generally recycling costs aren't considered and at least in the west there's no plan to recycle at least the fiberglass in turbine blades, leaving them to be buried.
I'm all for renewables but the way they're positioned is unrealistic.
Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it. Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
If we're being pedantic, nuclear is renewable too thanks to seawater extraction. There's a practically unlimited amount of uranium in the ocean and the rock underneath it.
Rooftop PV in the US now costs around $3/watt including BOS (balance of system) and labor. This means an average 6kW home installation is less than $20k -- without storage. (This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.)
Yes home storage adds more money but a grid-tied PV installation without batteries is very useful in many parts of the country: Using the grid as your "battery" at night, a $20k investment can make your net electricity cost zero or even negative.
A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
$20,000 for a 6kW system with a 15-20% capacity factor that lasts 20 years means you're going to generate a total of 157,000kWh. That's 12.7c/kWh. Before factoring in anything that might happen to it, including damage, cleaning, replacing your inverter. That is not cheap electricity -- the LCOE of nuclear is 9-15c/kWh. That's within spitting distance of Vogtle before you add storage.
Sure the panels may last 30 years, so you can juice the numbers and maybe you live in the middle of Nevada so you can get the upper end of the capacity factor but I mean, my estimate assumes nothing happens to those panels before the year 2055. My estimate also doesn't include financing costs for your car-sized purchase or any changes to your insurance premiums.
If you add a PowerWall for $15,000 that lasts 10-15 years, that doubles the cost despite increasing the capacity factor of the system, once again assuming you have zero issues with it until 2040.
> A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
I'd do it myself and I'd be happy too, because it's neat, but that doesn't mean I'm getting a good deal or that residential solar is a cheap way to get electricity.
I suspect the people who are happy with their financial decision don't understand the difference between opex and capex, and aren't factoring in the opportunity cost of their $20-35,000 investment. If you invest $20,000 in bonds at 5% for 20 years you have $53,000 -- or in the S&P 500 at 9% you have $112,000. Historically electricity prices have grown closer to 2% per year.
Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The LCOE for consumer solar is between $81 and $217 per MWh. This is MUCH more expensive than grid based solar.
>...This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.
The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
>...A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone a lot further if spent on other solar projects) - don't you think that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels? This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run.
Thanks for the info. I thought maybe they were combining consumer rooftop with them, but didn't take the time to double-check. From the June 2024 report, the consumer rooftop cost range was $122 - $284. The commercial and industrial was $54 to $191. If inflation has caused the Community & C&I to increase that much, it is likely the consumer cost has also noticeably increased unfortunately.
It used to be that panel cost was the most important factor in PV system cost. Now the panels are nearly free and everything else determines the system cost.
> ...and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.
That's an awkward way to try to frame "solar is cheaper than nuclear" as a negative for solar power. Why should anyone care when solar became cheaper than nuclear? If you're looking at different alternatives in the year 2025, the relevant fact is which is cheaper now. All the more so since the cost for solar power, even counting the cost of storage, has been dramatically decreasing over time so the advantage is likely to be even better in the future.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US...
I honestly like the idea of nuclear power, but it seems goofy to do cost comparisons between solar and wind power being deployed right now and some hypothetical version of nuclear power we don't and might never have. I imagine nuclear power probably could be cheaper if we changed everything about how we designed, built, and maintained nuclear plants.
I also imagine that level of investment and tolerance for policy change with other power generation sources could produce equally significant cost decreases. China's growing lead in the renewable power supply chain, material recycling, rare earth materials, etc, are all examples of challenges with renewable power than can probably be solved with time and money. Shouldn't our utopian future version of nuclear power be compared against a future where we make similar investments in changing how we approach renewable power to solve all those problems?
Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting? What problem are you solving? The final bit of emergency reserves?
> Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidizes so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China.
This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
If the fossil fuel supply chain is disrupted we get an energy crisis within weeks.
What happens if the renewable supply chain is disrupted?
Well.... all existing installations keeps working for decades and in the meantime we need to figure out an alternative. After a couple of years our emergency reserves would start to work harder due to old installations aging out but the impact would be near zero.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it, Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
Which is of course why all western reactors are struggling with cost. You do know that modular reactors has been a talking point for the nuclear industry since the 1950s? That is what the industry generally bounces to when large scale projects balloon in cost. They just never deliver.
> Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting?
The only storage that matters at scale is pumped hydro, and the cost for that is not "plummeting" at all because it's built out. Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar. The gap must be made up by either peaker natgas plants (which are costly, non-renewable and emit some carbon dioxide) or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
> Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar.
I love how the talking point has switched from "storage can't even cover an hour" a couple of years ago to now apparently having trouble with "multiple weeks". How quickly reality shifts.
When we're talking about emergency reserves, because that is what you are trying to paint as the end of the world, then who the fuck cares where it comes from?
Having that problem means that close to 99% of our entire energy system is renewable. The final piece is trivial to solve with synfuels, biofuels, hydrogen or whatever when it is deemed necessary.
In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. is enough to run the entire grid without any other energy source for 16 days.
That is trivially repurposed as our car fleet is switched to BEVs.
Or just use whatever aviation and the shipping industry settles on as they decarbonize.
> or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
This tells me you don't have the slightest clue how the grid works and are reasoning backwards from attempting to justify a trillion dollar handout to the nuclear industry.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
> In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc.
Just so we're clear ethanol produced from corn is almost the same carbon intensity as the gasoline, and it's worse for the climate when you factor in the land use changes. [1] The whole program was just a giveaway to corn farmers from the Dubyah administration. Even the rosiest image painted by the renewables industry association says it's 26% less carbon intensive (but they neglect land use). Ethanol is basically fossil fuel with extra steps.
Was the carbon emitted from burning this ethanol sequestered in the ground or was it already in the air and is just cycling the same amount of carbon involved the atmosphere?
You can look at the linked study, it's a complicated topic but this is net carbon add. It's a combination of the fossil fuel based fertilizers, tractor fuel, moving the corn around, processing the corn into starch, fermenting the starch and moving the end product to blending sites. It also includes carbon released due to changes in land use.
> Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity
With nuclear power, there's no such thing as 'too much'. It's economically optimal to produce flat out ("baseload") because continued production really is "too cheap to meter", as the saying goes. The cost is pretty much all in the plant itself, which is why a lot of research into next-gen nuclear is about building smaller and cheaper plants.
> But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed
Yes? That's how a "baseload" source works. And we should not pretend that intermittent renewable sources aren't going to have the exact same issue, only to a far greater extent (especially as they scale out to "99%" of the system). You can address this by not putting all your eggs in the intermittent basket.
So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down?
The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.
You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.
Here's a history refresher:
The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?
The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.
If you've decided to build a nuclear plant already (and there are plenty of reasons for such a choice - for one thing, it adds diversity to the mix when combined with intermittent renewables) that energy is no longer "horrifically expensive", it's already paid for. If you're worried about "producing too much" (which could happen with either nuclear or renewables), putting it in storage makes sense.
Again, you don't seem to comprehend how the grid works.
Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid. Both renewable power and nuclear power competes for the most inflexible portion of the grid. A fight renewables win hands down and nuclear power is forced to throttle down.
What happens when nuclear power is forced to throttle down? It becomes more expensive due to being nearly 100% CAPEX.
Like I said, Vogtle costs 20 cents/kWh running at full tilt. Somewhere at 40 cents/kWh running half the time.
Do you notice how many instances last week renewables supplied 100% of the grid load? Mind that this is late winter in Australia.
What do you do with your nuclear plant all those hours? Shut it down? Bid negative to make renewables shut down?
In Australia old traditional base load coal plants are forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. That is the reality today. In South Australia coal plants were phased out in 2016.
> Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid.
A heavily renewable grid is in trouble whenever the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. A heavily nuclear grid is in trouble whenever demand happens to exceed the limited amount of baseload it can provide. These events tend to be uncorrelated, so one can expect that adding some nuclear to a heavily renewable grid (and vice versa) will save a lot on costly "grid stabilization" services from peaker plants and/or grid-level storage.
A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense. But its "baseload" profile seems to provide an attractive bundle of bulk supply plus some amount of stabilization compared to a "99%" intermittent renewable mix. Why shouldn't we try to reduce the high variable costs of storage and peaker plants to whatever extent turns out to be feasible?
Renewables are far better at throttling than nuclear or any other technology.
It's maybe the most consistently misinterpreted fact in the renewables debate.
I put this down to years of headlines about negative prices "caused by" solar, and when you go and look at the stats, there's always fossil plants running for contractual or operational reasons.
But also to a bizarre fear of negative numbers.
Running nuclear full out and using low or even negative prices when required to incentivize people to shift demand to match supply is a far saner, cheaper, cleaner way to run a grid, yet we have people celebrating the opposite.
You of course have not heard about storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
> These events tend to be uncorrelated,
Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
It does not seem like you did dare to look at the South Australian example. Again:
How will you run your nuclear plant in a grid that daily is ran to 100% by renewables?
> A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense.
Now you are making up something because you can't accept that nuclear power does not solve the problem at hand.
There you have a coal plant shutting down daily with all the thermal stresses and cycles coupled with that because otherwise they would have to bid negative.
In Europe we see nuclear plants voluntarily time and time again withdrawing from the grids due to sustained low prices.
You try to shift words and meanings to step around the question of who pays. But all you do is force people to spend 20 cents/kWh, excluding transmission costs, on horrifically expensive nuclear power.
You reason like an engineer trying to design an imaginary perfect system not seeing the forest for the trees, or caring the slightest about the cost to the end user.
That can be a fun thought exercise, but reality will laugh you out of the room.
> storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
How is storage "exploding globally" when the bulk of long-term grid storage is still provided by pumped hydro, a technology that's built out? Short-term high-flow storage can be interesting in combination with any inflexible source (either nuclear or intermittent renewables - for one thing, it can solve the "plant has to shut down and restart every day" point you mention) but is only a small part of the problem.
> Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
The point is that the correlation may be imperfect enough that nuclear can meaningfully contribute to addressing that problem, whereas extending intermittent renewables to "99%" of the grid cannot. (To be sure, there's also some limited upside from diversifying the geography of renewable sources, but that doesn't extend to anywhere near "99%".) If a shortfall remains, it can be made up by some combination of rarely-operated peaker plants with cheaper CAPEX, plus some demand response/load shedding, especially from industry.
Your link says "battery storage and pumped hydro will have complimentary roles to play - batteries focusing on the flexibility and speed and ability to provide system services, and pumped hydro on dealing with longer storage requirements, such as extended periods of low wind and solar output." It acknowledges that battery electric storage is short-term only, meant to smooth out daily peaks.
At current costs batteries are best suited for daily cycling. A few years ago batteries were best suited for multiple cycles per day on the ancillary markets.
Given the recent auctions in China we are starting to see batteries where a cycle every second or third day is enough.
It is essentially optimistic technobabble for the technology losing out about a potential issue coming in 10-15 years as we decarbonize.
Please do explain why we should lock in a solution for that today instead of solving it with the technology at hand when we get there.
The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even.
If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth.
Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible.
I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency.
The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out.
The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry.
We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit.
As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions.
Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.
> This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
> Or you know, just diversify renewable supply chains?
That's happening about as fast as seawater extraction. There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the environmental price.
Regardless fuel costs for nuclear plants are roughly zero, about $0.0015/kWh, and there is more than enough uranium on land. And of course reprocessing spent fuel is a totally viable solution; most of France's uranium is closed loop. The entirety of the cost is in building and financing, which can be solved with policy changes.
> I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
If you're comparing solar + wind to not(solar + wind), then either you're mainly comparing to fossil fuels, or discussing a world that doesn't exist.
Sure, you like nuclear. You can say "oh, well, if we snap our fingers and magically have the world be different than it is, then nuclear would outperform solar".
Magic doesn't exist, and if you take two people in any country and task them with adding 5GW of reliable generation, one person with nuclear and the other with solar + battery, solar + battery will achieve that goal faster and cheaper every single time, in every country on earth.
> I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
Nuclear power is irrelevant in our energy systems today. The only comparison to make is fossil fuels and with that renewables give us major advantages.
For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry. The west quickly diversified from their fossil fuels, but we have not been able to do the same with nuclear energy.
But I don't see you complaining about supply chain issues regarding how Russia absolutely dominates the nuclear energy sector?
> There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the price.
So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty? And don't start talking about all the other stuff we need to build said supply chain and nuclear power plants.
But it is fine when nuclear power does it right?
And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
What are you even attempting to do here? Just muddying the waters because nuclear power evidently does not deliver and you can't bring yourself to accept it?
That person you are arguing with is not arguing with you in good faith. They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach. The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling, and they could not come up with a better idea if things go bad, I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
> They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach.
I support renewables. I think it's important we understand the whole picture, and think we should construct them even if they're expensive and imperfect. However people seem to think that they're basically free and completely harmless to the environment while neither is true.
> The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling.
Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production. The renewables industry has historically and also continues to receives significant subsidies. So does the fossil fuel industry.
> I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem. Yes, you can put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
That is why we are seeing massive 40 year PPA agreements, the state taking the entire financial- and project risk and similar steps to force the paltry few proposed nuclear projects over the final investment decision line?
Modern nuclear power is absolutely insanely subsidized.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
Not true. Basically every nuclear plant ever built has been, if not directly financed by government, backed a guarantee to purchase every MWh produced at a fixed (or index linked to inflation) price. Hinkley Point C - under construction in the UK - are guaranteed £92.50 per MWh produced (in 2012 prices index linked to inflation - so already this has risen to £133.81/MWh and the project is still years from operation). This guarantee lasts 35 years once the plant becomes operational. For comparison, current wholesale prices in the UK are roughly half this.
As a species collective we understand the big picture.
> Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem.
Sure to you because you apparently never had that job.
It's trivial to see you are just reciting from memory and not experience. Waste is a problem in that it is generated and must be handled, transported, stored safely. Perhaps you mean it's not a long term problem once stored?
Good job making it clear you don't understand the problem. Thankfully others do. Please continue to rant online out of the way such that you stay out of the way.
> Nuclear power is irrelevant in our energy systems today.
I dunno, it's been producing 20% of US power for decades. Same as renewables. Seems relevant.
> For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry.
12% come from Russia. [1]
> So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
I feel like environmental implications are relevant to discuss, and I think the topic is relevant.
> You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty?
Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. They have a 96% recovery rate. [2]
> And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
It didn't matter in my original post either which is why it's under "if we're being pedantic."
Like I said, irrelevant compared to the fossil fuel supply chain supplying 80%.
> 12% come from Russia. [1]
Of course ignoring the intermediary steps in the supply chain which Russia controls ~50% of. But Kazakh uranium being processed in Russia is Kazakh!
And this of course ignores that my main point was that Russia is the largest player in the global nuclear technological sector.
Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
> Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. [2]
And now we again "solve" nuclear power by saying that reprocessing works. Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Just make nuclear power even more horrifically expensive! No problem!
> Which falls to 7.6% when counting the useful energy and not staring yourself blind on the electricity grid.
Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
> Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
> Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Are you able to quantify this are compared to renewables or are we just assuming? Remember in terms of costs, it's basically entirely construction -- fuel costs almost nothing. So even if reprocessing is relatively expensive, adding cost there won't really change nuclear energy prices.
> Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
Renewables are relevant given their trajectory and that they make up ~90% of new installations due to being the by far best option today.
Grid infrastructure has a lifespan of a couple decades. We are seeing a complete disruption of the grid, but it will take a couple of decades for everything to shake out as the existing fleet of fossil and nuclear plants ages out.
> France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing. But relying on Russia for your energy supply chain is fine as long as it is nuclear power?
> Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing.
They do the reprocessing at the Orano La Hague site on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. They also historically reprocessed for Germany there and continue to reprocess for Japan. You can look these things up before you respond, you know. [1]
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid the flamewar style in the future? And especially please avoid personal attacks? We'd appreciate it.
You truly are out of your depth here. France is considering building a site to reprocess uranium for us in commercial reactors since the only plant available, which they have been using for decades, is in Russia.
> The French government is "seriously" examining plans to build a site on French territory to convert and enrich reprocessed uranium. At present, Russia is the only country in the world that can recycle uranium for use in nuclear power plants.
> ...
> Specifically, to convert its reprocessed uranium (URT), France has no other option but to perform this stage in Russia, the only country with a conversion plant for URT through its public operator Rosatom. The subsequent enrichment stage could be carried out in Russia or the Netherlands.
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. The other user did it as well, but I have the impression that your violations were somewhat worse.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid the flamewar style in the future? And especially please avoid personal attacks? We'd appreciate it.
> That means it’s fully within China’s purchasing power parity advantage sphere, where everything costs 40% less than in the west. That means zero tariffs.
Basically coal is less profitable and more expensive in places that have always been coal counties. The only thing to do in these areas is mine coal, so the concern is that entire regions will be rendered worthless if coal collapses.
Which means local residents cannot sell their homes without taking significant losses, and they probably lose their jobs in coal, which manifests into a poverty trap for the entire town.
And there are hundreds of these towns all through Appalachia.
So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.
Anybody who didn’t see this coming hasn’t been paying attention. There’s been plenty of time to move, retrain, whatever. The government has probably failed these people in one way or another, but these tend to be areas the say they value self-sufficiency and minimal government interference , so…
There are retrains programs dotted all over WV and Appalachia. They cover everything from construction and other trades to IT and more office-focused jobs.
I don't believe in retraining, but tons of immigrants move for better opportunities with very little savings. It's difficult and unfortunate, but it's necessary
From their perspective, this should require no effort; it is forcing them to change which requires effort.
Of course I want the use of coal to stop. But you need to reckon with these kinds of human factors if you want to effect change peacefully.
This is where Clinton failed. Having a documented plan to spend billions (somewhere on the order of 10 years of salary per miner, from numbers I could glean elsewhere in this discussion) doesn't make an impression when you have well-documented sound bites claiming that you intend to put them "out of business".
Why not? It'll probably build character. Also, it's happened all the time? People have been doing it for all of America's history. Tons of famous media is about people moving to the city for a better life.
> To do what, in this area, with what existing infrastructure?
Right! It's a real chicken and egg scenario. It would seem to me that without this infrastructure, it would be very hard to retrain and build new industries. It would really benefit the people of these regions to vote for people who, as a matter of policy, would bring training and infrastructure to them. Unfortunately, the people who most benefit from such policies vote against them [1], so the resources available are insufficient. So the conversation is about poverty reduction through social programs to support people working in a dying industry, rather than growing new industries. The solution, might be to vote for people proposing such resources, which I know is a radical idea, but it's at least something new to try.
They're also in geographically low population areas so counting them and the people employeed in their towns they have a significant sway on some states and the Senate skews things towards low population states through it's inequitable representation AND the outsized power Senate rules give individual Senators.
Plus it's made a few people EXTREMELY rich so they've made their opinions and interests everyone elses problem too.
Every once in a while someone in the Netherlands argues for the district system and they are immediately shut down with "America".
One man one vote. And yes the regions that contribute more to the economy are a priority. They fund everything including the military without which we'd still be a part of Spain.
Yeah I get the idea originally, you had to appease the slave and smaller states to get them to join the plan originally at all, but there's a very, very good reason wherever the US has had the chance to design a new government we have never saddled them with our system. I don't think there's a reasonable hope that it'll get reformed in a clean way though.
If people really cared about coal miners then they could be offered a $1 million redundancy package. It would amount to a tiny fraction of government spending and I'm pretty sure it would be welcomed.
Probably though, like the buses, there's an order of magnitude more work done on the "back end". The machines, logistics, etc etc and everything else that depends on the industry. In the bus drivers example, it could be all the people in NYC who need to take a bus to get to work and would be affected by the sudden disappearance of buses. So it is with many industries.
Coal counties are insignificant. Nobody is winning national elections by appealing to them.
The actual motive is to appeal to people who have made coal part of their identity. These are people who have never been anywhere near a coal mine, but have internalized coal as Important and American, and as a way to stick it to those stupid environmentalists.
Yeah. Think this was epitomised by
the DoE tweeting pictures of coal to own the libs. Or as one wag put it the right in 2005: "we shouldn't overregulate energy markets"; the right in 2025: "I'm actually attracted to coal"
In Trump's case you can throw in a personal obsession with hating wind power because you can see it from one of his golf courses.
Generally pathetic that people are trying to retcon this reflexive lib-owning vice-signalling from incredibly stupid people as actual industrial policy.
I think it’s hard for people who aren’t steeped in that world to understand it, because it sounds so ridiculous. The idea of loving pro-coal policies because it upsets environmentalists is hard to accept. It’s natural to think it must really be about economic realities, people's livelihoods, etc.
I have the questionable advantage of having listened to Rush Limbaugh almost every day in the 90s, reading lots of National Review, and taking in various other conservative media. I know the basis for these things, straight from the people pushing them. None of what’s happening is a surprise to me.
The thing is, if you’re burning fossil fuels to generate power there’s not much reason to prefer coal over natural gas. The latter is cheaper and cleaner and once pipelines are in place, you don’t need to truck it around.
Coal is dead and it’s not coming back. Areas in which it served as the pillar of the economy need to figure something else out. I say this as someone hailing from one such area.
Speaking frankly, the way politicians keep selling the fantasy of it making a comeback is cruel.
> Areas in which it served as the pillar of the economy need to figure something else out. I say this as someone hailing from one such area.
Old steel towns had to do this, coal country might look to them for a model on how to leave a dying industry behind. But seeing how they vote, they might not like the answer for what it takes to survive:
Pittsburgh PA - famous former steel town, faced very uncertain economic future after the mills closed, now a booming metropolis with top industry leaders in education, healthcare, sports, finance. What did it take? A dedication to multiculturalism and diversity. Pittsburgh would have died without embracing the global economy and attracting doctors, professors, students, entertainers, and athletes from all over the world to visit, live, and grow a family.
Cleveland OH - once one of America's great manufacturing hubs, powered by steel mills, car parts, and shipping along Lake Erie. When industry collapsed, Cleveland faced deep decline, job losses, shrinking population, even bankruptcy in the 1970s. But today it's finding new strength as a center of healthcare, research, and culture.
Then you look at places like Youngstown OH. Unlike Pittsburgh or Cleveland, Youngstown struggled to reinvent itself. Population plummeted, tax bases collapsed, and poverty took hold. The city became a symbol of the Rust Belt's hardest struggles. What held it back? Overreliance on steel, limited diversification, and waves of outmigration left too few resources to rebuild. What are they doing today to fix things? Healthcare and education. Should have started a lot sooner.
One more example is Bethlehem PA, another former steel town that now has top industries in healthcare, education, and also some manufacturing.
So that's the model. If you're a dying town with an industry that's shrivveling up due to changing economic conditions, the model to survive is to quickly pivot to healthcare, education, and entertainment, and to invite a bunch of outsiders into your community with open arms.
And that is the main problem these dying coal regions have, because looking at how they vote, embracing healthcare, education, entertainment, and diversity is the last thing they want to do. You look at what the people who they voted for are doing with their power, they're attacking healthcare, attacking education, and attacking diversity sometimes violently, but always unrelentingly. So the Pittsburgh model is off the table, and they'll have to find another way from the abyss of failed post-industrial policy.
> And that is the main problem these dying coal regions have, because looking at how they vote, embracing healthcare, education, and diversity is the last thing they want to do. You look at what the people who they voted for are doing with their power its attacking healthcare, attacking education, and attacking diversity sometimes violently, but always unrelentingly. So the Pittsburgh model is off the table, and they'll have to find another way from the abyss.
Spot on, from what I’ve seen. Just keep doubling down on what hasn’t worked in hopes that one day it’ll magically manifest a Disney ending and the good old days will return.
What did it take? A dedication to multiculturalism and diversity. Pittsburgh would have died without embracing the global economy and attracting doctors, professors, students, entertainers, and athletes from all over the world to visit, live, and grow a family.
Just cater to the rich folks! That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure. Rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich. Building prosperity is a difficult ordeal that takes time, sacrifice, a lot of money, and a culture of safety and community.
Sure if you want increase your tax base, step one is to be attractive to people with money.
But healthcare, education, and entertainment are not exclusive to rich people, they're industries that everyone enjoys and can take part in. The doctors, actors, professors, students, athletes, researchers, who come from around the world to live and work in Pittsburgh are not "the rich". They have money, but they're still just regular people.
For example the students who come to Pittsburgh for an education are not wealthy, but they are flush with cash from the government and lenders. They are attracted to Pittsburgh not because it's a good place for the rich, but because it's a good place for students.
Incidentally, good places for students are also good places for the rich. So I agree, rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich.
> That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure.
Did you miss the part where Pittsburgh is thriving? Cleveland is doing okay. Bethlehem is booming. Youngstown... not great but moving in a good direction.
> the real motive for cancelling renewables is to appeal to coal counties in the USA
Wyoming here. Coal country. Everyone thinks this is dumb. Including the folks in Campbell county, our top-producing coal region that has been trying to build a wind farm [1].
Trump’s social media fans in Florida and Texas like this because it feels like owning the libs. (To the extent there may be pecuniary interest, it would be in power producers. Like housing, stopping new power raises prices and profits incumbents.)
Also, that Reddit thread is about coking coal. Not the thermal coal power plants burn. It’s about American steel production shutting down in the face of our trade war. Not this new economic miracle these idiots have spun up.
>So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.
I heard that before the first Trump administration, there was bipartisan support in Congress for phasing out the use coal in the US, so it seems quite possible that that bipartisan support will reassemble itself after Trump is gone (because the next President is unlikely to be as populist and as uncaring about climate change as Trump).
This would make sense if it were a single issue. (And then, limited sense - even quite red places like Texas invest in solar because they need it. Coal is a regional issue, not a national one)
If you see it in light of all the other actions taken across the spectrum, you land at best at "desperate dice roll to re-tool the US into a manufacturing power from the 80s", and at worst at "deliberate dismantling of a first-rate world power into a second tier paradise for oligarchs".
It's made a national issue by 1) Senators from coal mining heavy states and the ridiculous setup of the Senate and the outsized power it gives individual Senators unless one party has 60 seats and 2) the amount of wealth it's given a few people (like the Koch brothers) who've used that wealth to buy influence in the GOP.
This message seems to come from a timeline where the people cutting the renewable projects care about electoral outcomes.
But in this timeline, they tried to violently overturn the 2020 election, and they are currently trying to rig the 2026 election by gerrymandering states they control as much as possible.
This isn't about earning the political support of people in coal country who vote GOP. If they ever face negative electoral outcomes in the future, their plan is to overturn the election using either force or legal chicanery.
What you claim didn't happen, and can easily disproven with data. Your interpretation of a reasoning of a policy (that didn't happen) is bad faith.
You are wrong about both electricity [1], gas[2] and total energy [3].
Europe was very dependent on energy imports in the past and current policy is the by far most successful attempt in a long at changing it. It will help us for decades to come.
I don't understand your post. Europe absolutely spent many years phasing out nuclear energy while rationalizing that increased gas imports from Russia was good because trade will make us friends [0]. The data supports this (though obviously does not capture the political discourse around Russian gas reliance). I am in agreement that the current, post-Ukraine invasion policy is good.
I guess you’re talking about Germany. Shutting down nuclear reactors and huge imports of Russian gas are two entirely separate things.
Gas imports like explained in the Wikipedia article you linked started in the 70s. There certainly was too much of a reliance on Russia, not enough investment in alternatives like LNG terminals and warnings of partners in the east were ignored with the north stream pipelines. In the end Germany got a lot of economic growth from cheap gas for decades and managed to get off Russian gas very fast. The European nuclear industry on the other hand is still heavily reliant on Russia.
Broad German anti-nuclear sentiment can be traced back mainly to Chernobyl and the exit plan that was followed in western Germany was decided after Fukushima. Eastern German reactors lacked containment and were shut down after the reunification. Contrary to an often heard claim western German nuclear was not replaced by fossil energy sources, but more than compensated by the growth of renewables. You could certainly point out that coal plants should have been shut off first, but that was even less possible politically at the time. In the end you have to shut off nuclear reactors because of growing safety risks caused by material fatigue and new ones have questionable economics.
Looking in absolute terms France is essentially phasing out nuclear power. But can't bring themselves to accept it politically.
They have an enormous fleet nearing end of life and are making political noise over a tiny number of plants they haven’t even taken the final investment decision on.
They are stuck arguing how the mindbogglingly large required subsidies should be financed.
In other words: They are betting on renewables as much as anyone else, they just can't bring themselves to stop wasting money on nuclear power due to political reasons.
It is more representative of the situation over the past 30 years to say that France is not Europe. But even they had plans to cut nuclear energy to 50%. [0]
As you can see in the first link, there was a 472 TWh production of nuclear Nuclear power in 2024, in contrast to your claim that it was phased out. It didn't really changed that much - the absolute change in coal or renewables combinded is larger.
This chart shows that nuclear produced >900 TWh in the EU in the early 2000s and the latest data point is 619 TWh (2023). That's a >30% reduction with a clear trend. I did not claim that every nuclear reactor in Europe was turned off.
I think I agree with you broadly, but to make the counter argument:
A big part of the reason why nuclear power isn’t cost-effective nowadays is because those costs have been at least partially internalized. The US federal government has stopped producing cheap nuclear fuel by disassembling nuclear weapons. Nuclear plants need to pay for the cost of storing their spent fuel on site indefinitely. Plant operators need to pay into a federal disaster insurance pool.
The costs for solar and batteries have come down a whole lot since ~10 years ago during the energiewende. IMO solar is the cost leader in areas where there is decent sun. The U.S. has a lot better sun than Germany.
Solar is the cost leader in most areas with poor sun too. You have to have truly abysmal sun for it to not be the cost leader. Finland has such abysmal sun, Germany doesn't.
I would argue that buying Russian gas was primarily market driven and politics didn't stop it from happening. It was cheaper than American or Qatari gas why should European nations not have bought it?
It the same way that the US got hooked on cheap Chinese imports.
Also renewables make too much sense right now. That's why a lot of dollars are allocated towards them even though subsidies are mostly gone.
Well, for one thing, massive methane leaks in Russian gas infrastructure means that Russian gas ii much worse for the environment than any other source of gas.
> We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad)
Maybe that was the discussion where you're from, what do i know. Where I'm from we had a honest political debate about nuclear, and the public decided on no. It wasn't because of "ideology". We discussed the safety, the waste challenge, and everything else.
The artificial energy supply shortage caused by this prohibition will be a great excuse to invade another oil-rich country. The current administration has already demonstrated Venezuela is next in line.
Mostly Germany, Belgium as well, possibly a few others.
France did shut down superphenix for completely ideological reasons tho.
Also stopped investing in nuclear but that was not really ideological (the nuclear buildup originated in something of a misprediction, and sadly the country didn’t really capitalise on it).
Belgium didn't phase out nuclear. They decided that someone in the future would handle the closure of the nuclear plants, and when the time came and no replacement plant had been built, we just kept the nuclear plants running.
Belgium legislated the phase out of nuclear in 2003 due 2025, opting to neither replace nor postpone closure of nor refurbish its at the time 7 reactors as their lifetimes ran out.
Then it had to postpone the closure of at least two reactors following the second invasion of Ukraine, and this year officially dropped the phaseout and opened the door for new builds (unlikely as they are).
It absolutely did, back in 2003. This was pushed back after the invasion of Ukraine then repealed but Doel 3 and Tihange 2 were shut down under the phaseout plan.
In UK we phased out nuclear by buying power from France who made it in nuclear power stations ... we were World leaders, but now we haven't the expertise to renew our nuclear power so have to rely on foreign companies.
The cost picture already makes sense for onshore wind, which is why if you have a suitable site people do that. If you own a hilltop farm in the UK a bank loan for a wind turbine is a no-brainer for the loan officer - because it's not correlated to farm gate prices unlike other loans you might want e.g. for equipment or buildings so that's a desirable loan to have.
The US (near as I can tell) isn’t even killing them for any concrete reason (any reason given changes), just to be anti-whatever they are.
Which, is similar to the German anti-nuclear approach, to be frank. Burning dirty coal instead of keeping an already existing nuke plant running isn’t a decision based on either environmental or economic reasoning, and that was done a lot.
> We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad) while doubling down on Russian gas dependency (because trade = peace). Clearly this has gone poorly and it will take Europe a decade to strengthen its energy sovereignty again.
what I don't understand is how this was obvious to me 20 years ago as a teenager, but European leaders just somehow thought it was a good idea. Was it just "a lucky guess" on my part? it was just so obvious that when you tolerate and interact with narcissists as if their behaviour was acceptable, they will simply escalate their behaviour. I was also critical of ties with the Chinese government and I was told I was just paranoid/racist. today we suddenly realise oh that was a bad idea, the leopards are chewing on our faces.
I reckon the rich and powerful saw it coming alright and they just figured they'd make bank before it got to the point they'd have to send the kids of poor people to war.
It was also obvious to all my friends when I was a teenager in 2008 that being friends with America was a bad idea. That also turned out to be right.
All we would have had to do was have no allies for the past ~60 years, and we would have never gotten burned. We also would have been entirely irrelavant to international politics, and likely wouldn't have become one of the richest nations on earth.
World politics is like love. It's better to have had a productive alliance that hits a rough patch, than never to have had one at all.
The US grows more acres of corn just for ethanol than the number of acres needed to go 100% solar. We would have _more_ useful farmland if we switched.
If all vehicles in the US were electric US total Electricity demand would rise from about 4,000 TWh to only 4,800 TWh. That’s it. And this is exactly why the U.S. risks losing both the trade war and the AI race to China.
China is going all-in on electrification, and that alone gives it a massive efficiency edge. Layer on top the fact that renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper every year, and the advantage compounds exponentially.
Take heavy equipment as an example: a Caterpillar machine might cost $10 million, while the Chinese electric equivalent is just one-fifth the price and burns only a third of the energy. That’s already nearly half the cost compared to diesel or gas-powered machines before you even count lower maintenance and fuel savings.
The math is simple: electric wins. And renewable compound the victory
all energy including vehicles. The US grows an unfathomable amount of ethanol corn, ~ 30 million acres. Its insanity, its an incredibly inefficient way to get energy.
There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc. But killing renewable projects because, uh, farming or whatever?, particularly at a time when the demand for energy is growing faster than ever, seems short sighted at best.